tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/abraham-lincoln-15091/articlesAbraham Lincoln – The Conversation2023-12-05T13:18:28Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2138522023-12-05T13:18:28Z2023-12-05T13:18:28ZWhy Franklin, Washington and Lincoln considered American democracy an ‘experiment’ – and were unsure if it would survive<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562824/original/file-20231130-19-e8zx58.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4089%2C3108&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Voters in a county election, 1854.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.110694.html">Etching by John Sartain after painting by George Caleb Bingham; National Gallery of Art</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From the time of the founding era to the present day, one of the more common things said about American democracy is that <a href="https://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/2023/05/14/american-experiment-in-democracy-tested-by-those-who-want-control/70180548007/">it is an “experiment</a>.” </p>
<p>Most people can readily intuit what the term is meant to convey, but it is still a phrase that is bandied about more often than it is explained or analyzed. </p>
<p>Is American democracy an “experiment” in the bubbling-beakers-in-a-laboratory sense of the word? If so, what is the experiment attempting to prove, and how will we know if and when it has succeeded?</p>
<h2>Establishing, then keeping, the republic</h2>
<p>To the extent you can generalize about such a <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/">diverse</a> <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807847862/the-other-founders/">group</a>, the founders meant two things, I would argue, by calling self-government an “experiment.”</p>
<p>First, they saw their work as an experimental attempt to apply principles derived from science and the study of history to the management of political relations. As the founder John Jay <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Principles_and_Acts_of_the_Revolution_in/ZWw2AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22first+people+whom+heaven+has+favored+with+an+opportunity+of+deliberating+upon%27%22+intitle:principles&pg=PA181&printsec=frontcover">explained to a New York grand jury in 1777</a>, Americans, acting under “the guidance of reason and experience,” were among “the first people whom heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live.”</p>
<p>Alongside this optimistic, Enlightenment-inspired understanding of the democratic experiment, however, was another that was decidedly more pessimistic. </p>
<p>Their work, the founders believed, was also an experiment because, as everyone who had read their Aristotle and Cicero and studied ancient history knew, republics – in which <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/republic-government">political power rests with the people and their representatives</a> – and democracies were historically rare and acutely susceptible to subversion. That subversion came both from within – from decadence, the sapping of public virtue and demagoguery – as well as from monarchies and other enemies abroad. </p>
<p>When asked whether the federal constitution of 1787 established a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin is famously said to have answered: “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/12/18/republic-if-you-can-keep-it-did-ben-franklin-really-say-impeachment-days-favorite-quote/">A republic, if you can keep it</a>.” His point was that establishing a republic on paper was easy and preserving it the hard part.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Five men sitting and standing around a table, with the title 'The Declaration Committee' below the image." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562828/original/file-20231130-27-qsdx64.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, from left: Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and John Adams.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-committee-which-drafted-the-declaration-of-independence-news-photo/3092203?adppopup=true">Printed by Currier & Ives; photo by MPI/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Optimism and pessimism</h2>
<p>The term “experiment” does not appear in any of the nation’s founding documents, but it has nevertheless enjoyed a privileged place in public political rhetoric. </p>
<p>George Washington, in <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw2.025/?sp=28&st=text">his first inaugural address</a>, described the “republican model of government” as an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” </p>
<p>Gradually, presidents began to talk less of a democratic experiment whose success was still in doubt than about one whose viability had been proven by the passage of time. </p>
<p>Andrew Jackson, for one, in <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Compilation_of_the_Messages_and_Papers/kD0PAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Our+Constitution+is+no+longer+a+doubtful+experiment%22+inauthor:richardson&pg=PA293&printsec=frontcover">his 1837 farewell address</a> felt justified in proclaiming, “Our Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment, and at the end of nearly half a century we find that it has preserved unimpaired the liberties of the people.”</p>
<p>Such statements of guarded optimism about the American experiment’s accomplishments, however, existed alongside persistent expressions of concern about its health and prospects. </p>
<p>In the <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Rise-of-American-Democracy">period before the Civil War</a>, despite participating in what in hindsight was a healthy, two-party system, politicians were forever proclaiming the end of the republic and casting opponents as threats to democracy. Most of those fears can be written off as hyperbole or attempts to demonize rivals. Some, of course, were sparked by genuine challenges to democratic institutions.</p>
<p>The attempt of Southern states to dissolve the Union represented one such occasion. In a July 4, 1861, address to Congress, Abraham Lincoln quite rightly saw the crisis as <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.1057200/?sp=1&st=text">a grave trial for the democratic experiment to survive</a>.</p>
<p>“Our popular Government has often been called an experiment,” Lincoln observed. “Two points in it our people have already settled – the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.” </p>
<h2>Vigilance required</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An white haired man from the 18th century in a black coat and white shirt with high collar." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562830/original/file-20231130-27-kzydzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Washington, in his first inaugural address, described the ‘republican model of government’ as an ‘experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nga.gov/global-site-search-page.html?searchterm=George+Washington">National Gallery, Corcoran collection</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If you tried to quantify references to the democratic “experiment” throughout American history, you would find, I suspect, more pessimistic than optimistic invocations, more fears that the experiment is at imminent risk of failing than standpat complacency that it has succeeded. </p>
<p>Consider, for example, the popularity of such recent tomes as “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democracies-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/">How Democracies Die</a>,” by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621076/twilight-of-democracy-by-anne-applebaum/">Twilight of Democracy</a>,” by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. Why this persistence of pessimism? Historians of the United States have long noted the popularity since the time of the Puritans of <a href="https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4948.htm">so-called “Jeremiads”</a> and “declension narratives” – or, to put it more colloquially, nostalgia for the good old days and the belief that society is going to hell in a handbasket.</p>
<p>The human-made nature of our institutions has always been a source of both hope and anxiety. Hope that America could break the shackles of old-world oppression and make the world anew; anxiety that the improvisational nature of democracy leaves it vulnerable to anarchy and subversion. </p>
<p>American democracy has faced genuine, sometimes existential threats. Though its attribution to Thomas Jefferson is apparently apocryphal, the adage that <a href="https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/eternal-vigilance-price-liberty-spurious-quotation/">the price of liberty is eternal vigilance</a> is justly celebrated.</p>
<p>The hard truth is that the “experiment” of American democracy will never be finished so long as the promise of equality and liberty for all remains anywhere unfulfilled. </p>
<p>The temptation to give in to despair or paranoia in the face of the experiment’s open-endedness is understandable. But fears about its fragility should be tempered with a recognition that democracy’s essential and demonstrated malleability – its capacity for adaptation, improvement and expanding inclusivity – can be and has historically been a source of strength and resilience as well as vulnerability.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213852/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Coens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Is American democracy an ‘experiment’ in the bubbling-beakers-in-a-laboratory sense of the word? If so, what is the experiment attempting to prove, and how will we know if and when it has succeeded?Thomas Coens, Research Associate Professor of History, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2084252023-06-28T13:02:55Z2023-06-28T13:02:55ZAmericans in former Confederate states more likely to say violent protest against government is justified, 160 years after Gettysburg<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534090/original/file-20230626-15-oruqz8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=19%2C9%2C3283%2C2461&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dead soldiers lie on the battlefield at Gettysburg in July of 1863. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dead-soldiers-lie-on-the-battlefield-at-gettysburg-where-23-news-photo/615314046?adppopup=true">Corbis via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the July Fourth long weekend, people will pour into the small town of <a href="https://www.gettysburgpa.gov/history/slideshows/battle-history">Gettysburg, Pennsylvania</a>, to commemorate the 160th anniversary of one of the <a href="https://govbooktalk.gpo.gov/2013/07/02/gettysburg-americas-bloodiest-battle/#:%7E:text=Lasting%20three%20days%20in%201863,dead%20and%20another%2030%2C000%20wounded.">deadliest battles</a> in U.S. history.</p>
<p>The three-day battle left over 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead, wounded or missing and cemented Gettysburg’s place in American history as the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/gett/index.htm">turning point of the Civil War</a>.</p>
<p>A few months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln visited the town for the dedication of <a href="https://www.nps.gov/places/soldiers-national-cemetery.htm">Soldiers’ National Cemetery</a>. There, he delivered his <a href="https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/gettysburg/good_cause/transcript.htm">famed Gettysburg Address</a>. Lincoln called on Americans to dedicate themselves to the “unfinished work” for which so many at Gettysburg had died: the preservation of the United States and a “new birth of freedom” for the nation.</p>
<p>I have researched Americans’ <a href="https://osf.io/753cb/">support for political violence</a> in my work as a political scientist at <a href="https://www.networkscienceinstitute.org/people/alauna-safarpour">Northeastern</a> and <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/alaunasafarpour">Harvard</a> Universities. As an incoming professor at Gettysburg College, which <a href="https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=books">was attacked by Confederate soldiers</a> and served as a <a href="https://www.gettysburg.edu/news/stories?id=dee02b07-33e7-4ce6-985e-eed77423d127">makeshift hospital</a> during the battle, I wanted to see whether the legacies of the Civil War still affected Americans’ support for political violence today.</p>
<p>I found that, overall, Americans living in the Confederate states that violently rebelled against the United States during the Civil War express significantly greater support for the notion that it can be justifiable to violently protest against the government. </p>
<p>Residents of what are known as the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-border-states.htm">Border States</a>, the slave states that did not secede from the Union, are also more likely than residents of Union states to say it can be justifiable to violently protest against the government. Confederate and Border State support are not statistically different from each other. </p>
<p>Residents of states belonging to the Confederacy are also significantly more likely than Americans living in Union or Border States to say it is justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government right now.</p>
<p><iframe id="EGesv" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/EGesv/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>‘Greater support for political violence’</h2>
<p>From Dec. 22, 2022, to Jan. 17, 2023, my colleagues and I at <a href="https://www.covidstates.org/">The COVID States Project</a>, a multi-university team polling Americans in all 50 U.S. states, surveyed over 20,000 Americans about their support for violent protest against the U.S. government. Our survey asked whether they felt violence is ever justifiable, and whether violence is justifiable right now. </p>
<p>I then analyzed the responses by state residence, grouping survey respondents by their <a href="https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm">state’s allegiance</a> in the Civil War: Union, Confederacy or Border State. Americans living in states that did not exist during the Civil War are excluded from the analysis.</p>
<p>Confederate state residents are about 2 percentage points more likely than Union state residents to say it is “definitely” or “probably” justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government. Border State residents are about 3 points more likely than Union residents to say violence can be justified. </p>
<p>When asked whether it is justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government right now, 12% of Confederate state residents say “yes” – which is 2 percentage points higher than the share who say “yes” in Border States and 3 points higher than those in Union states.</p>
<p><iframe id="CxiEh" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/CxiEh/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><iframe id="9zGEk" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/9zGEk/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>To ensure that these results do not reflect underlying social and demographic differences in the residents of these states, I used a statistical technique known as multiple regression. This technique allows researchers to determine the effect of a variable – in this case state residency – on an outcome – support for political violence – after accounting for differences attributable to other factors. </p>
<p>This analysis reveals that even after accounting for partisanship, race, gender, education, age, income, ideology and attitudes toward Black people, residents of Confederate states still express significantly greater support for political violence than do residents of Union or Border states.</p>
<p>Before you start fortifying your homes against a second Civil War, keep in mind that support for political violence – even among residents of the old Confederacy – remains low. </p>
<p>Nowhere close to a majority of Americans are ready to take up arms to overthrow the government. However, as the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/january-6-capitol-riot/">Jan. 6 attack</a> on the U.S. Capitol demonstrated, even a small minority of people intent on violence can cause serious harm to the nation.</p>
<h2>History matters</h2>
<p>Overall, these results point to the importance of historical factors in understanding modern support for political violence. </p>
<p>Political scientists have <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176741/deep-roots">traced the importance of slavery</a> on modern political attitudes, demonstrating that institutions long since eradicated still shape politics today. </p>
<p><a href="https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/rewriting-history-civil-war-textbooks">Research</a> has also shown that Southern myths about the Civil War, including the “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lost-Cause">Lost Cause” narrative of the Confederacy</a> – which casts the Confederate cause as glorious and honorable rather than aimed at maintaining slavery – dominated history textbooks after 1877. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three cannons in front of a stone monument topped with a bronze figure sitting on a horse." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534144/original/file-20230626-17-2qu1vz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee mounted on his horse sits atop a ridge held by Confederate troops in Gettysburg, Pa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CivilWarGettysburg/0d0e148cfdd24433b4065ecc00ded418/photo?Query=Gettysburg&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=666&currentItemNo=NaN&vs=true">AP Photo/Matt Rourke</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/nation-world/2017/08/22/how-civil-war-taught-school-depends-where-you-live/15766977007/#:%7E:text=Some%20schools%20emphasize%20states%27%20rights,commanders%20alongside%20their%20Union%20counterparts.">These distortions affect</a> how modern Americans think about history. As recently as 2017, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history">polling by the Southern Poverty Law Center</a> found that just 8% of American 12th graders could correctly identify slavery as <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-really-started-the-american-civil-war-205281">the central cause</a> of the Civil War. </p>
<p>Distorted portrayals of the Civil War as a glorious fight for independence by Southern states may contribute to the significantly greater support for political violence among these states’ residents today. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/17/us/teaching-critical-race-theory.html">current political debate</a> over how history can be taught in public schools highlights the importance of such decisions.</p>
<h2>Lincoln: ‘These dead shall not have died in vain’</h2>
<p>On this grim anniversary, perhaps Americans can spend time contemplating <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=take+increased+devotion+to+the+cause&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#:%7E:text=Gettysburg%20address%20delivered,resource%20%E2%80%BA%20rbpe.24404500">Lincoln’s famous words</a> to “take increased devotion to that cause” for which these honored dead “gave the last full measure of devotion.” </p>
<p>The Civil War was essentially the largest instance of homegrown violence against the government in U.S. history. Now, at a time of <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/rise-in-political-violence-in-united-states-and-damage-to-our-democracy-pub-87584#:%7E:text=A%20poll%20by%20the%20National,in%20the%20last%20few%20years.&text=Threats%20of%20violence%20against%20election,election%20officials%20had%20experienced%20threats.">increasing political violence</a> in the nation, I believe it is more important than ever to reflect on the Battle of Gettysburg – and the terrible toll wrought by the violence there.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208425/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alauna Safarpour is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern and Harvard Universities. Beginning in August 2023, she will be an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Gettysburg College. Gettysburg College was attacked by Confederate forces during the Battle of Gettysburg.</span></em></p>On the 160th anniversary of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, a political scientist finds that residents of formerly Confederate states express greater support for political violence than others.Alauna Safarpour, Postdoctoral Fellow, Network Science Institute, Northeastern UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2068232023-06-01T12:30:56Z2023-06-01T12:30:56ZReparations over formerly enslaved people has a long history: 4 essential reads on why the idea remains unresolved<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529469/original/file-20230531-22271-aukjo2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1066%2C201%2C5643%2C4255&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Black man holds up a sign during a Reparations Task Force meeting in Los Angeles, California on Sept. 22, 2022. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/los-angeles-californiasept-22-2022los-angeles-long-time-news-photo/1243475910?adppopup=true">Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The debate about reparations to descendants of enslaved people rages on.</p>
<p><a href="https://apnews.com/article/reparations-california-payments-slavery-racism-discrimination-a7d4abb30e8395c805a9f2cc0586bf91">In California</a>, the state’s reparations task force has estimated that the descendants of former enslaved people living in California should receive a payment of $1.2 million per person. </p>
<p>While the issue of reparations is nothing new, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/10/slavery-reparations-california-newsom-00096211">California Governor Gavin Newsome</a> created the task force in 2020 and called for it to offer solutions to the “structural racism and bias built into and permeating throughout our democratic and economic institutions.”</p>
<p>So far, Newsome has remained quiet on his task force’s recommendations and is awaiting its final report, expected on July 1, 2023. </p>
<p>Several scholars of U.S. slavery and the history of reparations have written articles explaining what the ongoing debate has been about since the idea first emerged after the Civil War. Here we spotlight four examples of those scholars’ work:</p>
<h2>1. Despite gains, persistent racial gaps remain</h2>
<p>While researching his book “<a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674019430&content=reviews">Making Whole What Has Been Smashed</a>,” John Torpey learned that the idea of compensating freed slaves or their descendants has never really gained much traction in the United States.</p>
<p>A driving force behind the persistence of reparations talk is just how stark the racial differences remain, <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-40-acres-and-a-mule-to-lbj-to-the-2020-election-a-brief-history-of-slavery-reparation-promises-114547">Torpey wrote</a>.</p>
<p>Compared to whites, Torpey explained, “blacks tend to have lower educational attainment, rates of home ownership and life expectancy but higher rates of poverty, incarceration, unemployment and life-threatening diseases.” </p>
<p>As a result, the wealth gap between whites and Blacks remains very large, Torpey noted, “and wage inequality is likely making it worse.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-40-acres-and-a-mule-to-lbj-to-the-2020-election-a-brief-history-of-slavery-reparation-promises-114547">From ‘40 acres and a mule’ to LBJ to the 2020 election, a brief history of slavery reparation promises</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>2. Righting past wrongs</h2>
<p>Anne Bailey <a href="https://annecbailey.net/">has researched slavery</a> for the past three decades and has concluded that there are many rationales for reparations. </p>
<p>For one, <a href="https://theconversation.com/revisiting-reparations-is-it-time-for-the-us-to-pay-its-debt-for-the-legacy-of-slavery-151972">Bailey wrote</a>, “There has never been a leveling of the playing field, or payments for the debt of unpaid labor over 250 years of slavery.”</p>
<p>Furthermore, she explained, Black contribution to the wealth of America has not been acknowledged or given its due.</p>
<p>“Paying reparations to Americans of African descent could help the U.S. reclaim some moral leadership on the global stage,” Bailey wrote. “The U.S. is not the only country in the world with human rights abuses then or now, but it can be one of the few countries in the world that truly addresses these wrongs.”</p>
<p>In other words, Bailey concluded, the U.S. can lead by example.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/revisiting-reparations-is-it-time-for-the-us-to-pay-its-debt-for-the-legacy-of-slavery-151972">Revisiting reparations: Is it time for the US to pay its debt for the legacy of slavery?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>3. Slave owners received reparations</h2>
<p>As a professor of public policy who has studied reparations, <a href="https://expertfile.com/experts/thomas.craemer/thomas-craemer-phd">Thomas Craemer</a> estimates the losses from unpaid wages and lost inheritances to Black descendants of the enslaved in America at around US$20 trillion in 2021 dollars.</p>
<p>“But what often gets forgotten by those who oppose reparations is that payouts for slavery have been made before,” <a href="https://theconversation.com/there-was-a-time-reparations-were-actually-paid-out-just-not-to-formerly-enslaved-people-152522">Craemer wrote </a>. “But those payments went to former slave owners and their descendants, not the enslaved or their legal heirs.”</p>
<p>A prominent example is the so-called “Haitian Independence Debt” that burdened an independent Haiti with reparation payments to former slave owners in France. Another was the British government, which paid reparations totaling the equivalent of about $429 billion in 2021 to slave owners when it abolished slavery in 1833.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A 1791 depiction of fighting between French troops and Haitian revolutionaries." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Haitians had to pay for their independence.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/combat-entre-les-esclaves-et-larm%C3%A9e-fran%C3%A7aise-lors-de-la-news-photo/1291357942?adppopup=true">API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the U.S., President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the “Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service or Labor within the District of Columbia” on April 16, 1862.</p>
<p>It gave former slave owners $300 per enslaved person set free.</p>
<p>The act also provided for an emigration incentive of $100 – around $2,683 in 2021 dollars – if the former enslaved person agreed to permanently leave the United States.</p>
<p>In contrast,“ Craemer wrote, "the formerly enslaved received nothing if they decided to stay in the United States.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/there-was-a-time-reparations-were-actually-paid-out-just-not-to-formerly-enslaved-people-152522">There was a time reparations were actually paid out – just not to formerly enslaved people</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>4. Germany reparations to Holocaust survivors</h2>
<p>As a professor of political science who studies the relationship between democracy, citizenship and justice, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pGUCXiUAAAAJ&hl=en">Bernd Reiter</a> has examined how Germany dealt with the horrors of the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Instead of seeking to erase the Holocaust from its history, the German government has paid since the end of World War II the equivalent of $7 billion for Israel and $1 billion for the World Jewish Congress, an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations.</p>
<p>“The German government has worked hard to ensure remembrance, penance, recompense and justice,” <a href="https://theconversation.com/if-germany-atoned-for-the-holocaust-the-us-can-pay-reparations-for-slavery-119505">Reiter wrote</a>. “The United States, in contrast, has no official policy of atoning for slavery.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/if-germany-atoned-for-the-holocaust-the-us-can-pay-reparations-for-slavery-119505">If Germany atoned for the Holocaust, the US can pay reparations for slavery</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives</em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206823/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Former enslaved persons have never received a dime for their labor. Nor have their descendants received reparations for the legacy of slavery.
Should the descendants be paid? By whom and how much?Howard Manly, Race + Equity Editor, The Conversation USLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2052812023-05-29T12:29:09Z2023-05-29T12:29:09ZWhat really started the American Civil War?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527606/original/file-20230522-23-ijaoe1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C17%2C5770%2C4022&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">More than 600,000 soldiers died during the American Civil War.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/battle-of-kennesaw-mountain-royalty-free-illustration/1152759368?adppopup=true">Keith Lance/Digital Vision Vectors via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/curious-kids-us-74795">Curious Kids</a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">curiouskidsus@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>What really started the Civil War? – Abbey, age 7, Stone Ridge, New York</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/citizenship-test-questions-and-answers/#american-history-">The U.S. citizenship test</a> – which immigrants must pass before becoming citizens of the United States – has this question: “Name one problem that led to the Civil War.” It lists three possible correct answers: “slavery,” “economic reasons” and “states’ rights.” </p>
<p>But as <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=SsoLG_0AAAAJ&hl=en">a historian and professor</a> who studies slavery, Southern history and the American Civil War, I know there’s really only one correct answer: slavery. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="1862 photo of enslaved people and soldiers on a plantation, standing for the camera." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527601/original/file-20230522-4578-n3onvk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Enslaved people and soldiers on a South Carolina plantation in 1862.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-enslaved-people-and-soldiers-on-the-plantation-of-news-photo/1402910706">Henry P. Moore/LOC/Archive Photos via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>White Southerners left the Union to establish a slave-holding republic; they were <a href="https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery-cause-civil-war.htm">dedicated to the preservation of slavery</a>. </p>
<p>What’s more, unlike slavery in the ancient world, slavery in the United States <a href="https://chssp.sf.ucdavis.edu/resources/curriculum/lessons/was-slavery-always-racial">was based on race</a>. By the time of the Civil War, Black people were the ones enslaved; white people were not. </p>
<p>Every American citizen, whether born in this country or naturalized, should understand that the conflict over slavery is what caused the Civil War. </p>
<h2>The history</h2>
<p>Slavery in the U.S. began at least as early as 1619, when a Portuguese ship brought about <a href="https://www.nps.gov/fomr/planyourvisit/first-african-landing.htm">20 enslaved African people to present-day Virginia</a>. It grew so quickly that by the time Colonists fought for their independence from England in 1775, slavery was <a href="https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2012/12/before-there-were-red-and-blue-states-there-were-free-states-and-slave-states/#:%7E">legal in all 13 Colonies</a>.</p>
<p>As the 19th century progressed, Northern states <a href="https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/experience/freedom/history.html#:%7E">slowly abolished slavery</a>; but Southern states made it central to their economy. By 1860, nearly 4 million enslaved people lived in the South. </p>
<p>Increasingly, the North and South were at odds over the future of slavery. White Southerners believed slavery had to expand into new territories or it would die. In 1845, they pressured the federal government <a href="https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/annexation">to annex Texas, where slavery was legal</a>. They also supported an effort to <a href="https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1854OstendManifesto.pdf">purchase Cuba and add it as a slave state</a>. </p>
<p>In the North, people generally opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories, and many favored the gradual emancipation of enslaved people. A smaller group, known as abolitionists, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/abolitionist-movement">wanted slavery to end immediately</a>. </p>
<p>But even though many Northerners opposed the expansion of slavery, they <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2957.html">did not favor equal rights for Black people</a>. In most Northern states, segregation was rampant, Blacks were barred from voting and violence against them was common.</p>
<p>By the 1850s, it became more difficult for the federal government to satisfy either side. <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/compromise-of-1850#:%7E">The Compromise of 1850</a>, a series of bills that tried to solve the problem, pleased almost no one.</p>
<p>The publication of the 1852 novel “<a href="https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/uncle-toms-cabin/">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</a>” – about the pain and injustice inflicted on an enslaved man – turned Northerners against slavery even more. In the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott-v-sandford">1857 Dred Scott decision</a>, the Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people were not U.S. citizens, nor could Congress ban slavery in a federal territory. Two years later, the abolitionist John Brown <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/topics/john-browns-harpers-ferry-raid">attacked a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia</a>, in an unsuccessful attempt to supply weapons to enslaved people.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Dressed in a three-piece suit, Abraham Lincoln sits for a photograph." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528041/original/file-20230524-21-b3wwpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A digitally restored photograph of President Abraham Lincoln, taken during the American Civil War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/portrait-of-president-abraham-lincoln-royalty-free-image/640971707">National Archives/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Lincoln becomes president, secession follows</h2>
<p>Amid this swirl of troubles, the presidential election of 1860 took place. A new political party, the Republican Party, was opposed to the spread of slavery throughout the western territories. With four major candidates running for president, <a href="https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/abraham-lincoln">Abraham Lincoln</a> won the electoral vote – but only 40% of the popular vote. </p>
<p>The election of a president from a party that opposed slavery jolted white Southerners to action. Less than two months after Lincoln won, South Carolina delegates, meeting in Charleston, decided to secede from the Union – that is, to <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp">formally withdraw membership in the United States</a>. </p>
<p>Other Southern states followed and said slavery was the primary reason for secession. Texas delegates wrote the abolition of slavery “would bring <a href="https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html">inevitable calamities upon both races and desolation</a>” in the slave states. The <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp">Mississippi secession document</a> said “our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest in the world.” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZKWrxZN5jmM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The hundreds of brutal, bloody battles of the Civil War took a terrible toll on the country.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Confederate supporters made their position clear</h2>
<p>The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, also said slavery was the reason for secession, and that Thomas Jefferson’s words in the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript">Declaration of Independence</a> – that all men are created equal – were wrong. </p>
<p>“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea,” <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech">Stephens told a crowd</a>. “Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” </p>
<p>Although the evidence shows slavery caused the Civil War, some Southerners created a myth – <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lost-Cause">the “Lost Cause</a>” – that transformed Confederate generals into heroes who were defending freedom. To some degree, that myth has, unfortunately, taken hold. Some schools are still <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/17/us/confederate-schools-trnd/index.html">named after Confederate generals</a>; <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/us-military-bases-honoring-confederate-figures-slated-to-get-new-names-/6641654.html">so are some military bases</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/symbols-of-the-confederacy-are-slowly-coming-down-from-us-military-bases-3-essential-reads-205729">although that is changing</a>. </p>
<p>It’s important to know the real reason for the Civil War so the country no longer celebrates historical figures who fought to establish a slave-holding republic.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to clarify that the colonies became states in the United States of America.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><em>Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.</em></p>
<p><em>And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205281/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Gudmestad does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There was one central reason the Civil War happened.Robert Gudmestad, Professor and Chair of History Department, Colorado State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1992542023-02-20T12:50:29Z2023-02-20T12:50:29ZPresidential greatness is rarely fixed in stone – changing attitudes on racial injustice and leadership qualities lead to dramatic shifts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510927/original/file-20230217-440-ugm5ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=18%2C72%2C1004%2C603&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A statue of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, sits in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Historians consistently have given Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, their highest rating because of his leadership during the Civil War. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/statue-of-abraham-lincoln-is-seen-in-the-lincoln-memorial-news-photo/1244410710?phrase=abraham lincoln memorial&adppopup=true">Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Every American president has landed in the history books. And historians’ assessments of their performance have been generally consistent over time. But some presidents’ rankings have changed as the nation – and historians themselves – reassessed the country’s values and priorities. </p>
<p>Historians have been ranking presidents in surveys since <a href="https://home.csulb.edu/%7Eastevens/posc100/files/ratings.htm">Arthur Schlesinger Sr.’s first such study</a> appeared in Life magazine in 1948. The results of that survey categorized Presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as “great.”</p>
<p>At the other end of the ranking, Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Warren Harding were labeled “failure.” </p>
<p>There have been numerous surveys ranking presidents since then, including a <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/07/29/356745922.html?pageNumber=143">1962 survey by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.</a>, which showed Jackson dropping into a “near great” category. </p>
<h2>Changing views shift rankings</h2>
<p>While the surveys point to Americans’ evolving social attitudes, with implications for our electoral politics and governance, they don’t always ask historians the same questions. Some simply ask them to rank presidents. Others ask them to also judge specific aspects of leadership, such as economic policy or international diplomacy. </p>
<p>Despite the relative stability of the ratings across surveys – especially at the top, where Lincoln, Washington and Roosevelt consistently hold sway – there have been some dramatic changes. C-SPAN’s four surveys on presidential leadership, for example, show some shifts in historians’ ranking of presidents over time.</p>
<p>Since <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2000%20C-SPAN%20Presidential%20Survey%20Scores%20and%20Ranks%20FINAL.PDF">2000</a>, the cable network has polled prominent historians every time there has been a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_9HaCYWGS8">change in administrations</a>. So, C-SPAN conducted surveys in <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2009%20C-SPAN%20Presidential%20Survey%20Scores%20and%20Ranks%20FINAL.PDF">2009</a>, <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2017%20C-SPAN%20Presidential%20Survey%20Scores%20and%20Ranks%20FINAL.PDF">2017</a> and <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2021-Survey-Results-Overall.pdf">2021</a> as well.</p>
<p>The surveys offer not only an overall ranking of presidents, but also rankings in each of the following 10 categories: public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision and agenda setting, pursuance of equal justice for all, and performance within the context of the times.</p>
<p>While Lincoln has ranked at the top of each survey, the two presidents who served right before him – <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/franklin-pierces-murky-legacy-as-president">Franklin Pierce</a> and <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/james-buchanan-why-is-he-considered-americas-worst-president">James Buchanan</a>, both sympathetic to slavery – and his immediate successor, white supremacist <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/johnson/life-in-brief">Andrew Johnson</a>, have consistently ranked at the bottom. <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/donald-j-trump/">Donald Trump</a> debuted in C-SPAN’s 2021 survey near the bottom. He was ranked 41st of 45 presidents.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A suited man, with ear-length hair, sits with his left hand resting on a side table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510930/original/file-20230217-26-x4wapy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andrew Johnson was Abraham Lincoln’s vice president and successor. As president, he vetoed legislation designed to help African Americans during Reconstruction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/andrew-johnson-17th-president-of-the-united-states-1860s-news-photo/463975927?phrase=andrew%20johnson%20&adppopup=true">The Print Collector/ Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What is a good leader?</h2>
<p>As a <a href="https://directory.richmond.edu/bios/ggoethal/">social psychologist and leadership scholar</a> at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies, with long-standing interests in presidential leadership, I believe these surveys can be best understood in terms of psychologist <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(86)90042-9">Dean Keith Simonton’s model</a> of evaluating presidents.</p>
<p>He maintains that historians generally view leaders, including presidents, positively to the extent that they fit a deeply ingrained image of someone who is strong, active and good. And that image comes to mind when they think of attributes and events linked to a president that suggest he was a good leader. Examples include how long he served, whether he was a war hero and whether he was assassinated, and in that sense, was a martyr. </p>
<p>On the other hand, historians also easily recall scandals, such as <a href="https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/watergate">Richard Nixon’s Watergate</a> and <a href="https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/us-domestic-policy/making-teapot-dome-scandal-relevant-again">Harding’s Teapot Dome</a>. These detract from these presidents’ “good” image, as evidenced by Nixon’s and Harding’s rankings of 31st and 37th, respectively, in C-SPAN’s <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2021-Survey-Results-Overall.pdf">2021</a> survey.</p>
<h2>Race matters</h2>
<p>In recent years, presidents’ positions on race and racism have been important factors in historians’ evaluations of their records. For example, Wilson’s rather startling efforts to <a href="https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/us-domestic-policy/the-debate-over-woodrow-wilson">segregate federal offices and the military</a> are becoming more widely known as scholars explore that aspect of his presidency.</p>
<p>His actions in that regard may overshadow his <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/wilson/foreign-affairs">international idealism</a>, which favored morality over materialism and has been viewed positively. He is no longer considered one of our “great” presidents. In Schlesinger Sr.’s 1948 survey, he ranked fourth of 29 presidents. But in <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2021-Survey-Results-Overall.pdf">2021</a>, historians ranked him 13th of 45 for C-SPAN. </p>
<p>Jackson dropped the most in C-SPAN’s surveys, from 13th in <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2000%20C-SPAN%20Presidential%20Survey%20Scores%20and%20Ranks%20FINAL.PDF">2000</a> to 22nd in <a href="https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2021-Survey-Results-Overall.pdf">2021</a>. His commitment to <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/jackson/domestic-affairs">Indian removal</a> from Southern and Midwestern states, not unique for the time, and the resulting <a href="https://cherokeehistorical.org/trail-of-tears/">Trail of Tears</a> – the forced and violent relocation of Native Americans from their homelands – are important topics in today’s political discussions.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A suited man stands with a top hat in his right hand as his left hand rests on a side table dressed in a table cloth." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510923/original/file-20230217-22-a24k7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510923/original/file-20230217-22-a24k7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510923/original/file-20230217-22-a24k7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510923/original/file-20230217-22-a24k7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510923/original/file-20230217-22-a24k7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=971&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510923/original/file-20230217-22-a24k7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=971&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510923/original/file-20230217-22-a24k7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=971&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Grover Cleveland, in office from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897, opposed efforts to integrate schools or give African Americans, whom he considered inferior to white people, voting rights.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-grover-cleveland-holding-top-hat-news-photo/640459089?adppopup=true">Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Several other presidents who lost ground, including <a href="https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-enslaved-households-of-james-k-polk">James Polk</a>, <a href="https://www.whitehousehistory.org/bios/zachary-taylor">Zachary Taylor</a>, <a href="https://www.rbhayes.org/hayes/hayes-evolving-views-on-anti-slavery-reconstruction/">Rutherford B. Hayes</a> and <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/cleveland/domestic-affairs">Grover Cleveland</a>, were associated with efforts to extend slavery or with failure to protect African Americans following Reconstruction.</p>
<p>Then there is the case of <a href="https://theconversation.com/gen-ulysses-s-grants-pending-promotion-sheds-new-light-on-his-overlooked-fight-for-equal-rights-after-the-civil-war-194896">Grant</a>. Ranked at the bottom as a failure in the mid-20th century, he had the largest ranking change of any president in the C-SPAN surveys. He jumped 13 places from 33rd in 2000 to 20th in 2021. He had already moved up from second-to-last place in the 1948 and 1962 Schlesinger surveys to somewhere in the bottom quartile in 2000, to a position in 2021 where more presidents ranked worse than he did.</p>
<p>The 2021 C-SPAN survey ranks Grant sixth on “pursued equal justice for all,” behind only Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter. Given the centrality of equal justice, which may overshadow whatever connection Grant may have had to scandals in his administration, such as <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tcrr-credit-mobilier-scandal/">Crédit Mobilier</a> and the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/18/crosshairs-an-investigation-president-fired-special-prosecutor/">Whiskey Ring</a>, Grant rises in historians’ overall evaluation.</p>
<h2>Moral authority</h2>
<p>This all suggests historians have quite simple ways of evaluating presidents. We have an image of the ideal leader. Just a few pieces of information relating to that ideal make a big difference in whether we view presidents as fitting or not fitting that image. This is particularly true of our perception of how good they were. Presidents’ moral commitments speak loudly to whether or not we view them as good.</p>
<p>Interestingly, on the quality of “moral authority” in the C-SPAN surveys from 2000 to 2021, Grant’s ranking rose 14 rungs, from 31st to 17th, even more than it did on “pursued equal justice for all,” where it rose 12 rungs, from 18th to sixth. Wilson and Jackson dropped 13 and 18 places, respectively, on “moral authority.”</p>
<p>Clearly, moral judgments loom large in historians’ assessments of presidential leadership.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A bearded man, dressed in a suit, sits with his right leg crossed over his left. His left hand rests on a book, atop a side table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510928/original/file-20230217-364-94akxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ulysses S. Grant, once ranked poorly by historians, now gets high marks. His advocacy for African American voting rights stands out among his efforts for the freedmen during Reconstruction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ulysses-s-grant-18th-president-of-the-united-states-c1869-news-photo/463975929?phrase=Ulysses%20S.%20Grant&adppopup=true">Print Collector/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199254/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>George R. Goethals received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health from 1971-1983. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and the International Leadership Association.
Dr. Goethals met Dean Keith Simonton at a professional meeting. </span></em></p>Historians change their views of presidents over time, often because of the country’s changing views on race and moral leadership.George R. Goethals, Professor in Leadership Studies, University of RichmondLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1948962022-12-05T13:26:27Z2022-12-05T13:26:27ZGen. Ulysses S. Grant’s pending promotion sheds new light on his overlooked fight for equal rights after the Civil War<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498586/original/file-20221201-16851-brd9vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=81%2C661%2C2939%2C3112&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">General Grant stands in front of his campaign tent at his headquarters in Virginia in 1865.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-grant-stands-in-front-of-his-campaign-tent-at-his-news-photo/515359842?phrase=ulysses%20s%20grant&adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Tucked away in an amendment to the <a href="https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy23_ndaa_bill_text.pdf">FY2023 U.S. defense authorization bill</a> is a rare instance of congressional bipartisanship and a tribute to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant. </p>
<p>If approved, the measure would posthumously promote Grant to the rank of General of the Armies of the U.S., making him only the third person – along with <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/macarthur-general-john-j-pershing/">John J. Pershing</a> and <a href="https://armyhistory.org/general-of-the-armies-of-the-united-states-george-washington/">George Washington</a> – to be awarded the nation’s highest military honor.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.history.msstate.edu/directory/aem231">Executive Director</a> of the <a href="https://www.usgrantlibrary.org/">Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library</a>, I believe that the promotion would be much more than a symbolic nod to a great military general. Rather, it would highlight the overlooked legacy of a man who fought to end the last vestiges of slavery. </p>
<h2>Outbreak of Civil War</h2>
<p>During the Civil War, Grant rose to fame as a decisive leader who was willing to doggedly pursue Confederate armies and avoid retreat at all costs. He first gained his reputation for tenacity with Union victories at <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/shiloh#:%7E:text=Hardin%20County%2C%20TN%20%7C%20Apr%206,continent%20up%20to%20that%20date.">Shiloh</a>, <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/chattanooga">the Battles for Chattanooga</a> and <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/vicksburg">the Siege of Vicksburg</a>. </p>
<p>Like most white northerners, Grant signed up to <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/ulysses-s-grant">fight for the Union</a> – not for emancipation. </p>
<p>But by 1862, the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery-cause-civil-war.htm">freedom of enslaved African Americans</a> had become vital to the Union war strategy, if not yet its cause.</p>
<p>A year before President Abraham Lincoln signed in 1863 <a href="https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation">the Emancipation Proclamation</a> that freed enslaved people in the Confederate states, Grant oversaw the establishment of refugee, or <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/grants-contraband-conundrum/?searchResultPosition=1">contraband camps</a>, throughout the <a href="https://repository.upenn.edu/hist_digital/1/">Mississippi Valley</a>. Those camps provided basic housing, food and work for Black men and women who had fled from slavery.</p>
<p>Grant also administered the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/article.html">enlistment of African American men</a> into United States Colored Troops units during <a href="https://www.nps.gov/vick/learn/historyculture/african-americans-and-the-campaign.htm">the Vicksburg campaign</a>. </p>
<p>In March 1864, <a href="https://americanhistory.si.edu/lincoln/lincolns-generals">Lincoln appointed Grant</a> to the rank of lieutenant general and ordered him to take on the Confederate Army in Virginia, a task at which numerous other Union leaders had failed.</p>
<p>At this point during the war, Grant assumed the role of chief strategist for the entire Union war effort. It took the next 13 months of fighting <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/overland-campaign-1864">during the Overland campaign</a> before <a href="https://loc.gov/exhibits/civil-war-in-america/biographies/robert-e-lee.html">Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered</a> to Grant at <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Appomattox-Court-House">Appomattox</a> on April 9, 1865. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A white man dressed in a dark military uniform stands at a table with another white man dressed in a military uniform." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498570/original/file-20221201-6286-e8f6w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498570/original/file-20221201-6286-e8f6w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498570/original/file-20221201-6286-e8f6w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498570/original/file-20221201-6286-e8f6w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498570/original/file-20221201-6286-e8f6w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498570/original/file-20221201-6286-e8f6w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498570/original/file-20221201-6286-e8f6w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this illustration, Gen. Ulysses S, Grant, left, accepts the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/robert-e-lee-surrenders-to-general-u-s-grant-royalty-free-illustration/112873439?phrase=ulysses%20s%20grant%20robert%20lee&adppopup=true">Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the Federal victory, many <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-grant-was-the-great-hero-of-the-civil-war-but-lost-favor-with-historians/2014/04/24/62f5439e-bf53-11e3-b574-f8748871856a_story.html">Americans hailed Grant</a> as the man who saved the Union. </p>
<p>But Grant was magnanimous in victory. </p>
<p>Multiple times during the war <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/gentlemans-agreement-ended-civil-war-180954810/">he honored the dignity</a> of his defeated adversaries, most famously at Appomattox, where he did not require Lee to hand over his sword, as usually required. Grant also allowed Confederate officers to keep their sidearms and horses. </p>
<p>Lee appreciated <a href="https://npg.si.edu/blog/lee-surrendering-grant-appomattox">Grant’s actions</a>, remarking: “This will have the best possible effect upon the men … it will be very gratifying, and will do much toward conciliating our people.” </p>
<h2>Impact of the ‘Lost Cause’</h2>
<p>But after the war, the conciliatory feelings vanished. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/the-lost-causes-long-legacy/613288/">Southern partisans constructed</a> the narrative of the “Lost Cause.” It held that the root of the Civil War was not slavery, but <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/states-rights">the rights of states to control</a> their own destinies. It further held that the Union victory had nothing to do with Confederate character or leadership, but rather the Union’s sheer numbers and superior resources.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.salon.com/2011/05/01/joan_waugh_grant/">this Lost Cause narrative</a>, Grant was seen as a bumbling butcher devoid of any meaningful strategic vision, who succeeded only by mercilessly throwing more soldiers at his enemy. It also revived <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-04-25/legacy-of-ulysses-s-grant-complicated-200-years-after-birth">the old rumors</a> of his excessive drinking. </p>
<p>In this story line, Grant’s foil was always the courtly gentleman, Robert E. Lee. The hagiography of Lee demanded <a href="https://www.salon.com/2011/05/01/joan_waugh_grant/">Grant’s inferiority</a>. </p>
<p>By the early 20th century, the Lost Cause was no longer isolated in the South and had spread across America. Crowds flocked to see <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/08/383279630/100-years-later-whats-the-legacy-of-birth-of-a-nation">the racist anti-Reconstruction “Birth of a Nation”</a> in movie theaters, and during the World War I rush to build military bases, the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/the-lost-causes-long-legacy/613288/">Army named ten of them after Confederate generals</a>. </p>
<h2>President Grant’s fight for equality</h2>
<p>Grant served as <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/ulysses-s-grant/">U.S. president from 1869 to 1877</a> during a time when white southerners proved hostile toward <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reconstruction-civil-rights-during-reconstruction/">federal Reconstruction measures</a> that sought equal rights for recently freed enslaved people. </p>
<p>Grant saw his role of enforcing these policies as an extension of his wartime duty and necessary to <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-short-overview-of-the-reconstruction-era-and-ulysses-s-grant-s-presidency.htm">protect the gains of the Union victory</a>, especially the newly established rights for African Americans. </p>
<p>He used the resources of the federal government to <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/grant-kkk/">crush the Ku Klux Klan</a>, established the Department of Justice to <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/created-150-years-ago-justice-departments-first-mission-was-protect-black-rights-180975232/">investigate civil rights abuses</a> and signed <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/CivilRightsAct1875.htm#:%7E:text=The%20bill%20guaranteed%20all%20citizens,schools%2C%20churches%2C%20and%20cemeteries.">the Civil Rights Act of 1875</a>. </p>
<h2>Grant’s latest cause</h2>
<p>In recent years, the American public has questioned the Lost Cause and taken steps to mitigate its pervasiveness throughout the U.S. </p>
<p>Southerners themselves have chosen to remove <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/970610428/nearly-100-confederate-monuments-removed-in-2020-report-says-more-than-700-remai">Confederate leaders</a> from town squares and imagery from <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2021/01/11/its-a-great-day-mississippi-raises-new-state-flag-after-126-years/">state flags</a>. The U.S. Army has established a <a href="https://www.thenamingcommission.gov/names">Naming Commission</a> to <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-moves-to-rename-army-bases-honoring-confederate-generals-who-fought-to-defend-slavery-183862">rebrand Confederate-named bases</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Construction workers use heavy-duty chains to remove a statue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee is lifted off its pedestal in Charlottesville, Virginia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/statue-of-confederate-general-robert-e-lee-located-in-news-photo/1233936650?adppopup=true">Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is telling, too, that Grant’s Presidential Library is now located in Mississippi, a Deep South state he once conquered.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether the request made to elevate Grant’s rank by U.S. Senators <a href="https://www.brown.senate.gov/">Sherrod Brown</a> of Ohio, a Democrat, and <a href="https://www.blunt.senate.gov/">Roy Blunt</a> of Missouri, a Republican – along with <a href="https://wagner.house.gov/about/meet-ann">GOP U.S Rep. Ann Wagner</a> – will be finally approved by Congress as part of <a href="https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy23_ndaa_bill_text.pdf">the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act</a>. </p>
<p>Either way, in my view, a thoughtful reconsideration of Grant’s wartime and post-war contributions is long overdue. </p>
<p><em>This article was updated to clarify Confederate imagery removed from state flags.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194896/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne Marshall is affiliated with Ulysses S. Grant Association</span></em></p>Known as the military leader who saved America, Ulysses S. Grant left a legacy of fighting for the rights of enslaved people during and after the Civil War.Anne Marshall, Associate Professor of History, Mississippi State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1891952022-08-29T12:37:47Z2022-08-29T12:37:47ZWhy virtue signaling isn’t the same as virtue – it actually furthers the partisan divide<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481184/original/file-20220825-18-um2x9m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=140%2C878%2C3039%2C1829&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A sign in a yard listing many virtues – an example of virtue signaling.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/modern-sign-in-a-front-yard-royalty-free-image/1262002387?adppopup=true">davelogan/iStock via Getty images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a speech on July 23, 2022, before the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, Sen. Ted Cruz <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/watch-ted-cruz-gets-standing-ovation-at-cpac-when-announcing-pronouns/ar-AA10m6Ql">introduced himself</a> to the audience with the words, “My name is Ted Cruz and my pronoun is kiss my ass.” </p>
<p>In 2019, the Vermont College of Fine Arts appealed to a different group. They replaced the term alumni – which is derived from the Latin masculine plural but traditionally used to refer to all graduates of the school – with alumnx. In its <a href="https://vcfa.edu/about/office-diversity-equity-inclusion/">statement</a>, the college said that dropping the traditional term “alumni” was “a clear step toward exercising more intentional language, which we strive to implement in all aspects of college life.” </p>
<p>These statements are very different, of course. One is explicitly inclusive, designed to demonstrate that everyone who graduated from the school, irrespective of their gender, is included and respected. The other crudely denigrates the very attitudes expressed in the second example. </p>
<p>But for all their differences, both are examples of what has come to be called “virtue signaling” – an act that implicitly claims that the speaker has made a determination about some important moral question and wants to signal to others where they come down. </p>
<hr>
<iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/why-virtue-signaling-isnt-the-same-as-virtue-it-actually-furthers-the-partisan-divide-189195&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Even though some might call the use of the phrase “kiss my ass” far from any notion of virtue, and more correctly understood as “<a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/the-needful-rise-of-vice-signaling">vice signaling</a>,” as a <a href="https://polisci.la.psu.edu/people/cxb518/">scholar of ethics and politics</a> I argue that both of these statements operate in precisely the same way – and that is the problem. </p>
<h2>Virtue signaling alone is insufficient</h2>
<p>Virtues are really just agreements among the members of any group about what is important, valuable and what group members can expect from each other. This is as true for motorcycle gangs as it is for monasteries. And the only way to establish and maintain, let alone modify or improve, any such agreement is by talking about it. </p>
<p>That’s what virtue signaling does. It helps any group recall and reflect on what it is that gives the group its identity. Thus, while the term virtue signaling may be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/20/virtue-signalling-putdown-passed-sell-by-date">relatively new</a>, the practice is as old as morality itself.</p>
<p>But useful though it may be, virtue signaling is far less demanding, and far less constructive, than virtue itself. Unless the former is matched with the latter – that is, unless words are matched with actions – mere signaling is insufficient. </p>
<p>The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle is widely regarded as one of the first, and still one of the most important, <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/virtue/">virtue theorists</a>. He argued that becoming a virtuous person is a worthy but arduous process, requiring maturity, discipline and <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html">constant repetition</a>. </p>
<p>“Men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage,” he wrote.</p>
<p>Virtue signalers are often inclined to pat themselves on the back for their moral insight and courage. Aristotle saw the <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html">very same thing</a>. He observed that many think that “by taking refuge in argument” they can become ethical. But Aristotle knew that this refuge doesn’t work: talking about virtue is useful – after all, this discussion comes from Aristotle’s book on ethics – but real virtue requires work. It is far more demanding and thus far harder to fake. </p>
<h2>Who is being signaled?</h2>
<p>But there is another question that speaks to the problem with virtue signaling right now: Who is being signaled to? </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A sign saying God, Guns, Guts made America free. Let's fight to keep all three." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481183/original/file-20220825-18-lvory0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481183/original/file-20220825-18-lvory0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=230&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481183/original/file-20220825-18-lvory0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=230&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481183/original/file-20220825-18-lvory0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=230&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481183/original/file-20220825-18-lvory0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=289&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481183/original/file-20220825-18-lvory0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=289&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481183/original/file-20220825-18-lvory0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=289&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A bumper stick on a car parked in the Appalachian town of Abingdon, Va., attributes America’s greatness to God, guns and guts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bumper-stick-on-a-car-parked-in-the-appalachiana-town-of-news-photo/154321931">Robert Alexander/Archive Photos/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Consider again the two examples above. Cruz got <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv1e1DmwkBw">a standing ovation</a> immediately after these words. That is not at all surprising, for there was hardly anyone who did not agree with his signal and who did not already understand themselves to be the more moral group of Americans. What’s more, Cruz’s words were designed to alienate the other side of the partisan division, to belittle and reject them as part of the conversation. </p>
<p>The language of the Vermont College of Fine Arts is not nearly as inflammatory, but that statement, as well, could be viewed as dismissive by anyone who might insist that alumni has been a benign word for millennia, or that it is already a gender neutral term, or who believes that making up new words is as ineffectual as it is exasperating.</p>
<p>These two examples show what is frequently the case: The “signal” in virtue signaling is designed to communicate specifically to one partisan tribe and to affirm that group’s moral superiority. That outcome is particularly unwelcome, for the U.S. is divided enough already. </p>
<p><a href="https://news.yahoo.com/poll-half-of-americans-now-predict-us-may-cease-to-be-a-democracy-someday-090028564.html?">A June 2022 poll</a> found that a majority of Americans – 55% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans – believed it was “likely” that the United States would “cease to be a democracy in the future.” <a href="https://www.thetrace.org/2022/07/civil-war-us-political-violence-research/">Another survey</a> conducted around the same time by the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program found that half of all Americans agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.” </p>
<p>Virtue signals to one partisan tribe do nothing to diminish this division and likely exacerbate it. As researchers <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7042-8318">Scott Hill</a> and <a href="https://rpgarner.com/">Renaud-Philippe Garner</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03444-6">conclude</a> in their 2021 paper, “Human societies require people who disagree to cooperate and trust each other. They must also allow for disagreement and productive discussion of competing views. Yet, virtue signaling undermines all of this.”</p>
<h2>Lincoln’s call for virtue</h2>
<p>Those concerned about the deep divide in American society would be wise to recall Abraham Lincoln’s <a href="https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm">second inaugural address</a>. Given shortly before the end of the American Civil War – perhaps the one time when American society was more polarized than it is now – Lincoln insisted that Americans strive for a very <a href="https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09394-9.html">democratic understanding of the virtue of charity</a>. </p>
<p>Lincoln called Americans to take up the difficult task of reuniting their riven society “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” </p>
<p>With the end of the war, charity meant caring for the widow and orphan, the disabled veteran and the worker whose business was destroyed. </p>
<p>But Lincoln went further: Charity was “for all.” In a democracy, that means adopting the posture that like me, my opponent is a person of goodwill and worthy of my benefit of the doubt. And by extending that charity to all, charity reinforces democratic equality: All citizens should both give and expect to receive this benefit. </p>
<p>Since virtue signaling so often only serves one partisan tribe, it spurns any such idea. Certainly there is nothing remotely charitable about Ted Cruz’s statement. And even the ostensibly inclusive statement by the Vermont College of Fine Arts makes it all too easy to malign those who aren’t enlightened enough to go along.</p>
<p>Lincoln called for charity between two sides who had been killing each other for four long years. He well understood the difficulty associated with such a task, but he saw the value, as well. That same understanding would be valuable to American society today, as well.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189195/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Beem does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Virtue signaling is designed to communicate specifically to one partisan tribe and to affirm its moral superiority. A scholar of ethics and politics explains why that is unwelcome in a divided US.Christopher Beem, Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1833112022-06-15T19:19:03Z2022-06-15T19:19:03ZJuneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467219/original/file-20220606-20-dln03a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=22%2C0%2C1057%2C758&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900, held in 'East Woods' on East 24th St. in Austin, Texas.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-juneteenth">Austin History Center</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The actual day was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/juneteenth-day-celebration.html">June 19, 1865</a>, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.</p>
<p>The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-juneteenth">celebrations known as Juneteenth</a> were said to have gone on for seven straight days. </p>
<p>The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/general-order-no-3">General Order No. 3</a>. It <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/general-order-no-3">read in part</a>, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” </p>
<p>But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/emancipation-proclamation">Emancipation Proclamation</a> signed by <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-emancipation-proclamation-came-to-be-signed-165533991/">President Abraham Lincoln</a> two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863. </p>
<p>As I explore in <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Black-Ghost-of-Empire/Kris-Manjapra/9781982123475">my book</a> “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from <a href="http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/documents/1776-1865/abolition-slavery.html">Pennsylvania in 1780</a> to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-slavery/slavery-in-africa-18041936/F01667F6DC2CDF8A51D6F9E0D5505E6E">Sierra Leone in 1936</a>. </p>
<p>There were, in fact, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Day">20 separate emancipations</a> in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.</p>
<p>In my view as <a href="https://as.tufts.edu/history/people/faculty/kris-manjapra">a scholar of race and colonialism</a>, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23256427M/There_is_a_river">historians have long documented</a>, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods. </p>
<p>In fact, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Kris-Manjapra/157794425">based on my research</a>, emancipations were actually designed to force Blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slave owners – not to the enslaved – thus ensuring <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1341787?seq=1">white people maintained advantages in accruing and passing down wealth across generations.</a>.</p>
<h2>Reparations to slave owners</h2>
<p>The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense. </p>
<p>The first, arguably the most important, was the <a href="https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/gradualism-republican-party">ideology of gradualism</a>, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.</p>
<p>The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.</p>
<p>The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2117142">various forms of debt</a> in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.</p>
<p>In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.</p>
<h2>Emancipation myths and realities</h2>
<p>On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule. </p>
<p>The Pennsylvania <a href="http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/documents/1776-1865/abolition-slavery.html">Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery</a> stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.” </p>
<p>At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.</p>
<p>After that first <a href="https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/gradual-abolition-act-of-1780/#:%7E:text=The%20Gradual%20Abolition%20Act%20of,without%20making%20slavery%20immediately%20illegal.">Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania</a>, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners. </p>
<p>Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday. </p>
<p>All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.</p>
<p>Emancipation Day came to <a href="https://connecticuthistory.org/from-the-state-historian-connecticuts-slow-steps-toward-emancipation/">Connecticut</a> and <a href="https://newporthistory.org/history-bytes-abolition-of-slavery-in-ri/">Rhode Island</a> on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in <a href="https://history.nycourts.gov/when-did-slavery-end-in-new-york/">New York</a>, and on July 4, 1804, in <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24486906">New Jersey</a>. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began commemorating the <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/emancipation.htm">British Empire’s Emancipation Day</a> of Aug. 1.</p>
<p><a href="https://emancipation.dc.gov/page/historical-overview-dc-emancipation">The District of Columbia’s day</a> came on April 16, 1862. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Seven white men gather around a table to watch President Abraham Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468578/original/file-20220613-24-4a8phb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468578/original/file-20220613-24-4a8phb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468578/original/file-20220613-24-4a8phb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468578/original/file-20220613-24-4a8phb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468578/original/file-20220613-24-4a8phb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468578/original/file-20220613-24-4a8phb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468578/original/file-20220613-24-4a8phb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/abraham-lincoln-signs-emancipation-royalty-free-illustration/122147017?adppopup=true">Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln <a href="https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html">signed the Emancipation Proclamation</a> that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/bs-md-emancipation-150-20141101-story.html">Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland</a> on Nov. 1, 1864. In the following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in <a href="https://www.virginiamemory.com/online-exhibitions/exhibits/show/remaking-virginia/end-of-slavery/celebrations">Virginia</a>, on May 8 in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/emancipation-day-commemoration-from-columbus-mississippi/361971/">Mississippi</a>, on May 20 in <a href="https://dos.myflorida.com/library-archives/research/explore-our-resources/emancipation/">Florida</a>, on May 29 in <a href="https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/emancipation-day-and-juneteenth-celebrations-aren-new-georgia/AnJRzXlY4l2mVl25NI0VzM/">Georgia</a>, on June 19 in <a href="https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/juneteenth">Texas</a> and on Aug. 8 in <a href="https://www.nps.gov/anjo/learn/historyculture/johnson-and-tn-emancipation.htm">Tennessee</a> and <a href="https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2015/08/07/emancipation-day-marks-slaverys-end-kentucky/31277799/">Kentucky</a>.</p>
<h2>Slavery by another name</h2>
<p>After the Civil War, the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/historical-documents/the-reconstruction-amendments">three Reconstruction Amendments</a> to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment">Thirteenth Amendment of 1865</a> allowed for the enslavement of incarcerated people <a href="https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-convict-leasing/">through convict leasing</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment">Fourteenth Amendment of 1868</a> permitted incarcerated people to be denied the right to vote.</p>
<p>And the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/15th-amendment">Fifteenth Amendment of 1870</a> failed to explicitly ban forms of <a href="https://time.com/6165147/fifteenth-amendment-racial-equality-today/">voter suppression</a> that targeted Black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era. </p>
<p>In fact, <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/general-order-no-3">Granger’s Order No. 3</a>, on June 19, 1865, spelled it out.</p>
<p>Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”</p>
<p>Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” </p>
<h2>The meaning of Juneteenth</h2>
<p>Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="with a blue sky in the background, a Black woman stands over a crowd of people, raising her fist in the air." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467240/original/file-20220606-26-nw9stq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Black woman raises her fist in the air during a Juneteenth reenactment celebration in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/prescylia-mae-raises-her-fist-in-the-air-during-a-news-photo/1233550531?adppopup=true">Mark Felix /AFP/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom. </p>
<p>They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule. </p>
<p>Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.</p>
<p>At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/46133/juneteenth-by-ralph-ellison/">Juneteenth</a>,” noted Black author <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/30/317056807/ralph-ellison-no-longer-the-invisible-man-100-years-after-his-birth">Ralph Ellison</a> called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?” </p>
<p>The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kris Manjapra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Known as Juneteenth in Texas, Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.Kris Manjapra, Professor of History, Tufts UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1800702022-05-20T12:13:35Z2022-05-20T12:13:35ZThe US Civil War drastically reshaped how Americans deal with death – will the pandemic?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464089/original/file-20220518-23-b5e9l3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C35%2C5964%2C3943&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An art installation by Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg in remembrance of Americans who have died of COVID-19, near the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/VirusOutbreakBidenFuneralAssistance/5b587173d76b4be8ab21b5cfba95e5cd/photo?Query=%22in%20america:%20remember%22&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=108&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo/Brynn Anderson</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>More than <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2022/how-many-people-died-covid-united-states-1-million-graphic/">1 million people living in the United States</a> have died of COVID-19 during the past two years.</p>
<p>The numbers paint a clear picture of devastation, though they can’t capture the individual and familial pain of losing loved ones – which will no doubt transform many more millions of Americans’ lives.</p>
<p>The impact of this mass death on American society as a whole is less clear, especially since the pandemic is not over. While there have been a few moments of public remembrance – 700,000 white flags <a href="https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/covid-19-white-flag-memorial-installation-comes-to-an-end-on-national-mall/2820218/">placed on the National Mall</a>, and President Joe Biden’s <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/05/12/statement-from-president-joe-biden-marking-one-million-american-lives-lost-to-covid-19/">brief words</a> noting the “one million empty chairs around the dinner table” – the country is only beginning to grapple with the shared grief of so many deaths.</p>
<p>Instead, there is public discord surrounding those who died. In a country divided over basic facts about the virus, deaths have been exploited for political purposes, or <a href="https://khn.org/news/how-covid-death-counts-become-the-stuff-of-conspiracy-theories/">wrapped into conspiracy theories</a>.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://religion.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/laderman-gary.html">a scholar</a> of religion who has studied <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rest-in-peace-9780195183559?q=rest%20in%20peace&lang=en&cc=us">the history of death in America</a>, I am quite preoccupied with how the country makes sense of, honors and remembers the COVID-19 dead. The magnitude of death today immediately brings to my mind the event that killed the second-highest number of Americans: the Civil War.</p>
<p>My first book, “<a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078688/sacred-remains/">The Sacred Remains</a>,” looked at the conflict’s impact on Americans’ attitudes toward death, during another period of extreme division and overwhelming loss of life.</p>
<h2>Preserving the dead</h2>
<p>Roughly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html">750,000 people</a> died in the Civil War, or <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/statistics-civil-war">2.5% of the country’s population</a> at the time – the equivalent of 7 million Americans dying today.</p>
<p>The unprecedented death toll had profound consequences on American cultures of death for generations, particularly through the emergence of the funeral industry.</p>
<p>Throughout the 19th century, most Americans died, and had their bodies tended to, at home. Last moments with the corpse were with loved ones, who were responsible for washing and preparing it for the final rituals before burial, generally in local churchyards.</p>
<p>But the Civil War provided an opportunity for <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078688/sacred-remains/">a game-changing development</a>. <a href="https://www.civilwarmed.org/embalming1/">Embalming</a> was an innovative method of preserving bodies that allowed some Northern families to have their war dead retrieved from the mostly Southern battlefields and brought back to be buried in Northern soil.</p>
<p>The display of President Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body after his assassination was <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-lincolns-embrace-of-embalming-birthed-the-american-funeral-industry-86196">a pivotal moment</a> in this transformation. His corpse was transported on a train from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois, with frequent stops in many Northern cities where it was put on display for grieving Americans.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white illustration shows a line of people paying respects at a funeral." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464103/original/file-20220518-19-ixh8mx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464103/original/file-20220518-19-ixh8mx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464103/original/file-20220518-19-ixh8mx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464103/original/file-20220518-19-ixh8mx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464103/original/file-20220518-19-ixh8mx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464103/original/file-20220518-19-ixh8mx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464103/original/file-20220518-19-ixh8mx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A drawing depicts Americans viewing Abraham Lincoln’s body at City Hall in New York City in 1865.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/abraham-lincolns-funeral-1865-citizens-viewing-the-body-at-news-photo/517479796?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As embalming became more common, it helped legitimize a new class of professional experts: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183559.001.0001">funeral directors</a>, whose homes became a mix of business, mortality, religion and their own domestic life. By the early 20th century, this new business had established a fairly standard American way of death, centered on the viewing of an embalmed body to bring a community together.</p>
<p>Americans’ relationship to their dead would never be the same. The intimacies the living had with the dead before the Civil War gradually disappeared, as funeral homes managed the care of more and more bodies.</p>
<h2>Meaning-making</h2>
<p>One of my intellectual heroes, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/713685991">sociologist Robert Hertz</a>, wrote <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Death-and-the-right-hand/Hertz/p/book/9780415489072">a famous essay</a> about death and society in 1907. He argued that social groups represent themselves as immortal, capable of overcoming the death of any member. The community’s survival depends greatly on transcending death, so it transforms the dead into sacred symbols of group identity and social cohesion.</p>
<p>Hertz’s studies focused on death in small societies in Borneo. Yet his exploration of the relationship between the death of the individual and the life of the social group is pertinent now, in the context of the pandemic – as it was in the aftermath of the Civil War.</p>
<p>The victorious Union turned dead soldiers into symbols of the nation. Their deaths were seen as sacred sacrifices to preserve the country. For religion scholars, this is a clear example of <a href="http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm">American civil religion</a>. In the U.S., civil religion is a patriotic culture that sees America as a sacred, exceptional country, built on shared ideals, myths and traditions.</p>
<p>But the Northern victors did not “control the narrative,” as we say these days. Indeed, a very striking and still-present counternarrative soon developed among the vanquished Confederates after the war. The losers built an alternative civil religious culture, what historians refer to as “<a href="https://ugapress.org/book/9780820334257/baptized-in-blood/">the religion of the Lost Cause</a>.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Women in white dresses and skirts stand in front of a war monument in a black and white photograph." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464114/original/file-20220518-17-9khcs9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464114/original/file-20220518-17-9khcs9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464114/original/file-20220518-17-9khcs9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464114/original/file-20220518-17-9khcs9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464114/original/file-20220518-17-9khcs9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464114/original/file-20220518-17-9khcs9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464114/original/file-20220518-17-9khcs9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Daughters of the Confederacy unveil the ‘Southern Cross’ monument at Arlington, Va., in 1917.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/arlington-va-daughters-of-the-confederacy-unveiling-the-news-photo/515947348?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For many white Southerners, the battlefield dead did not signal God had abandoned their cause but rather illuminated his support for <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/lost-cause-religion/#:%7E:text=Historians%20refer%20to%20this%20as,the%20Virginia%20journalist%20Edward%20A">values associated with the Confederacy</a> – values the United States is still grappling with today. They saw the loss as a temporary setback, but believed that ultimate victory would come if they maintained some form of Southern cultural purity based on notions of racial, regional and religious superiority.</p>
<h2>Looking ahead</h2>
<p>The politicization of death is not uncommon in American history, particularly during times of profound social crisis. And since the start of the pandemic, the same has happened with COVID-19 victims. </p>
<p>Death during a pandemic is obviously different from death during a civil war. In both cases, however, it is difficult for a divided country to experience unity in the face of an enormous loss of life and to agree on what those deaths mean for the nation.</p>
<p>Unique aspects of the pandemic make national mourning, and united healing, even more complicated. For example, the virus has not taken an equal toll across the country. The death toll shows <a href="https://theconversation.com/covid-19-is-hitting-black-and-poor-communities-the-hardest-underscoring-fault-lines-in-access-and-care-for-those-on-margins-135615">significant disparities</a> among different economic and racial groups. And the need to prevent contagion has intensified the physical separation between the living and the dead, making some meaningful rites of mourning <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-pandemic-changed-death-rituals-and-left-grieving-families-without-a-sense-of-closure-175302">difficult or impossible</a>.</p>
<p>Many communities have made efforts to commemorate the pain of the pandemic, such as through <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/11/01/929938826/for-d-a-de-los-muertos-remembering-those-lost-to-the-coronavirus">Dia de los Muertos</a>, a Mexican holiday honoring those who have died. But there have been minimal efforts to help make sense of the deaths on a national level: to rally around a compelling public narrative about the tremendous loss of life and grief. It remains to be seen if Americans will eventually incorporate the losses into a unifying civil religion, or only use them to reinforce polarization.</p>
<p>One million dead and counting will certainly require more efforts, more reflection and more soul-searching to help American society overcome and indeed draw strength from <a href="https://theconversation.com/brains-are-bad-at-big-numbers-making-it-impossible-to-grasp-what-a-million-covid-19-deaths-really-means-179081">this unimaginable number</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180070/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gary Laderman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Civil War – the second-most-deadly event in US history, just behind COVID-19 –contributed to lasting changes in how Americans care for the dead.Gary Laderman, Goodrich C White Professor of Religion, Emory UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1766632022-02-16T20:15:34Z2022-02-16T20:15:34ZAll American presidents have lied – the question is why and when<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446325/original/file-20220214-138710-1elarsz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C12%2C2874%2C1942&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Critics of President Joe Biden have accused him of lying. Most American presidents have been accused of deception.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-joe-biden-speaks-during-an-event-at-germanna-news-photo/1369802125?adppopup=true">Win McNamee/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Those who dislike a president tend to emphasize the frequency or skill with which he lies. </p>
<p>During the Trump administration, for instance, The Washington Post kept a running database of the president’s lies and deceptions – with the final tally running to over <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/">30,000 falsehoods</a>. President Joe Biden’s critics have insisted that he, too, is a <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/11/22/bidens-obsessive-lies-small-and-large-are-big-trouble-for-america/">liar</a> – and that the media is complicit in ignoring his supposed frequent <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/572189-why-isnt-it-a-lie-when-joe-biden-says-something-false-or-dishonest">deception of the American people</a>. </p>
<p>The frequency of these criticisms would seem to indicate that most people do not want a president who lies. And yet a recent <a href="https://progressive.org/dispatches/lies-more-lies-presidential-history-lueders-200810/">study of presidential deception</a> found that all American presidents – from Washington to Trump – have told lies, and knowingly so, in their public statements. The most effective of presidents have sometimes been effective precisely because they were skilled at <a href="https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/paradoxes-of-the-american-presidency-9780190648503?cc=us&lang=en&">manipulation and deception</a>.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://phil.washington.edu/people/michael-blake">political philosopher</a> with a focus on how people try to reason together through political disagreement, I argue that what matters most is not whether a president lies, but when and why he does so. </p>
<p>Presidents who lie to save their own public image or career are unlikely to be forgiven. However, those who appear to lie in the service of the public are often celebrated.</p>
<h2>The morality of deception</h2>
<p>Why, though, are lies thought so wrongful in the first instance?</p>
<p>Philosopher Immanuel Kant, in the 18th century, provided one powerful account of <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577415.001.0001/acprof-9780199577415-chapter-4">the wrongness of lying</a>. For Kant, lying was wrong in much the same way that threats and coercion are wrong. All of these override the autonomous will of another person, and treat that person as a mere tool. When a gunman uses threats to coerce a person to do a particular act, he disrespects that person’s rational agency. Lies are similarly disrespectful to rational agency: One’s decision has been manipulated, so that the act is no longer one’s own.</p>
<p>Kant regarded any lie as immoral – even one told to <a href="https://experts.illinois.edu/en/publications/kant-and-lying-to-the-murderer-at-the-door-one-more-time-kants-le">a murderer at the door</a>. </p>
<p>Modern-day philosophers have often endorsed versions of Kant’s account while seeking exceptions from its rigidness. One common theme is the necessity of the deception for achieving an important political goal. For example, a political leader who gives honest answers about a forthcoming military operation would likely imperil that operation – and most citizens of the state engaging in that military action would not want that. The key is that people might accept such deception, after the fact, because of what that deception made possible. </p>
<p>During World War II, the British government sought to deceive the Nazi command about its plans for invasion – which entailed <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/06/d-day-would-be-nearly-impossible-pull-off-today-heres-why/">lying even to British allies</a>. The moral imperative of defeating Nazi Germany is generally thought to be important enough to justify this sort of deception.</p>
<p>This example also illustrates another theme: Deception might be permitted when it is in the context of an adversarial relationship in which truth-telling should not be expected. Lying to one’s own citizens may or may not be justifiable – but there seems to be very little wrong about lying to one’s <em>enemies</em> during wartime. </p>
<h2>Honorable lies?</h2>
<p>These ideas might be used in defense of some presidential lies. </p>
<p>During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was convinced that Hitler’s expansionism in Europe was a threat to the liberal democratic project itself, but he faced an electorate without any will to intervene in a European war. Roosevelt chose to insist publicly that he was opposed to any intervention – while doing everything he could to prepare for war and to covertly help the <a href="https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2017/01/04/how-franklin-d-roosevelt-prepared-us-for-wwii/">British cause</a>. </p>
<p>As early as 1948, historian <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24911690">Thomas Bailey</a> noted that Roosevelt had made a calculated choice to both prepare for war and insist he was doing no such thing. To be open about his view of Hitler would have likely led to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=CVqTXJjmtmUC&pg=PA298&lpg=PA298&dq=roosevelt+lying&source=bl&ots=0frUEvK02d&sig=ACfU3U3djJZzxplhbGcQwVXwPOAqWJaa2w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiQ_cKC_evrAhUBip4KHUTjDqY4ChDoATAGegQICBAB#v=onepage&q=the%20man%20in%20the%20street&f=false">his defeat in the 1940 election</a>. </p>
<p>Before Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln made similar calculations. Lincoln’s lies regarding his negotiations with the Confederacy – described by <a href="https://www.megmott.com">Meg Mott</a>, a professor of political theory, as being “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/24/politics/presidents-lie/index.html">devious</a>” – may have been instrumental in preserving the United States as a single country.</p>
<p>Lincoln was willing to open peace negotiations with the Confederacy, knowing that much of his own party thought that only unconditional surrender by the South would settle the question of slavery. At one point, Lincoln wrote a note to his own party asserting – falsely – that there were “<a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0021.104/--hampton-roads-peace-conference-a-final-test-of-lincolns?rgn=main;view=fulltext">no peace commissioners</a>” being sent to a conference with the Confederacy. </p>
<p>A member of the Congress later noted that, in the absence of that note, the 13th Amendment – which ended the practice of chattel slavery – <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0021.104/--hampton-roads-peace-conference-a-final-test-of-lincolns?rgn=main;view=fulltext">would not have been passed</a>.</p>
<h2>Good lies and bad lies</h2>
<p>The problem, of course, is that a great many presidential lies cannot be so easily linked to important purposes. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a dark suit speaks into microphones, with flags in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446331/original/file-20220214-15-66fael.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former U.S. President Bill Clinton addresses the nation to apologize for misleading the country about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-bill-clinton-addresses-the-nation-from-the-rose-news-photo/462731481?adppopup=true">William Philpott/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>President Bill Clinton’s lies about his sexual activities were either simply self-serving or told to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Fe88rwSW8ywC&pg=PT507&lpg=PT507&dq=bill+clinton+%22the+lie+saved+me%22&source=bl&ots=AJY7EQZHoq&sig=ACfU3U2uGl7_XXWvjxHXE5jYNH0XyzOZyA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjFsPGE0enrAhWTvJ4KHY_WB5MQ6AEwC3oECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=bill%20clinton%20%22the%20lie%20saved%20me%22&f=false">preserve his presidency</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, President Richard Nixon’s insistence that he knew nothing about <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-insists-that-he-is-not-a-crook">the Watergate break-in</a> was most likely a lie. John Dean, Nixon’s legal counsel, confirmed years later that the president <a href="https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/08/07/john-dean-uncovers-what-nixon-knew-about-watergate">knew about, and approved of</a>, the plan to rob the Democratic National Committee headquarters. This scandal eventually ended Nixon’s presidency. </p>
<p>In both cases, these presidents faced a significant threat to their presidencies – and chose deception to save not the nation, but their own power. </p>
<h2>President Biden, President Trump and truth</h2>
<p>It is likely that President Trump lied <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/podcast-glenn-kessler-david-corn-lies-washington-post-fact-checker/">more than most presidents</a>. What is striking about his lies, however, is that they have tended to be told to defend his own <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/04/trump-male-ego-merkel-schroeder/">self-image or political viability</a> rather than in service of some central political good.</p>
<p>Indeed, some of President Trump’s more implausible lies seemed best understood as tests of loyalty; those in his circle who repeated his most obvious lies <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/26/14386068/why-does-trump-lie">demonstrated their loyalty to President Trump in doing so</a>. Most recently, he has attacked as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/24/donald-trump-big-lie-american-democracy">disloyal</a> those members of the Republican Party who have not repeated his false claims about electoral fraud.</p>
<p>Recent studies indicate that President Biden, thus far, has not shown himself equal to President Trump <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidmarkowitz/2021/04/30/who-lied-more-during-their-first-100-days-biden-trump-or-obama/?sh=56acaa81a89d">in his deceptiveness</a>. He has, however, made deceptive and misleading claims on a number of topics, ranging from the costs of particular policies to his <a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?page=1&category=&ruling=false&speaker=joe-biden">own history and early life</a>. These lies seem somewhat unlike those told by Lincoln and by Roosevelt; they seem generally told in the interests of making a rhetorical point more powerful rather than as necessary means to an otherwise unobtainable political goal. They seem, in that respect, less morally justifiable than these earlier falsehoods.</p>
<p>A justification for these lies might be found with reference to practices which – like warfare or politics – necessarily involve conflict and gamesmanship. No one would expect honesty from the enemy side during warfare, and perhaps one should not from opponents in politics either. Some political philosophers have thought that, when politics becomes <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691057392/ethics-for-adversaries">an adversarial game</a>, politicians might be forgiven when they seek to deceive the other party. President Biden might rely upon this idea, and could note that the Republican Party is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/10/bipartisanship-is-out-biden-its-about-time/">less open to bipartisan negotiation than at any time in its history</a>. </p>
<p>Even this last justification, however, may not be enough. Lying to one’s political opponents might be permitted in an adversarial context. The lies told by presidents are often addressed to constituents, and such deception seems harder to justify. </p>
<p>[<em>Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?source=inline-140ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>And finally, even the most important of lies must be believed for it to be justifiable; a lie that is immediately recognized as such is unlikely to achieve the goal justifying that lie. This is an increasingly difficult burden. Modern presidents find it more <a href="https://www.issuelab.org/resources/15318/15318.pdf">challenging to lie</a> without having their lies recognized as untrue than presidents serving before the advent of social media and dedicated <a href="https://www.factcheck.org">fact-checking</a>. </p>
<p>If presidents must sometimes lie to defend important political values, then, it seems as though the good president must be both able to lie and able to lie well. </p>
<p><em>This is updated version of an article <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-washington-to-trump-all-presidents-have-told-lies-but-only-some-have-told-them-for-the-right-reasons-145995">first published on September 17, 2020</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176663/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Blake receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.</span></em></p>A political philosopher argues that while all American presidents may lie, those who appear to lie for the public good are often celebrated.Michael Blake, Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy and Governance, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1736252022-02-15T13:49:16Z2022-02-15T13:49:16ZOld statues of Confederate generals are slowly disappearing – will monuments honoring people of color replace them?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445505/original/file-20220209-13-1pvibsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=751%2C60%2C3722%2C4412&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The monument 'Rumors of War' depicts a young African American in urban streetwear sitting atop a horse.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-monument-rumors-of-war-is-unveiled-in-times-square-on-news-photo/1177509058">Spencer Platt/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With most of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/11/23/charlottesville-verdict-live-updates/">legal challenges resolved</a> after the violent <a href="https://time.com/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-clashes/">Unite the Right rally</a>, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/charlottesville-confederate-monuments-lee.html">statue of Robert E. Lee removed</a> from its lofty pedestal in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, local lawmakers in December 2021 voted to do the unimaginable – donate the statue to the local <a href="https://jeffschoolheritagecenter.org/">Jefferson School African American Heritage Center</a>. </p>
<p>In turn, the nonprofit cultural group quickly announced its plan to <a href="https://www.cbs19news.com/story/45391966/jefferson-school-will-melt-lee-statue-by-february-2022">melt down the bronze statue</a> and use it as raw material for a new public artwork. What the group plans to build is still an open question, but it clearly will not be another statue honoring the <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/#start_entry">Lost Cause</a> of the Confederacy, the idea that slavery was a benevolent institution and the Confederate cause was just.</p>
<p>As part of America’s reckoning with its oppressive past, Charlottesville and the rest of the nation face the question of not just which statues and other images should be taken down, but what else – if anything – should be put up in their place.</p>
<p>Statues of Black Americans – and, more importantly, their absence – are an often overlooked barometer of racial progress, hidden in plain sight. Despite their silence, statues are active portraits that can reinforce the value and visibility of Black Americans. The <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/global-race-usa-statues-idINKBN2601O5">lack of Black statues</a> sends a clear message of exclusion.</p>
<p>For its part, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center wants to be not only more inclusive in the decision-making involved in determining the future of the Lee statue, but also transformative. </p>
<p>“Our aim is not to destroy an object, it’s to transform it,” <a href="https://www.wvtf.org/2021-12-09/black-heritage-museum-reenvisions-charlottesvilles-statue-of-confederate-gen-robert-e-lee">Andrea Douglas</a>, the center’s executive director, explained. “It’s to use the very raw material of its original making and create something that is more representative of the alleged democratic values of this community, more inclusive of those voices that in 1920 had no ability to engage in the artistic process at all.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Construction workers use heavy-duty chains to remove a statue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee is lifted off its pedestal in Charlottesville, Va.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/statue-of-confederate-general-robert-e-lee-located-in-news-photo/1233936650?adppopup=true">John McDFor their partonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Most important, she said, the group wants to “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/08/us/charlottesville-lee-statue-melted-trnd/index.html">turn it into something that can cause our community to heal</a>.”</p>
<h2>History of exclusion</h2>
<p>As a <a href="https://honors.tcu.edu/faculty/dr-frederick-w-gooding/">professor of pop culture history</a> who studies Black statues within mainstream society, I believe Charlottesville is not the only city in need of healing. With more questions being asked about today’s relevance of Confederate statues, Americans must also ask critical questions about the role of statues in reflecting present morals and future ideals. </p>
<p>While not uncommon to spot statues of accomplished Black athletes, such as <a href="https://www.baltimoreravens.com/video/ray-lewis-statue-unveiled-at-m-t-bank-stadium">Ray Lewis</a> in Baltimore, <a href="https://www.unitedcenter.com/venue/statues/">Michael Jordan</a> in Chicago or <a href="https://www.espn.com/boston/nba/story/_/id/9914066/statue-boston-celtics-great-bill-russell-unveiled-boston">Bill Russell</a> in Boston, it’s much more rare to find Black Americans memorialized outside of the sports and entertainment industries. </p>
<p>With few new exceptions, public and prominent statues of Blacks people are nonexistent. </p>
<p>The public art and history nonprofit group <a href="https://monumentlab.com/">Monument Lab</a> conducted a survey in 2021 of 48,178 statues, plaques, parks and obelisks across the United States. In its report, the group found that less than 1% were of people of color. </p>
<p>Of the top 50 most-represented individuals, the survey revealed that only five are Black or Indigenous people: civil rights leader <a href="https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm">Martin Luther King Jr.</a> in fourth place; abolitionist and Underground Railroad leader <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/harriet-tubman-statue-philadelphia-black-history-month-exhibit-20220111.html">Harriet Tubman</a> in 24th; Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who led Native American resistance to colonialism, in 25th; Lemhi Shoshone explorer <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/sacagawea-statue-in-portland-or.htm">Sacagawea</a> in 28th; and abolitionist and writer <a href="https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/central-park/monuments/2098">Frederick Douglass</a> in 29th. </p>
<p>More than likely, that percentage will remain the same for the foreseeable future – even with the recent wave of removing controversial statues in 2020 and 2021.</p>
<p>Since May 2020, the <a href="https://www.toppledmonumentsarchive.org/">Toppled Monuments Archive</a> has detailed <a href="https://www.toppledmonumentsarchive.org/the-collective">84 such removals</a> of “colonialist, imperialist, racist and sexist monuments” <a href="https://www.artpapers.org/monumental-collapse/">in North America</a>. In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy">Whose Heritage? Project</a> says that if other Confederate symbols are included, such as institution names and publicly displayed plaques, a more accurate number is that <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/02/04/cost-remove-confederate-monument-south">168 were taken down in 2020</a>.</p>
<h2>A changing landscape</h2>
<p>Not a single statue was built to honor the legacy of a Black person until 1974, when the likeness of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/07/11/archives/20000-at-unveiling-of-statue-to-mary-bethune-in-capital-a-fine.html">famed educator Mary McCleod Bethune</a> became the first Black statue ever <a href="https://washington.org/find-dc-listings/emancipation-memorial-freedmans-memorial">erected on federal lands</a>. The <a href="https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm">Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial</a> on the National Mall was not installed until in 2011. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue of a Black woman giving a loaf of bread to two children." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A view of the Mary McLeod Bethune statue in Lincoln Park in Washington.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-the-mary-mcleod-bethune-statue-in-lincoln-park-in-news-photo/474111719?adppopup=true">Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bethune’s statue stands in stark contrast to a nearby statue in Washington’s Lincoln Park. The <a href="https://washington.org/find-dc-listings/emancipation-memorial-freedmans-memorial">Freedman’s Memorial</a>, erected in 1922, immortalizes Abraham Lincoln standing clothed and erect, while a bare-chested Black man with broken chains around his wrists kneels at Lincoln’s feet. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/protesters-demand-removal-of-statues-depicting-freed-black-american-kneeling-before-lincoln">Tensions over this controversial symbol</a> led to the removal of a similar statue in Boston <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/us/boston-abraham-lincoln-statue.html">on Dec. 29, 2020</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue of a man standing near another man on his knees." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Freedmen’s Memorial depicts President Abraham Lincoln freeing an enslaved man.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/conservative-african-american-leaders-rally-and-call-on-news-photo/1227127010?adppopup=true">Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Public statues represent significant expenditures of time, money and political capital, especially with more than US$2 million and four years of legal battles spent on the Robert E. Lee statue’s removal in Charlottesville.</p>
<p>[<em>Understand key political developments, each week.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=politics&source=inline-politics-understand">Subscribe to The Conversation’s politics newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Public art is widely viewed as a tool to tell a more complete and honest narrative. As noted in the key findings of the Monuments Lab Audit: <a href="https://monumentlab.com/audit?section=key-finding-4">Monuments should be held accountable to history</a>. “Monuments that perpetuate harmful myths and that portray conquest and oppression as acts of valor require honest reckoning, conceptual dismantling, and active repair,” the audit concluded. </p>
<p>Part of the repair is occurring in Charlottesville and in Richmond, Virginia, where most notably <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/878822835/rumors-of-war-in-richmond-marks-a-monumentally-unequal-america">“Rumors of War”</a>, featuring a Black man in dreds and urban streetwear atop a powerful horse, stands near the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.</p>
<p>As with Charlottesville, Americans can reject the notion that our future, as now represented in public statues, is permanently fixed in stone. Perhaps when it comes to our existing statues, it is time to consider what we can melt down in other places and forge anew.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/173625/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frederick Gooding Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With a few notable exceptions, public monuments across the United States are overwhelmingly white and male. A movement is slowly growing to tell a more inclusive history of the American experience.Frederick Gooding Jr., Dr. Ronald E. Moore Professor of Humanities and African American Studies, Texas Christian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1699162022-01-12T19:54:42Z2022-01-12T19:54:42ZHow the Vietnam War pushed MLK to embrace global justice, not only civil rights at home<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438266/original/file-20211217-25-1otqfqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C22%2C2964%2C2133&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President Lyndon B. Johnson, right, talks with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in his White House office in Washington, D.C., Jan. 18, 1964.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/USPRESIDENTJOHNSONKING/d22cce379ce5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/photo?Query=King%20johnson&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=689&currentItemNo=5">AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On July 2, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. stood behind President Lyndon Baines Johnson as the Texan signed into law <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=97">the Civil Rights Act of 1964</a>. Although not the first civil rights bill passed by Congress, it was the most comprehensive.</p>
<p>King <a href="https://taylorbranch.com/king-era-trilogy/pillar-of-fire/">called the law’s passage</a> “a great moment … something like the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.” Johnson recognized King’s contributions to the law by gifting him a pen used to sign the historic legislation.</p>
<p>A year later, as Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, King again <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965.htm">joined the president for the occasion</a>.</p>
<p>But by the start of 1967, <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/johnson-lyndon-baines">the two most famous men in America were no longer on speaking terms</a>. In fact, they would not meet again before King fell to an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968. </p>
<p>King was foremost a minister who pastored to a local church throughout his career, even while he was doing national civil rights work. And he became concerned that his political ally Johnson was making a grave moral mistake in Vietnam. <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/johnson-announces-more-troops-to-vietnam">Johnson quickly escalated</a> American troop presence in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 in 1965. And by 1968, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/03/the-vietnam-war-part-i-early-years-and-escalation/389054/">more than a half a million troops</a> were stationed in the Southeast Asian nation.</p>
<p>As I write in my 2021 book “<a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469663005/nonviolence-before-king/">Nonviolence Before King</a>,” the Baptist preacher had been on a “<a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/pilgrimage-nonviolence">pilgrimage to nonviolence</a>” for years. And by 1967, he was a radical apostle of Christian nonviolence. </p>
<p>King called on the United States to “<a href="https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/where-do-we-go-from-here">be born again</a>” and undergo a “<a href="https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm">radical revolution of values</a>.” King believed that Jim Crow segregation and the war in Vietnam were rooted in the same unjust ethic of race-based domination, and he called on the nation to change its ways. </p>
<h2>Speaking against the Vietnam War</h2>
<p>King preached nonviolent direct action for years, and his team organized massive protest movements in the cities of Albany, Georgia, and Selma and Birmingham in Alabama. But by 1967, King’s religious vision for nonviolence went beyond nonviolent street protest to include abolishing what he called the “<a href="https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/">triple evils</a>” crippling American society. King defined the triple evils as racism, poverty and militarism, and he believed these forces were contrary to God’s will for all people.</p>
<p>He came to believe, as he said in 1967, that racism, economic exploitation and war were crippling America’s ability to create a “beloved community” defined by love and nonviolence. And on April 4, 1967, he publicly rebuked the president’s war policy in Vietnam at Riverside Presbyterian Church in New York City in a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam.”</p>
<p>“I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam,” he told those gathered in the majestic cathedral. “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”</p>
<p>King was initially optimistic that <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/1600/presidents/lyndonbjohnson">Johnson’s Great Society program</a>, which aimed to make historic investments in job growth, job training and economic development, would tackle domestic poverty. But by 1967 the Great Society appeared to be a casualty of the mounting costs of the war in Vietnam. “I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such,” <a href="https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm">King said in his speech</a>. </p>
<p>King saw the grinding poverty facing Black people at home as inseparable from the war overseas. As he <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/a-testament-of-hope-martin-luther-king?variant=32117034778658">noted</a>, “If our nation can spend 35 billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and 20 billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.” </p>
<p>King could no longer ignore that military force ran contrary to the nonviolence he espoused. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html">urban revolts</a> in Watts and Newark in the late 1960s rocked the nation, he pleaded with people to remain nonviolent.</p>
<p>“But they ask – and rightly so – what about Vietnam?” <a href="https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm">King said in the same 1967 speech</a>. “They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Led by Martin Luther King Jr., several men dressed in black suits march in a rally. Ahead of them are police officers holding rifles." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/438537/original/file-20211220-18663-glbf04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Martin Luther King Jr. leads the march against the Vietnam conflict in a parade on State Street in Chicago on March 25, 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ANTIVIETNAMMARCHSPOCKKING/7c39064f64e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/photo?Query=MLK%20vietnam&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=12&currentItemNo=3">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>King’s vision</h2>
<p>By 1967, King’s vision of justice was one of flourishing for all people, not only civil rights for African Americans. King was criticized for expanding his vision beyond civil rights for Black Americans. Some worried that aligning with the peace movement would weaken the civil rights movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/vietnam-war">even issued a statement</a> clearly opposing what it saw as a merging of the civil rights and peace movements. </p>
<p>But in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King called “for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation … an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.” Such unconditional love is “the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality,” and he noted that this unifying principle was present in Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. </p>
<p>King was always first a religious leader. He never sought nor gained elected office, because he wanted to maintain a moral voice and be free to challenge policies he believed to be unjust. </p>
<p>But the cost for King’s speaking out was high: By the time of his assassination, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/04/martin-luther-king-jr-50-years-assassination-donald-trump-disapproval-column/482242002/">King’s national approval rating was at an all-time low</a>. </p>
<p>He was not a morally perfect man. Declassified files show how the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried to target King over his extramarital affairs. Hoover <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/01/18/956741992/documentary-exposes-how-the-fbi-tried-to-destroy-mlk-with-wiretaps-blackmail">used a wiretap to tape King having sex with other women</a> and sent those to his wife, Coretta Scott King, with a letter indicating King should kill himself because of his moral transgressions.</p>
<h2>Honoring King</h2>
<p>For those seeking to honor King’s legacy today, his religious nonviolence is demanding. It asks that people go beyond acts of service and charity – as important as those are – to both speak and act against violence and racism as well as to organize to end those pernicious forces.</p>
<p>[<em>3 media outlets, 1 religion newsletter.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=religion&source=religion-3-in-1">Get stories from The Conversation, AP and RNS.</a>]</p>
<p>It is a radical concept of love that demands we embrace those we know and those we don’t, to acknowledge, <a href="https://www2.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/BlackHistoryMonth/MLK/CommAddress.html">as King said</a>, “that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny.” </p>
<p>On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the challenge may be to decipher the meaning of this idea in action for our own lives. The future of what King called <a href="https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/">the beloved community</a> depends on it – a world at peace because justice is present.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s Note: This article has been updated with the correct location of Albany.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169916/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anthony Siracusa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>MLK’s vision for nonviolence included abolishing what he called triple evils – racism, poverty and militarism.Anthony Siracusa, Senior Director of Inclusive Culture and Initiatives, University of Colorado BoulderLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1732002021-12-07T13:34:16Z2021-12-07T13:34:16ZStephen Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ lays bare the bizarre role of guns in American culture<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435955/original/file-20211206-21-rihftx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=224%2C168%2C2512%2C1837&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Great playwrights have always used the theater to narrate and interrogate the history of their society.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-american-composer-and-lyricist-stephen-sondheim-news-photo/1325792865?adppopup=true">Douglas Elbinger/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Long before <a href="https://theconversation.com/schools-should-heed-calls-to-do-lockdown-drills-without-traumatizing-kids-instead-of-abolishing-them-131605">the numbing regularity of school shootings</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/11/19/1057288807/kyle-rittenhouse-acquitted-all-charges-verdict">the Kyle Rittenhouse trial</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/11/03/1049380749/gun-rights-supreme-court-arguments-new-york">the current Supreme Court debate</a> over whether to further relax gun laws, composer and lyricist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zEXfjqFb3Q">Stephen Sondheim</a> was sounding the alarm about the role of guns in American culture. </p>
<p>Sondheim, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/11/26/528777499/stephen-sondheim-broadway-legend-died-at-91">who died on Nov. 26, 2021</a>, had a knack for using stage and song to explore America’s dark, violent underbelly.</p>
<p>One of his lesser-known works, “Assassins,” <a href="https://www.classicstage.org/current-season/assassins">just started a new run off-Broadway by the Classic Stage Company</a>. Originally produced in 1990, the musical is a collective biography of the historical figures who attempted to assassinate U.S. presidents, four of them successfully. Nine of the 13 assassins or would-be assassins are included, from John Wilkes Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln, to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/27/john-hinckley-ronald-reagan-assassination-attempt-1981">John Hinckley, Jr.</a>, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1984.</p>
<p>These malcontents hardly seem like promising subjects for a musical. But Sondheim brilliantly deployed musical theater to explore America’s curious fascination with firearms and the pivotal role of assassinations in the republic’s history. </p>
<p>To Sondheim, assassins, like everybody else, are in pursuit of the American dream. As they battle delusions, fight against perceived political injustice, long for celebrity or seek community, they turn to guns to accomplish their goals. His score consists of uniquely American musical styles drawn from different periods of U.S. history, including ragtime, patriotic marches and folk ballads.</p>
<p><a href="https://issuu.com/yalerep/docs/assassins_program_online?fr=sNzExNDE3NDg1Mjc">In the program notes</a> from a 2017 revival, Yale drama school dean James Bundy wrote, “We know the assassins as well, because we see them in the media, and in the mirror, now.”</p>
<p>More than three decades after its first production, “Assassins” retains its historical importance and derives new meaning from its prescience. </p>
<h2>Shooting their way into history</h2>
<p>The show opens at a fairground shooting gallery, where a gun salesman doles out weapons to the characters. In choosing a carnival for the scene, Sondheim underlines the point that assassination is an act aimed at capturing the public’s attention.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/review-assassins-sondheim-doyle-classic-stage_92998.html">He boldly and controversially</a> tries to get inside the mind of the assassins by giving voice to their demons – a technique he also used in the macabre musical “<a href="https://everythingsondheim.org/sweeney-todd-the-demon-barber-of-fleet-street/">Sweeney Todd</a>.”</p>
<p>He suggests that all the people who have tried to shoot U.S. presidents – individuals whose lives spanned centuries, class divides, political beliefs and religious convictions – share a common psychological profile: They were all ambitious, and they all failed to realize their dreams.</p>
<p>Booth, for example, <a href="https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/edwin-john-wilkes-booth">was reportedly depressed by bad reviews of his performances as an actor</a>. Charles Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881, was angry that he hadn’t been appointed as an ambassador as a reward for his work in Garfield’s campaign. “I wanted it done [with a pistol] in an American manner,” <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-stalking-of-the-president-20724161/">he later said</a>.</p>
<p>And so they take revenge for their individual failure by trying to kill the president – the personification of the American Dream. The Declaration of Independence declared “the pursuit of happiness” as an American right. But what recourse do unhappy people have?</p>
<p>By carrying out <a href="https://www.bolerium.com/pages/books/201288/mitchell-abidor-ed-and/death-to-bourgeois-society-the-propagandists-of-the-deed">what 19th-century anarchists called</a> “the propaganda of the deed,” the assassins intend to write – or shoot – themselves into history. </p>
<p>“What a wonder is a gun,” Sondheim writes in one number, titled “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HlQja4HrVo">The Gun Song</a>.” It continues:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Move your little finger and
You can change the world
Why should you be blue when
You've your little finger
Prove how just a little finger can
Change the world
</code></pre>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qXlaU-vO7Uw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘The Gun Song’ features the sound of a revolver clicking.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Guns and individualism go hand in hand</h2>
<p>In “Assassins,” the gun serves not as a tool of self-defense – which the gun rights lobby touts as a reason to buy a firearm – but as an instrument of self-expression and self-realization. </p>
<p>The assassins, who saw themselves as the “<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-good-guy-with-a-gun-became-a-deadly-american-fantasy-117367">good guys with guns</a>,” are, in a perverse way, the epitome of American individualism.</p>
<p>The term “<a href="https://stevenlukes.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/3-the-meanings-of-individualism.pdf">individualism</a>” – meaning attaching moral value to individual autonomy – was coined by the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville in his celebrated work “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm">Democracy in America</a>,” published in 1835. He was the first to use it in English.</p>
<p>The word took off at around the same time that Samuel Colt invented some of the mechanisms <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/20/opinions/supreme-court-gun-rights-case-lethality-tucker/index.html">that made firearms more lethal</a>: His revolver <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-innovative-gun-made-a-wild-west-huckster-into-an-american-industrialist/2020/07/16/fb85c4ce-97a3-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html">was patented in 1836</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Boy holds BB gun flanked by portraits of U.S. politicians." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435939/original/file-20211206-19-1six0no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Guns have long been intertwined with American history and popular culture.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://centerofthewest.libraryhost.com/?p=collections/findingaid&id=111&q=&rootcontentid=35035#id35035">Courtesy of the Roy Marcot Firearms Advertisement Collection at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The fantasy of fending off enemies with a gun would appear in other stage works. In one of the most popular American musicals of the 21st century, ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--OHR2jKTpk">A Christmas Story: The Musical</a>,’ a stage version of the 1983 film, “A Christmas Story,” which is set in 1940’s Indiana, a boy believes that his dreams will come true if he can only get a Red Ryder BB gun as a Christmas present, despite the concerns of his parents, his teachers and even Santa.</p>
<p>The 15-year-old student in the recent Michigan shooting allegedly used a gun that <a href="https://www.insider.com/oxford-school-shooting-gun-apparent-christmas-gift-prosecutor-says-2021-12">he had received as an early Christmas present</a> to kill four students at his school.</p>
<h2>Everybody’s got a right?</h2>
<p>Great playwrights have always used the theater to narrate and interrogate the history of their society. </p>
<p>William Shakespeare used his more speculative plays <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137438959">to comment on oppression within his own society</a>, at a time when the Protestant Queen Elizabeth was harshly persecuting Catholics. Shakespeare couldn’t write a play criticizing the Queen, so he wrote a play about killing a tyrant in ancient Rome.</p>
<p>In fact, in his history plays, assassination – whether it’s in “Julius Caesar” or “Macbeth” – is a recurrent theme. The first recorded assassination of a political leader with a gun was <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/18169697.murder-1st-earl-moray-made-history/">the Earl of Moray</a>, who was felled by a musket shot in Scotland in 1570. This was followed by the assassination of <a href="https://www.delft.com/william-of-nassau-dillenburg-william-of-orange">William the Silent</a> in Delft in 1584, who was shot and killed with a handgun. Shakespeare was surely aware of both events. </p>
<p>Unlike in plays by Shakespeare, the assassinations in Sondheim’s work are carried out not by rival leaders, but by ordinary people. </p>
<p>“[‘Assassins’] dares its audience to see our country and assess our national myths through the eyes of our villains instead of our heroes,” director Michael Thomas, who revived the musical in the fall of 2021, <a href="https://www.richlandsource.com/life_and_culture/assassins-explores-the-dark-side-of-the-american-dream-at-theatre-166/article_e55a4a1e-2797-11ec-9004-570d509124cb.html">said</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://members.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=weekly&source=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>At the end of the musical, the assassins and would-be assassins regroup at the shooting range, with <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/appendix-13.html">Lee Harvard Oswald</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Czolgosz">Leon Czolgosz</a> and <a href="https://hollywoodlife.com/feature/who-is-lynette-squeaky-fromme-manson-family-member-3595245/">Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme</a> among their ranks. </p>
<p>They proudly restate their mantra – “Everybody’s got the right to be happy” – before loading their guns and opening fire on the audience <a href="https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/assassins/everybodysgottheright.htm">while singing</a>:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Hey Pal, feeling blue? Aim for what you want a lot
Everybody gets a shot
Everybody’s got a right
To their dreams
</code></pre>
<p><a href="https://nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/events/assassins/">A recent “Assassins” revival in the U.K.</a> sought to make a connection to our present moment. The last scene, chillingly, is of a child buying a gun out of a vending machine.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to fix the date of “A Christmas Story: The Musical”.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/173200/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>To the famous composer, the gun serves not as a tool of self-defense, but as an instrument of self-expression and self-realization.Jennifer Tucker, Associate Professor of History and Science in Society, Wesleyan UniversityPeter Rutland, Professor of Government, Wesleyan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1559392021-04-19T18:47:23Z2021-04-19T18:47:23ZFrom haute cuisine to hot dogs: How dining out has evolved over 200 years – and is innovating further in the pandemic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394307/original/file-20210409-15-14oj47j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C18%2C4193%2C2760&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The dining-out experience has changed as people wear masks and are separated by plexiglass in outdoor dining.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/waiter-boris-macquin-serves-customers-behind-plexiglass-news-photo/1231905438?adppopup=true">Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Dining out has for generations been a fun way to celebrate special occasions, meet friends or just enjoy a quiet evening with someone special. But for many, that ended almost overnight last year as the spread of COVID-19 shuttered businesses and forced people to stay home. </p>
<p>The restaurants that survived scaled down and reworked their operations. Many have had to close permanently. Since March 2020, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall">over 110,000</a> – or about one out of every six restaurants in the U.S. – have closed. This has affected not only individuals, but the overall economy. In 2017 the profits of the restaurant industry were estimated at <a href="https://www.statista.com/topics/1135/us-restaurants/#:%7E:text=As%20a%20leading%20contributor%20to,billion%20U.S.%20dollars%20in%202017.">US$800 billion</a>, which experts expect have shrunk substantially in the past year.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/1536/Hannah_Cutting-Jones__Research_Interests.pdf">food historian</a>, I follow the impact of global events on food culture and practices. Starting in late 18th-century Europe, the dining-out experience shifted considerably, with the first modern restaurants opening in urban areas and catering to wealthy patrons.</p>
<p>By the mid-20th century, the availability of cheaper fast-food options allowed many more people to dine out. Throughout, the hospitality industry has been central to social, cultural and economic developments globally. The humblest restaurant fare has even been used at times to foster diplomatic relationships between nations. </p>
<h2>The first restaurants</h2>
<p>People have always eaten on the go. For millennia, street vendors, roadside inns and taverns provided weary sojourners with food. Some of the <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo38299036.html">world’s earliest restaurants</a> catering to travelers who ordered specific, often regional dishes originated in China over 900 years ago. By the 16th century restaurants had emerged in Japan, as well.</p>
<p>The first modern restaurants serving local residents as well as other guests originated in <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/who-invented-the-first-modern-restaurant">France in the 1780s</a>. The word restaurant itself comes from the rich “restorative” broths served at such establishments. Parisian chefs soon integrated aristocratic dishes and impeccable service into the dining experience and “<a href="https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13375.html">haute cuisine</a>,” or high cuisine, was born. </p>
<p>French food went on to define and dominate the highest echelons of global dining for the next two centuries. With access to a thriving urban restaurant scene, well-off Europeans were a bit spoiled when it came to eating out. </p>
<p>Author Charles Dickens, while traveling to the United States in 1842, was horrified by the lack of etiquette and dining options. He described the food he received in American boardinghouses and hotels as “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_United_States_of_Arugula.html?id=4nwaK8qLfpgC">piles of indigestible matter</a>.”</p>
<p>By 1860, however, that had changed, at least in New York City, where several restaurants started to gain acclaim. The most famous of these was Delmonico’s, the <a href="https://gothamist.com/food/a-brief-history-of-delmonicos-new-york-citys-first-restaurant">first restaurant to be reviewed in The New York Times</a> in 1859. Emphasizing the luxury of fine dining, the review gushed, “No nobleman of England – no Marqui of ancienne noblesse – was ever better served or waited on in greater style than you will be in a private room at Delmonico’s.” </p>
<p>Abraham Lincoln, who dined at Delmonico’s during the Civil War, was <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/21/494262209/food-for-thought-ten-restaurants-that-shaped-america">the first of a series of presidents</a> to enjoy Delmonico’s dishes, especially the gratin <a href="https://ny.eater.com/2011/6/29/6673317/remembering-delmonicos-new-yorks-original-restaurant">potatoes</a>. </p>
<p>Restaurants proliferated in mid-19th-century America as industrialization and urbanization transformed the economy and the landscape. Eating out became a reflection of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Restaurants-That-Changed-America/dp/0871406802/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=history+of+restaurant&qid=1618534908&sr=8-3">social and professional success</a>. </p>
<p>When Dickens returned to the U.S. in 1868, he feasted on no fewer than 40 courses at a Delmonico’s banquet in his honor. At its end he was <a href="https://www.americanheritage.com/delmonicos">moved to amend his earlier impressions</a> of American fare by admitting “I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality [and] consideration.” </p>
<h2>Haute Dog diplomacy</h2>
<p>In the 20th century, American politicians enlisted simpler restaurant fare to bolster diplomatic relations and connect to the public. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="First lady Eleanor Roosevelt; King George VI; Sarah Delano Roosevelt, the president's mother; Queen Elizabeth; and President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the verandah of their family estate in Hyde Park." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395885/original/file-20210419-17-15w62o3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">First lady Eleanor Roosevelt; King George VI; Sarah Delano Roosevelt, the president’s mother; Queen Elizabeth; and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at their family home.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ROYALCOUPLEVISITSROOSEVELTS/dfab8909dde6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/photo?Query=FDR,%20%20%20Queen%20%20hyde%20park&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=10&currentItemNo=9">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On June 11, 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first lady Eleanor, and the king and queen of England sat down to a catered event at Roosevelt’s family estate in Hyde Park, New York that would become known as the “<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/when-franklin-delano-roosevelt-served-hot-dogs-king-180963589/">Hot Dog Summit</a>.” </p>
<p>No British monarch had until then set foot on American soil, but with Europe on the brink of war Roosevelt believed a public gesture of friendship could forge stronger bonds with England and bolster pro-British sentiment. So when he found out the royal couple planned to visit Canada in 1939 he immediately <a href="http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/images/invitekg.jpg">wrote to the king</a>, inviting him to enjoy a few days of simple country life at their family home. </p>
<p>The president’s plan was to present royals as relatable, so he organized an outdoor luncheon at which the famous group enjoyed a classic American “take-out” meal, hot dogs and beer, in front of journalists, cameras and a charmed audience. According to witnesses, Queen Elizabeth ate her frankfurter with a knife and fork while King George VI followed the Roosevelts’ example and used his hands. He then <a href="https://www.historyandheadlines.com/royal-hot-dog-summit-1939/">asked for seconds</a>. </p>
<p>The Hot Dog Summit seems to have been a turning point in how American politicians used food to identify with the masses and achieve their political aims. Historian <a href="https://www.marist.edu/liberal-arts/faculty/david-woolner">David B. Woolner</a> believed it “was an <a href="https://hvmag.com/life-style/history/franklin-delano-roosevelt-the-picnic-that-won-the-war-the-royal-visit-the-hot-dog-summit-of-1939-and-hyde-park-on-the-hudson-movie/">enormous PR success</a> for both governments. I think a genuine warmth emerged between FDR and the king, and it marks a significant turning point in Anglo-American relations.”</p>
<h2>Executive orders</h2>
<p>The U.S. emerged as an economic and cultural superpower after World War II. Factories and industry turned away from war production and looked toward cultivating what Americans wanted, both at home and while dining out: convenience, entertainment, efficiency and a good deal. A new kind of restaurant, the “fast food” franchise, checked all of the boxes.</p>
<p>Increasing numbers of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Nation-Dark-All-American/dp/0547750331">regular Americans now experienced the joy of dining out</a>. A variety of chain restaurants proliferated across the country and then internationally, propelled by new innovations in technology, transportation and communication. By the 1970s the Golden Arches, the symbol of McDonald’s, had become the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160830-mcdonalds-golden-arches-the-strange-story-of-an-icon">world’s most famous icon</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Bill Clinton holding a coffee in one hand and a cold drink in another at a McDonald's restaurant in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1993." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394310/original/file-20210409-17-1evzzxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Clinton at a McDonald’s restaurant in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1993.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/PresidentElectBillClinton1993/fc2f6694515442a3ac55b2f24372d565/photo?Query=clinton%20AND%20mcdonald&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=255&currentItemNo=23">AP Photo/Greg Gibson</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the first presidents to regularly visit fast food establishments. President Clinton was known to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/presidents-and-presidential-candidates-eating-fast-food/11/">jog to McDonald’s</a> on several occasions for his beloved Big Macs. </p>
<p>Donald Trump took the executive relationship with fast food to another level. According to the Washington Post, on Trump Force One during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign there were “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-campaign-big-macs-screaming-fits-and-constant-rivalries/2017/12/02/18bcfa30-d6bd-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html">four major food groups</a>: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza and Diet Coke.”</p>
<p>In January 2019 Trump became the first president to serve White House guests a meal catered by McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King. The fast-food banquet was set out on silver trays and served to visiting members of the Clemson Tigers men’s football team. </p>
<p>But politicians still enjoyed haute cuisine, too. Last November, as California remained on lockdown, news leaked that Governor <a href="https://apnews.com/article/san-francisco-coronavirus-pandemic-california-napa-gavin-newsom-00231e30f720a999e4187c6600489108">Gavin Newsom</a> and his wife enjoyed dinner at French Laundry, an exclusive Napa Valley restaurant, with 10 others – and maskless. The ensuing fallout illustrated <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opinion/gavin-newsom-french-laundry-california.html">people’s frustration, fear and fatigue</a> over the ongoing crisis and everyone’s longing to once again visit their favorite restaurants. </p>
<p>[<em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklysmart">You can get our highlights each weekend</a>.]</p>
<h2>A brave new world</h2>
<p>Lockdown has changed people’s culinary habits. Many of us initially embraced the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/12/25/948934131/2020-in-the-kitchen-the-year-we-spent-making-baking-frying-and-trying">novelty of cooking at home</a> and proudly shared pictures of a first casserole or sourdough loaf. As the months dragged on, however, many began <a href="https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/americans-supporting-small-businesses-during-covid-19/">returning to their favorite eateries</a> – not only because they missed the food but because some people wanted to financially <a href="https://chicago.eater.com/21525451/how-to-help-during-pandemic-covid-19-chicago">support local businesses</a>. </p>
<p>COVID-19 restrictions also spurred innovation in the restaurant trade. The <a href="https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2021/03/29/how-nashville-restaurants-pivoted-during-covid-19-pandemic/7049801002/">ones that survived</a> revamped their business models, offering more takeout options, creating online ordering apps, organizing comfortable outdoor dining and minimizing contact whenever possible – modifications many places will likely keep even as restrictions are lifted.</p>
<p>After all, restaurant culture has always been driven by ingenuity to meet the changing needs – and tastes – of its communities and clientele.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/155939/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hannah Cutting-Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The pandemic changed people’s dining-out experience, with takeout becoming more common. But since dining out became fashionable in the 18th century, how and where people go to eat has been evolving.Hannah Cutting-Jones, Lecturer, Department of History, University of OregonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1519722021-03-04T13:14:43Z2021-03-04T13:14:43ZRevisiting reparations: Is it time for the US to pay its debt for the legacy of slavery?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387595/original/file-20210303-13-1dqs0oa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C7%2C5100%2C3387&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is spearheading fresh efforts in Congress to address reparations.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/subcommittee-chair-sheila-jackson-lee-arrives-during-a-news-photo/1231362365?adppopup=true">Al Drago/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Some 156 years after the end of the Civil War and the official abolition of slavery through the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendment/amendment-xiii">13th Amendment</a>, the idea of reparations is gaining currency in Washington.</p>
<p>On March 1, Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to President Joe Biden, suggested the White House could “<a href="https://news.yahoo.com/biden-top-aide-says-white-223154235.html">start acting now</a>” <a href="https://www.axios.com/biden-cedric-richmond-reparations-f4984eab-18fd-4f4b-ad14-4cd10c54a18a.html">on the issue</a>. The comment comes just weeks after a House committee chaired by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, <a href="https://ibw21.org/reparations/021721-congress-hearing-on-reparations-bill-hr-40/">heard testimony</a> on H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a commission on the legacy of slavery that would look at possible payments for descendants of enslaved people of African descent.</p>
<p>Having <a href="https://annecbailey.net/">researched slavery</a> for the past three decades, I have concluded that there are many rationales for reparations. There has never been a leveling of the playing field, or payments for the debt of unpaid labor over 250 years of slavery. Furthermore, <a href="https://theconversation.com/slave-built-infrastructure-still-creates-wealth-in-us-suggesting-reparations-should-cover-past-harms-and-current-value-of-slavery-153969">Black contribution to the wealth of America</a> has not been acknowledged or given its due, in spite of the fact that the Southern planters and Northern manufacturers who helped shape the nation were made rich by turning raw commodities harvested by enslaved people into commercial empires.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Joe Biden takes part in a virtual event for Black History Month" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387592/original/file-20210303-17-b2hjzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=35%2C11%2C3958%2C2646&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387592/original/file-20210303-17-b2hjzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387592/original/file-20210303-17-b2hjzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387592/original/file-20210303-17-b2hjzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387592/original/file-20210303-17-b2hjzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387592/original/file-20210303-17-b2hjzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387592/original/file-20210303-17-b2hjzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Will Joe Biden be the president to usher through reparations for slavery?.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-joe-biden-participates-in-a-virtual-roundtable-news-photo/1303728263?adppopup=true">Pete Marovich/Pool via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But there is an additional reason that looking at reparations now makes sense. At a time when <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/19/969196055/biden-takes-his-americas-back-message-to-the-world-in-munich-speech">Biden is trying to rebuild America’s image overseas</a>, reparations for this unpaid debt could, I believe, drastically improve the United States’ international standing and serve as an example to other nations on how to deal with past inequities.</p>
<h2>A promise never delivered</h2>
<p>Campaigns for reparations have a long history. President Abraham Lincoln, who was known as “The Great Emancipator” in large part because he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/14/frederick-douglass-needed-to-see-lincoln-would-the-president-meet-with-a-former-slave/">heeded the calls of Black abolitionists like ex-slave Frederick Douglass</a> and signed the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation#:%7E:text=President%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20issued%20the,and%20henceforward%20shall%20be%20free.%22">Emancipation Proclamation in 1863</a>, was also a key advocate for a form of reparations.</p>
<p>Under <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/">Special Field Order No. 15</a>, issued with Lincoln’s blessing in 1865, newly emancipated slaves were to receive “forty acres and a mule.” </p>
<p>Some <a href="https://www.nacsw.org/Convention/Proceedings2017/BridgemanPReparationsFINAL.pdf">freed slaves had already received their 40 acres</a> at the time Congress passed the bill.</p>
<p>But this promise was not kept. After Lincoln was assassinated, President Andrew Johnson <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-07-10-9707100158-story.html#:%7E:text=Sherman%20ordered%20that%20each%20former,vetoed%20by%20President%20Andrew%20Johnson">promptly vetoed the bill</a>. According to <a href="https://sanford.duke.edu/people/faculty/darity-jr-william">noted economist William Darity</a>, the cost of reneging on the promise to Black Americans was land worth more than <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2008.00555.x">US$1.3 trillion in today’s dollars</a>. </p>
<p>While efforts to compensate Black former slaves were thwarted, remarkably, some white slave owners seeking compensation for the end of slavery were more successful. Through <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/civil_war/DCEmancipationAct_FeaturedDoc.htm#:%7E:text=On%20April%2016%2C%201862%2C%20the,to%20%24300%20for%20each%20freeperson.">1862’s District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act</a>, slave owners were paid for their lost “property.”</p>
<h2>Debt compounded</h2>
<p>After the reversal of early efforts to compensate people of African descent, Southern states continued to put in place policies to maintain white supremacy.</p>
<p>What followed were <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/575769/stony-the-road-by-henry-louis-gates-jr/">decades of institutional marginalization</a> under <a href="https://onlinellm.usc.edu/a-brief-history-of-jim-crow-laws/">Jim Crow segregation</a> that further impeded Black progress. <a href="https://www.aaihs.org/housing-discrimination-in-the-jim-crow-us/">Racist housing policies</a>, <a href="https://www.history.com/news/last-hired-first-fired-how-the-great-depression-affected-african-americans">employment practices</a> and <a href="https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/summer-2004/jim-crows-schools">inequitable education</a> made it harder for Black Americans to accrue wealth.</p>
<p>During this period, calls for reparations continued. Ex-slave <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/callie-house-c-1861-1928/">Callie House</a> of Nashville, Tennessee, launched an ambitious reparations campaign in the 1890s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/12958/my-face-is-black-is-true-by-mary-frances-berry/">calling on the government to pay pensions to formerly enslaved people</a>.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/summer/slave-pension.html">1915 lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury</a> calling for $68 million to be paid to former slaves for unpaid labor was dismissed on the grounds of “sovereign immunity,” under which a state is immune from civil action. And <a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/garvey.htm">political activist Marcus Garvey</a> in the 1920s made <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719897569">reparations central</a> to his Universal Negro Improvement Association movement.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387588/original/file-20210303-15-1poykqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marcus Garvey made reparations central to his campaigning.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/garvey-marcus-politiker-schwarznationalistischer-prophet-news-photo/537147825?adppopup=true">Ullstein bild via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the debt to Black Americans for the uncompensated labor of their ancestors was not paid. Moreover, the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2741797">economic outcomes of sanctioned racism</a> under Jim Crow meant that this debt only increased.</p>
<p>The protests and advocacy of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s bore great fruits, but no reparations.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=97">Civil Rights Act of 1964</a> and the <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=100">Voting Rights Act of 1965</a> were hard-fought milestones.</p>
<p>But inequities persisted, and, with them, the debt owed. Black and brown bodies were – and still are – <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/11/12/black-people-are-still-seeking-racial-justice-why-and-what-to-do-about-it/">disproportionately caught up in the criminal justice system</a>; <a href="https://usafacts.org/articles/homeownership-rates-by-race/">Black families are less likely to own their own homes</a>; and <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/schools-are-still-segregated-and-black-children-are-paying-a-price/">public education has failed far too many Black youths</a> – all of which has far-reaching ramifications for employment, career success and accumulating wealth. Again, the original unpaid debt has been compounded. </p>
<p>But calls for reparations never went away. In October 1962, the pioneering civil rights activist <a href="https://www.aaihs.org/audley-moore-and-the-modern-reparations-movement/">Queen Mother Moore</a> helped draft a “<a href="https://www.forreparations.org/timeline/in-1962-queen-mother-audley-moores-reparations-committee-of-descendants-of-united-states-slaves-files-a-claim-in-california/">Resolution for Reparations</a>” that was promoted in the U.S. and around the world.</p>
<p>The organization <a href="https://www.ncobraonline.org/">N'COBRA</a> has, since the 1980s, been campaigning for reparations. More recently there has been author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 article “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">The Case for Reparations</a>” and calls from groups such as the <a href="https://reparationscomm.org/">National African American Reparations Commission</a> along with <a href="https://ibw21.org/reparations/black-christian-leaders-push-for-slavery-reparations/">some Black church leaders</a>. There has been <a href="https://www.ashevillenc.gov/news/asheville-reparations-resolution-is-designed-to-help-black-community-access-to-the-opportunity-to-build-wealth/">some success on a local level</a>, but no action on a federal one.</p>
<h2>Not too late</h2>
<p>Another campaign for reparations has been successful – the one for <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-japanese-americans-received-reparations-and-african-americans-are-still-waiting-119580">the Japanese American citizens</a> interned during World War II.</p>
<p>After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation">sent tens of thousands of Japanese Americans to internment camps</a>. In the years after the war, advocates, including the children and descendants of those interred, launched a lengthy campaign, ending with President Ronald Reagan’s making a formal apology and signing <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442">1988’s Civil Liberties Act</a>, through which each survivor was paid $20,000 each, around $44,000 in today’s money.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Congressmen surround President Ronald Reagan." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387590/original/file-20210303-15-wkjcui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387590/original/file-20210303-15-wkjcui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387590/original/file-20210303-15-wkjcui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387590/original/file-20210303-15-wkjcui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387590/original/file-20210303-15-wkjcui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387590/original/file-20210303-15-wkjcui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387590/original/file-20210303-15-wkjcui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 could serve as an example.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/congressmen-surround-president-ronald-reagan-as-he-signs-news-photo/595717514?adppopup=true">Wally McNamee/Corbis Historical via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The campaign for reparations for people of African descent could proceed similarly: a bill, a formal apology and compensation, which could include measures aside from just payment checks – such as education and housing funds, or reforms in the criminal justice system. </p>
<p>The renewed focus on reparations comes at a pivotal time in recent U.S. history. Long considered, rightly or wrongly, as a beacon of democracy and freedom, the U.S. has in the past four years presented a different face to the world amid a retreat into “<a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-foreign-policy-is-still-america-first-what-does-that-mean-exactly-144841">America first</a>” policy.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the recent <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol">attack on the Capitol</a>, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html">killing of George Floyd</a> at the hands of police and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/10/01/919063734/senate-democrats-call-on-congress-to-fix-racial-disparities-in-health-care">racial disparities highlighted in the pandemic</a> have raised concerns about the fragility of American democracy and have put the lasting legacies of structural racism in the U.S. on full display.</p>
<p>Paying reparations to Americans of African descent could, I believe, help the U.S. reclaim some moral leadership on the global stage. The U.S. is not the only country in the world with human rights abuses then or now, but it can be one of the few countries in the world that truly addresses these wrongs.</p>
<p>In other words, the U.S. can lead by example.</p>
<p>[<em>Understand key political developments, each week.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/politics-weekly-74/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=politics-understand">Subscribe to The Conversation’s politics newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to clarify that it was President Andrew Johnson who vetoed a bill handing land to former enslaved people.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151972/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne C. Bailey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Former enslaved persons never got ‘forty acres and a mule,’ and their descendants have been denied reparations for the legacy of slavery. Will Joe Biden be the president to change that?Anne C. Bailey, Professor of History, Binghamton University, State University of New YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1525222021-02-26T13:26:34Z2021-02-26T13:26:34ZThere was a time reparations were actually paid out – just not to formerly enslaved people<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386544/original/file-20210225-17-1di91zc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C60%2C5071%2C3581&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">No guessing who in this 1864 depiction may have been compensated after slavery ended.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/propri%C3%A9taire-dune-plantation-avec-leurs-esclaves-aux-etats-news-photo/840481568?adppopup=true">API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The cost of slavery and its legacy of systemic racism to generations of Black Americans has been clear over the past year – seen in both <a href="https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/08/us-blacks-3-times-more-likely-whites-get-covid-19">the racial disparities of the pandemic</a> and widespread protests over <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/29/us-police-brutality-protest">police brutality</a>.</p>
<p>Yet whenever calls for reparations are made – as <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/17/slavery-reparations-house-committee-debates-commission-study/6768395002/">they are again now</a> – opponents counter that it would be unfair to saddle a debt on those not personally responsible. In <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/mitch-mcconnell-opposes-reparations-slavery/index.html">the words of</a> then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking on <a href="https://theconversation.com/juneteenth-freedoms-promise-is-still-denied-to-thousands-of-blacks-unable-to-make-bail-98530">Juneteenth</a> – the day Black Americans celebrate as marking emancipation – in 2019, “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.” </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://dpp.uconn.edu/person/thomas-craemer/">professor of public policy</a> who has studied reparations, I acknowledge that the figures involved are large – I conservatively estimate the losses from unpaid wages and lost inheritances to Black descendants of the enslaved at <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12151">around US$20 trillion in 2021 dollars</a>.</p>
<p>But what often gets forgotten by those who oppose reparations is that payouts for slavery have been made before – numerous times, in fact. And few at the time complained that it was unfair to saddle generations of people with a debt for which they were not personally responsible.</p>
<p>There is an important caveat in these cases of reparations though: The payments went to former slave owners and their descendants, not the enslaved or their legal heirs.</p>
<h2>Extorting Haiti</h2>
<p>A prominent example is the so-called “Haitian Independence Debt” that saddled revolutionary Haiti with reparation <a href="https://theconversation.com/when-france-extorted-haiti-the-greatest-heist-in-history-137949">payments to former slave owners in France</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A 1791 depiction of fighting between French troops and Haitian revolutionaries." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386545/original/file-20210225-19-iu8yn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Haitians had to pay for their independence.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/combat-entre-les-esclaves-et-larm%C3%A9e-fran%C3%A7aise-lors-de-la-news-photo/1291357942?adppopup=true">API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Haiti <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/haitian-revolution-1791-1804/#:%7E:text=On%20January%201%2C%201804%2C%20Dessalines,nation%20to%20recognize%20its%20independence.">declared independence from France in 1804</a>, but the former colonial power refused to acknowledge the fact for another 20 years. Then in 1825, King Charles X decreed that he would recognize independence, but at a cost. The price tag would be 150 million francs – more than 10 years of the Haitian government’s entire revenue. The money, the French said, was needed to compensate former slave owners for the loss of what was deemed their property.</p>
<p>By 1883, Haiti had paid off some 90 million francs in reparations. But to finance such huge payments, Haiti <a href="https://canada-haiti.ca/sites/default/files/Haiti,%20France%20and%20the%20Independence%20Debt%20of%201825_0.pdf">had to borrow 166 million francs</a> with <a href="https://history.wisc.edu/publications/haiti-and-the-great-powers-1902-1915/">the French banks</a> Ternaux Grandolpe et Cie and Lafitte Rothschild Lapanonze. Loan interests and fees added to the overall sum owed to France.</p>
<p>The payments ran for a <a href="https://canada-haiti.ca/sites/default/files/Haiti,%20France%20and%20the%20Independence%20Debt%20of%201825_0.pdf">total of 122 years from 1825 to 1947</a>, with the money going to more than 7,900 former slave owners and their descendants in France. By the time the payments ended, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12151">none of the originally enslaved or enslavers were still alive</a>.</p>
<h2>British ‘reparations’</h2>
<p>French slave owners weren’t the only ones to receive payment for lost revenue, their British counterparts did too – but this time from their own government.</p>
<p>The British government paid reparations totaling £20 million (equivalent to some £300 billion in 2018) to slave owners when it abolished slavery in 1833. Banking magnates Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore arranged for a loan to the government of $15 million to cover the vast sum – which represented almost half of the U.K. governent’s annual expenditure.</p>
<p>The U.K. serviced those loans <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/29/slavery-abolition-compensation-when-will-britain-face-up-to-its-crimes-against-humanity">for 182 years from 1833 to 2015</a>. The authors of the British reparations program saddled many generations of British people with a reparations debt for which they were not personally responsible.</p>
<h2>Paying for freedom</h2>
<p>In the United States, reparations to slave owners in Washington, D.C., were paid at the height of the Civil War. On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the “<a href="https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/37th-congress/session-2/c37s2ch54.pdf">Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service or Labor within the District of Columbia</a>” into law.</p>
<p>It gave former slave owners $300 per enslaved person set free. More than <a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/299814">3,100 enslaved people</a> saw their freedom paid for in this way, for a total cost in excess of $930,000 – almost $25 million in today’s money.</p>
<p>In contrast, the formerly enslaved received nothing if they decided to stay in the United States. The act provided for an emigration incentive of $100 – around $2,683 in 2021 dollars – if the former enslaved <a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/299814">agreed to permanently leave the United States</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=100Ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>Similar examples of reparations going to individual slave owners can be found in the records of countries including Denmark, <a href="https://products.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=A1567C">the Netherlands</a> and <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112046472657&view=1up&seq=1">Sweden</a>, as well as <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/004005870">Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela</a>, <a href="https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/173/">Peru</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com.pr/books?id=pRFQAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Brazil</a>.</p>
<p>The French government even set an example on how the government can conduct genealogical research to determine eligible recipients. It compiled a massive six-volume compendium in 1828, listing some 7,900 original <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12151">slave owners in Saint Domingue and their French descendants</a>.</p>
<h2>Reparations, this time the other way round …</h2>
<p>Blessed with detailed U.S. Census records and local archives, I believe the government could do the same for the Black descendants of enslaved Americans. </p>
<p>In the <a href="https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/overview/1860.html">1860 census</a>, the last one before the Civil War, the government counted 3,853,760 enslaved people in the United States. Their direct descendants live among close to <a href="https://blackdemographics.com/">50 million Black residents in the United States</a> today.</p>
<p>Using historic census records to estimate the number of man-, woman-, and child-hours available to slave owners from 1776 to 1860, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12151">I estimated how much money</a> the enslaved lost considering the meager wages for unskilled labor at the time, which ranged from 2 cents in 1790 to 8 cents in 1860. At a very moderate interest rate of 3%, I arrived at an estimate of $20.3 trillion in 2021 dollars for the total losses to Black descendants of enslaved Americans living today. </p>
<p>It is a huge sum – roughly one year’s worth of the <a href="https://www.bea.gov/news/2021/gross-domestic-product-fourth-quarter-and-year-2020-second-estimate">U.S.’s GDP</a> – but a figure that would comfortably close the racial wealth gap. The difference is, in contrast to historical precedents, this time the benefits would go to the Black descendants of the enslaved, not to enslavers and their offspring.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152522/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Craemer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>History is full of examples of nations paying out to compensate for slavery. But the money never went to those who suffered under the system, only those who profited.Thomas Craemer, Associate Professor of Public Policy, University of ConnecticutLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1518052021-02-11T15:11:34Z2021-02-11T15:11:34ZJohn Brown was a violent crusader, but he blazed a moral path that the cautious Lincoln followed to end slavery<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384066/original/file-20210212-17-lk7x4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=67%2C21%2C1936%2C1319&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Abolitionist John Brown, left, and President Abraham Lincoln, right, were both moral crusaders. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-american-president-abraham-lincoln-mid-19th-news-photo/145890325?adppopup=true">Hulton Archive/Getty Images & Stock Montage/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of the most underappreciated figures in the nation’s history, John Brown, was re-introduced to Americans by the Showtime series “<a href="https://www.sho.com/the-good-lord-bird">The Good Lord Bird</a>,” based on the <a href="https://www.jamesmcbride.com/good-lord-bird/">James McBride novel</a> of the same name. </p>
<p>Too often dismissed as a failed zealot, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Brown-American-abolitionist">Brown was an unconventional anti-slavery leader</a> who blazed a trail that Abraham Lincoln would follow just a few years later. </p>
<p>Commentators then and now are more likely to see <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925362418/john-brown-and-abraham-lincoln-divergent-paths-in-the-fight-to-end-slavery">differences between Lincoln’s and Brown’s approaches</a> to civic leadership. Lincoln was cautious and deliberate; Brown was a revolutionary on fire. </p>
<p>Though this contrast is instructive, there’s another way to look at both men. In the end, they were both moral crusaders who exercised uncompromising moral leadership. </p>
<h2>Unwavering commitment</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Brown-American-abolitionist">John Brown was a leading white abolitionist</a> who engaged in many peaceful efforts to free and assist enslaved African Americans before the Civil War. </p>
<p>But his methods eventually shifted. In 1856, a 55-year-old Brown joined two of his sons in the Kansas territory and led anti-slavery paramilitary forces to victory in the violent period that became known as “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Bleeding-Kansas-United-States-history">Bleeding Kansas</a>.” </p>
<p>In 1859, Brown’s abolitionist efforts culminated in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Harpers-Ferry-Raid">a raid on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry</a> in what is now West Virginia. This was the first step in Brown’s broader plan to emancipate slaves throughout the South. The attempt was unsuccessful, and Brown was captured, tried and hanged shortly thereafter.</p>
<p>In a speech delivered at Harpers Ferry more than 20 years later, <a href="https://www.nps.gov/people/frederick-douglass.htm">abolitionist Frederick Douglass</a> <a href="https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/frederick-douglass-at-harpers-ferry.htm">claimed</a> that “John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A Civil War broadside featuring a song about John Brown." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382074/original/file-20210202-15-77el1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 1863 broadside entitled ‘A Song for the Times or John Brown,’ telling the story of a man who insisted that slaves should be freed and treated like everyone else.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/broadside-from-the-american-civil-war-entitled-a-song-for-news-photo/578389278?adppopup=true">JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Defending his positive view of Brown’s turn to violence, Douglass explained that Brown was an “agent” of God’s “retributive justice.” Douglass argued that a higher logic – what Brown <a href="https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/t-05508-051.pdf">referred to</a> as the “law of God” – provided a special justification and vindication for Brown’s actions.</p>
<p>As I have explored at length <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo17607560.html">elsewhere</a>, such higher-law arguments to justify actions are more than mere rhetoric in the service of political causes. They have been carefully developed throughout the history of political thought by some of the most profound thinkers from around the world, and from ancient times to our own. </p>
<p>Brown possessed – or, perhaps better, was possessed by – a clarity of moral principle that simply ruled out inaction or compromise in the face of grave injustice. One of Brown’s refrains was “<a href="http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/bbspr05-0032.html">Whenever there is a right thing to be done, there is a ‘thus saith the Lord’ that it shall be done</a>.” </p>
<p>When questioned about his motives by federal authorities following his capture, Brown said simply: “<a href="https://www.famous-trials.com/johnbrown/615-interview">We came to free the slaves, and only that</a>.” </p>
<p>In stark contrast to the great American political leaders of his day, Brown shunned compromise and accommodation and instead was driven by an unwavering commitment to moral principle.</p>
<h2>Statesman versus radical</h2>
<p>The greatest American political leader of the mid-19th century was Abraham Lincoln, who was elected to the presidency the year following Brown’s famous raid. If Brown began the war that ended slavery, Lincoln is the man who finished it.</p>
<p>The inextricable link between the two anti-slavery leaders was forged, in fact, years earlier and hundreds of miles away on the plains of Kansas. The <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Kansas_Nebraska_Act.htm">Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854</a> and its <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Missouri_Compromise.htm">repeal of the Missouri Compromise</a> was <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1234">“like a fire bell in the night”</a> for both Brown and Lincoln. By allowing slavery to be legalized by popular vote in new states north of the Missouri Compromise line, this law sparked a flood of settlers to the Kansas territory who were determined to tip the scales either for or against slavery.</p>
<p>Given the highly polarized nature of the issue of slavery by this time, many of these new settlers were prepared to engage in violence to influence the outcome of the vote. The ensuing conflict drew Brown into direct, violent confrontation with proponents of slavery for the first time. </p>
<p>And the federal government’s new openness to slavery’s extension beyond the existing states <a href="https://politicalsciencereviewer.wisc.edu/index.php/psr/article/view/618">transformed</a> the issue of slavery from being a “<a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-in-reply-to-douglas-at-springfield-illinois/">minor question” in Lincoln’s mind</a> to the centerpiece of his political thought and career.</p>
<p>While debating political rival Stephen Douglas a few years later, Lincoln stated the importance of moral principle to his campaign with Brown-like simplicity and clarity: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<a href="https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate7.htm">The real issue in this controversy</a> is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, according to Lincoln, abstract legal doctrines relating to states’ rights or the nature of the constitutional union were, at best, secondary. Opposite opinions about the morality of slavery drove the controversy that would result in the Civil War.</p>
<p>And yet, in his <a href="http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm">Cooper Union Address</a> in 1860 – the speech that would catapult him to the presidency – Lincoln was at pains to distance himself from Brown. </p>
<p>“John Brown was no Republican,” said Lincoln, the party’s leader. He was a deluded madman who convinced himself that he was “commissioned by Heaven” to liberate the enslaved. </p>
<p>Lincoln presented himself as the clearheaded, prudent statesman who would work within the legal framework to combat the moral evil of slavery; Brown was the dangerous radical who would indiscriminately destroy both.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The House joint resolution in favor of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/382079/original/file-20210202-19-1q3ydqs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lincoln ‘fought tirelessly’ for House passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/13th-amendment">National Archives</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Distance vanishes between Lincoln and Brown</h2>
<p>Yet five years later, as Lincoln unknowingly entered what would be the final weeks of his life, his differences with Brown appeared to narrow. </p>
<p>Lincoln had fought tirelessly in January 1865 for <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_Passes_the_Thirteenth_Amendment.htm">the passage in the House of Representatives of the 13th Amendment</a>, which abolished slavery, using every tool at his disposal to influence reluctant members. </p>
<p>In the first week of February, Lincoln approved Congress’ resolution to move the 13th Amendment forward to ratification and rejected a Confederate peace proposal. As the Civil War raged on and thousands of additional lives were lost, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/thirteenth-amendment">Lincoln seemed to focus his energy not on securing the peace, but on abolishing slavery</a>. </p>
<p>Lincoln had achieved just what Brown had attempted in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry: abolition through violent conflict with slaveholders. </p>
<p>Lincoln’s second inaugural address the following month, moreover, <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=38&page=transcript">framed</a> the Civil War in precisely the same terms Brown had used to justify his actions. In this speech, Lincoln casts himself as a mere agent in the service of God’s providential plan to punish the evil of slavery. </p>
<p>With the 13th Amendment on its way to ratification, all that remained was the fulfillment of divine justice, Lincoln said – a mystical moment of equilibrium when “all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” and “<a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=38&page=transcript">every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword</a>.”</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>In his final words on the defining event of his political career, the distance between Lincoln and Brown all but vanishes. Brown’s “thus saith the Lord” echoes clearly in Lincoln’s concluding prayer: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” </p>
<p>Lincoln appreciated the prudent statesmanship of pre-Civil War politicians such as Henry Clay, but the defining quality of Lincoln’s leadership was forged of less pliable stuff. Lincoln was ultimately more crusader than compromiser. </p>
<p>In this way, he and John Brown share a model of moral leadership that is still worthy of study, even in the 21st century.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151805/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Seagrave does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>President Lincoln was a statesman. John Brown was a radical. That’s the traditional view of how each one fought slavery, but it fails to capture the full measure of their devotion.Adam Seagrave, Associate Professor of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, Arizona State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1503202020-11-20T13:21:37Z2020-11-20T13:21:37ZFive reasons Trump’s challenge of the 2020 election will not lead to civil war<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370185/original/file-20201118-23-15u4kbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C8%2C2982%2C1985&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pro-Trump supporters, including Infowars host Alex Jones, hold a 'Stop The Steal' protest Wednesday in Atlanta as Georgia's recount nears the end. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/alex-jones-host-of-infowars-an-extreme-right-wing-program-news-photo/1229673008?adppopup=true">Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/09/22/disunited-states-could-a-second-civil-war--and-an-end-to-the-union--really-happen/">Some Americans fear</a> that the deep political divisions in the country and President Donald Trump’s <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1329054683441278977">determination to challenge the results</a> of the election <a href="https://www.qcherald.com/columnists/time-gather-together-and-fight-%E2%80%A6-not-each-other">will cause civil war</a>.</p>
<p>Those who object to Trump’s tactics argue that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/world/europe/trump-autocrats-dictators.html">he behaves like an autocrat</a>. <a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/enemy-people-trumps-war-press-new-mccarthyism-and-threat-american-democracy">Delegitimizing sources of information that resist his narrative</a>, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-10-14/column-trumps-demonization-of-his-opponents-is-dangerous">demonizing political opponents</a>, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/09/14/trump-escalates-the-signals-to-his-followers-use-lethal-violence-to-help-me-hold-power/">supporting political violence </a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/autocratic-legalism-trump.html">using courts as political tools</a> are all hallmarks of dictators.</p>
<p>Much as the South rejected President Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election with armed rebellion, will President Trump’s many supporters attempt to violently overthrow a Biden-led government? </p>
<p>I <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/alexander-cohen-976110">am a political scientist</a> who studies public opinion and American politics. I believe the United States will not erupt in open rebellion. Here are five reasons.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A Georgia state trooper separates Biden supporters from Trump supporters." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370322/original/file-20201119-24-xp5vxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Georgia state trooper separates Biden supporters from Trump supporters at a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally Wednesday outside the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/georgia-state-trooper-separates-biden-supporters-from-trump-news-photo/1229673829?adppopup=true">Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>1. The American political system remains stable, if stressed.</h2>
<p>As the lawfully elected president of the United States, President Trump must follow certain rules and laws. This rule of law has continued even while he challenges the election. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/us/politics/trump-election-lawsuits.html">The courts are quickly dispatching judicial challenges as meritless</a> and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/07/were-heading-for-some-recounts-dont-expect-them-to-change-the-outcome/?sh=332646ad17e0">recounts are proceeding legally and normally</a>. Despite <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/19/election-2020-updates-georgia-release-recount-results/3775154001/">the recent invitation of Michigan GOP legislators to the White House</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/electors-vote.html">state legislatures have not signaled any desire to upend the electoral process</a>. While outcomes may frustrate the president, the legal process is being honored.</p>
<p>In contrast, before the Civil War, interpretation of the Constitution <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/69.2.327">became contentious</a>, states argued that the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-war-glass-negatives/articles-and-essays/time-line-of-the-civil-war/1861/">Union was dead</a> and politicians <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/field-of-blood_article-180970043/">fought in open combat in the Senate</a>. Military officers <a href="https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/g/going-south-u-s-navy-officer-resignations-dismissals-on-the-eve-of-the-civil-war.html">resigned their commissions</a> to support revolution. The current American political system has avoided such systematic conflict.</p>
<p>Of course, <a href="https://www.ushistory.org/us/10f.asp">governments can be shaken by the will of their citizens</a>. While President Trump’s supporters are vocal, they are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/11/09/strongman-trump-defeat-pinochet-election/">organized around a cult of personality</a> rather than any organizational structure. This limits their ability to overthrow systems of power. Compared with <a href="https://time.com/5106608/protest-1968/">organizations that resisted the Vietnam War</a> or <a href="https://www.history.com/news/sons-of-liberty-members-causes">Revolutionary War</a>, they lack discipline and hierarchy. They also lack supplies and material to combat entrenched resistance, and can hardly be seen as dangerous to military and federal law enforcement, which as of Jan. 20 will report to Joe Biden.</p>
<h2>2. Trump’s most vocal supporters enjoy little support from the powerful.</h2>
<p>The South rebelled with the full <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/why-non-slaveholding-southerners-fought">support of politicians, the plantation class and the small landholders</a>. Nearly everyone embraced rebellion. </p>
<p>Currently, however, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/business/joe-biden-wall-street.html">Wall Street does not embrace Trumpism</a> and has nothing to gain from rebellion. While many Fox News commentators have covered allegations of voter fraud – claims that have often been <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2020/11/15/fox-news-host-tucker-carlson-apologizes-false-claim-voter-fraud/6303120002/">debunked</a> – the channel is hardly calling for violent revolution. President Trump actually <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fox-news-tweets/">finds them too moderate</a>. </p>
<p>Many prominent Republicans are seeking to satisfy Trump supporters while also <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/politics/republicans-recognizing-biden-legitimacy-president-elect/index.html">quietly backing a transition of power</a>. <a href="https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-congratulates-president-elect-biden-vice-president-elect-harris?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top">Corporate America has not signaled any interest</a> in entering the fray. Powerful communications platforms are <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/11/twitter-facebook-senate-judiciary-committee-1234617061/">resisting streams of misinformation</a>.</p>
<p>The powerful do not support revolution.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Text on this Civil War-era envelope is from Jefferson Davis: 'Slave states, once more let me repeat, that the only way of preserving our slave property, or what we prize more than life, our Liberty, is by a union with each other.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370330/original/file-20201119-19-1w3zx22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Text on this Civil War-era envelope is from Jefferson Davis: ‘Slave states, once more let me repeat, that the only way of preserving our slave property, or what we prize more than life, our Liberty, is by a union with each other.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/image-depicts-a-snake-labeled-with-the-names-of-the-news-photo/175319121?adppopup=true">G. W. Falen/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>3. The geography of pro-Trump support does not favor rebellion.</h2>
<p>In 1861, although the <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469606859/border-war/">border states were heavily divided</a>, the Confederacy was unified in rebellion. Anti-war sentiment in the North <a href="https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/a-23-2005-04-06-voa1-83126097/124809.html">was generally sporadic</a> and mostly anti-draft rather than pro-Southern. </p>
<p>In short, the North and South were relatively unified, quite adversarial, and ideologically polarized. In the South, this made arming and preparing for insurrection easy. It also made the rebellion difficult to quell.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="The Constitution of the Confederate States of America before the U.S. Civil War, circa March 1861." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370189/original/file-20201118-23-10lwrjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370189/original/file-20201118-23-10lwrjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370189/original/file-20201118-23-10lwrjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370189/original/file-20201118-23-10lwrjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370189/original/file-20201118-23-10lwrjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370189/original/file-20201118-23-10lwrjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370189/original/file-20201118-23-10lwrjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Constitution of the Confederate States of America before the U.S. Civil War, circa March 1861.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-constitution-of-the-confederate-states-of-america-prior-news-photo/99859058?adppopup=true">Photo by Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/america-divided-rural-urban/2020/11/04/8ddac854-1ebf-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html">The geography of those strenuously contesting the election</a> is far less uniform. Blue metropolitan areas dot the map throughout the country. Demonstrators do not represent the views of all Republicans. And even in a deep-red state like North Dakota, <a href="https://www.270towin.com/2020-election-results-live/state/north-dakota">almost 32% of voting residents chose Biden</a>. This <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/rural-city-trump-voters/">geographical diffusion of ideology</a> makes organized rebellion extremely difficult. </p>
<h2>4. The military is loyal to the office, not the man.</h2>
<p>When governments are overthrown, <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/seizing-power">at least some elements of the military must be supportive</a>. In the U.S. Civil War, both commanders and soldiers joined the rebellion.</p>
<p>This seems implausible in the contemporary United States. Trump’s mismanagement and <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/08/trump-mocked-us-military-troops-losers-whole-life/">disrespect toward enlisted soldiers and the generals</a> have been notable, and <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/01/04/the-clash-between-trump-and-his-generals/">he keeps firing very popular commanders</a> and replacing them with political surrogates. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/">Privately, many generals are eager for his presidency to end</a>, and most are unlikely to execute any unlawful orders. Some have even criticized his politicization of the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/21/politics/esper-milley-trump/index.html">military</a>. </p>
<p>Certainly, the president can dismiss officers and appointees he believes are personally disloyal to him, such as former <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-purge-of-defense-agencies-comes-at-a-vulnerable-time-for-us-national-security-149853">Secretary of Defense Mike Esper</a> and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/trump-fires-head-u-s-election-cybersecurity-after-he-debunked-n1248063">Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs</a>. Yet the military at large has not demonstrated unwavering loyalty to Trump, and appears to remain loyal to the office and rule of law. </p>
<p>In extending increased protection to Joe Biden, the Secret Service has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-secret-service/2020/11/06/0057dc5e-1fd9-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html">demonstrated this</a> too.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="President Trump and then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370334/original/file-20201119-15-owe4lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Among the military figures who have rebuked President Trump is retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, right, who resigned as Trump’s defense secretary.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-donald-trump-speaks-alongside-secretary-of-news-photo/887037010?adppopup=true">Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>5. Present civil disorder is, relatively speaking, tame.</h2>
<p>Finally, the social upheaval of the present day should be placed in historical perspective. Compared with the 1860s, or even <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/6/2/21277253/george-floyd-protest-1960s-civil-rights">the 1960s</a>, civil disorder is tame at best. </p>
<p>Protests have been mostly orderly. While there has been some <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/11/14/million-maga-march-dc-protests/">violence at recent demonstrations in Washington</a> and leftist-led disturbances on the West Coast, the violence is far less dramatic or widespread than in previous periods. Consider, for instance, violence at <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1968-democratic-convention-931079/">the 1968 Democratic Convention</a>, the <a href="https://www.kent.edu/may-4-historical-accuracy">1970 shootings at Kent State</a>, or <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/john-browns-day-of-reckoning-139165084/">John Brown’s bloody raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859</a>. If things were going to fall apart, city halls and statehouses would be occupied, National Guardsmen would throw down their weapons and join a revolution and violence would escalate beyond control. We simply are not there.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Without a doubt, the president’s attempts to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/13/trump-election-voter-fraud-claims-attack-democracy">undermine faith in the integrity of the election are dangerous to democracy</a>. Legal processes to ensure that every legal vote is counted will proceed. And, without a doubt, Trump and his surrogates will continue to focus on small details, broad generalizations and debunked theories to cast popular doubt on the legitimacy of a possible President Biden. They will try to delay vote certification, nullify state results and push the election to the House, where the president would win. </p>
<p>This is their right in a democracy. Yet, for the moment, the system appears poised to hold together. The months ahead will be turbulent, but civil war is unlikely.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150320/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Cohen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Much as the South rejected President Lincoln’s election with a massive armed uprising, could President Trump’s many supporters rise up and overthrow a Biden-led government?Alexander Cohen, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Clarkson UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1498132020-11-11T00:20:43Z2020-11-11T00:20:43ZIn appealing to ‘give each other a chance,’ Biden recalls the democratic charity of Abraham Lincoln<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368697/original/file-20201110-15-1jkx5t6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C53%2C6000%2C3736&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President-elect Joe Biden speaks on Nov. 7, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/APTOPIXElection2020Biden/c84dfa04ec37439d9b16ce439bfbae16/photo?Query=joe%20biden%20nov.%207&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1561&currentItemNo=3">AP Photo/Andrew Harnik</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Nov. 7, in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, Joe Biden delivered his <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-11-07/joe-biden-victory-speech-2020-election-transcript">first speech as president-elect</a>. In declaring victory, Biden spoke directly to those who didn’t support him. </p>
<p>“And to those who voted for President Trump, I understand your disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of elections myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress. We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.”</p>
<p>I am a <a href="https://polisci.la.psu.edu/people/cxb518">scholar of democracy and ethics</a>, and Biden’s words call to mind Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Delivered on March 4, 1865, after his reelection and at a time when Union victory was in sight, that speech – like Biden’s – called for a new beginning after a time of extreme division. </p>
<p>Both speeches also reflect an idea of democratic charity – that we all deserve to be heard, respected and given the benefit of the doubt. </p>
<h2>Opponents, not enemies</h2>
<p>Biden’s words, “We are not enemies. We are Americans,” also recall Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural speech, delivered in 1861. Lincoln used the occasion to make a poignant but vain appeal to his fellow citizens to forgo the looming American Civil War. Ending his speech, <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp">Lincoln said</a>:</p>
<p>“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368698/original/file-20201110-17-wjedd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A scene in front of the Capitol during Lincoln’s second inauguration, 1865.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/LINCOLNSECONDINAUGURAL/79bd2625fbe6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/photo?Query=lincoln%20second%20inaugural&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=18&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But to me, the more important part of Biden’s speech was his plea that we “give each other a chance.” These words summon Lincoln’s second inaugural address. That speech ended with these words:</p>
<p>“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” These words are carved on the wall of the Lincoln memorial in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>Both Lincoln’s speech and Biden’s call for a new beginning after a time of extreme division. And both reflect a specifically democratic idea of charity that all Americans ought to strive for. </p>
<h2>Democratic charity</h2>
<p>For most people, charity refers to instances when someone gives away something that the other person needs: food, shelter or just a cash donation. There is usually, therefore, a power imbalance between the giver and the receiver. </p>
<p><a href="https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_there_something_wrong_with_philanthropy">Scholars and philanthropists alike acknowledge</a> that paternalism and even condescension are always risks associated with such an unbalanced relationship. </p>
<p>Democratic charity is different. It doesn’t start with an unequal relationship. Instead, it reflects the ideal that in a democratic society we are equal. And all citizens are both givers and receivers. </p>
<p>Democratic charity means assuming, at least to start, that just like me, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/civility-now-foreign-concept-americans-politics-how-did-we-get-ncna873491">my opponent is a person of goodwill</a>, who loves his or her country, and conveys beliefs honestly. </p>
<p>Lincoln’s call for charity rested on the Christian notion that all Americans have fallen short of God’s judgment. While he plainly believed that slavery was an affront to God, <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp">he also encouraged</a> those in the North to “judge not, lest we be judged.” </p>
<p>That phrase comes from the <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207:5&version=NIV">Gospel of Matthew</a>, in which Jesus admonishes his followers that they should concern themselves more with their own sin and less with the sins of others.</p>
<p>The point is that all people have fallen short. And knowing that, <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp">Lincoln says</a>, ought to make Americans more likely to practice charity toward those on the other side, even the other side of a bloody civil war. </p>
<h2>Charity starts with humility</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/368699/original/file-20201110-15-2zgqoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/LincolnMemorialinWashington/8963d80c19e04a99ae70c7b7019a402c/photo?Query=lincoln%20second%20inaugural&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=18&currentItemNo=13">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Lincoln, charity starts with humility. Contemporary research by <a href="https://psychsciences.case.edu/faculty/julie-exline/">Julie Exline</a> and <a href="https://cct.biola.edu/people/peter-c-hill/">Peter Hill</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439760.2012.671348">confirms this insight</a>. In three separate studies, their results show that humility is “a consistent and robust predictor of generosity.” </p>
<p>What’s more, this is a common refrain within Christian, and especially Catholic, theology. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a monk and <a href="https://www.usccb.org/myusccb/upload/twim-33-fact-of-faith.pdf">doctor of the Catholic Church</a>, <a href="https://richardconlin.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/st-bernard-of-clairvaux-the-twelve-degrees-of-humility-and-pride.pdf">argued</a> in the 12th century that it is only after the monk fully understands his own sinfulness that he can genuinely serve others. In 2019, Pope Francis echoed this sentiment when he said that charity without humility is “<a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/charity-without-meekness-and-humility-is-sterile-pope-reflects">sterile</a>.” </p>
<p>But while humility readily stems from the Christian concept of sin, that is not the only foundation. <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498511445/Democratic-Humility-Reinhold-Niebuhr-Neuroscience-and-America%E2%80%99s-Political-Crisis">In my own work</a>, I have argued that humility can start from the fact that all human beings are subject to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. </p>
<p>Just like sin, these effects too are universal and inescapable. As a result, no one sees the world just as it is. When one recognizes this fact, it is likewise possible to develop a more generous perspective toward those on the other side. Here too, democratic charity toward others begins with a democratic sense of humility about the self.</p>
<p>[<em>Insight, in your inbox each day.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=insight">You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter</a>.]</p>
<h2>How we move forward</h2>
<p>The end of an election can be an opportunity to reaffirm a shared commitment to one another as Americans. This is no small thing. Accepting a loss in which one has invested so much hope, time and treasure is never easy. </p>
<p>But right now, as with the end of the civil war, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/10/26/gene-weingarten-divided-country-healing/?arc404=true">divisions are deep and fraught with distrust</a>, rancor and, in many cases, outright hatred. <a href="https://apnews.com/article/mitt-romney-no-evidence-vote-fraud-0ac291da7ab09f6336d24290ef81f53b">Baseless and reckless claims of voter fraud</a> are perhaps the latest manifestation of that condition. To many, Biden’s words may therefore seem woefully insufficient to the task. </p>
<p>But as it was true for Lincoln, the effort itself is worthy. Democratic charity offers Americans the opportunity to take a step back from hatred and give one another a chance.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149813/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Beem does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>On Nov. 7, when President-elect Joe Biden urged in his address that we “give each other a chance,” his words summoned Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address of 1865.Christopher Beem, Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1491252020-11-05T13:30:40Z2020-11-05T13:30:40ZPost-election grief is real, and here are 5 coping strategies – including getting back into politics<p>Shortly after Abraham Lincoln was elected on Nov. 6, 1860, a woman from Alabama, Sarah Espy, documented her concerns in her diary. She <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/emotional-and-sectional-conflict-in-the-antebellum-united-states/F28B17218A4D85694F08A9033C1909E5">wrote</a> that she felt “grieved,” and explained why. “For it is thought now to be certainty that Lincoln…and that the Southern States are going to withdraw from the Union. If so, it is the beginning of woe.” </p>
<p>While the particular concerns change, every election triggers distress for some people. That certainly held true for the previous two presidential elections: Many Americans were deeply upset following the victories of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/11/07/election.withdrawal/index.html">Barack Obama</a> in 2008 and of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/election-grief-trump-clinton-psychology-sad-2016-11">Donald Trump</a> in 2016. </p>
<p>Symptoms of depression – sadness, loneliness and fatigue – seem <a href="https://psychcentral.com/blog/grief-loss-after-the-election/">to be common responses to electoral loss.</a> This may prove to be a particularly widespread phenomenon in the aftermath of the 2020 election, given the nation’s <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/">contentious political divide</a>.</p>
<p>People don’t typically talk about politics in the same sentence as grief and woe, but the two are more closely connected than we might realize. I am a <a href="https://polisci.utk.edu/faculty/ojeda.php">political scientist</a> who studies how mental health shapes the way citizens think and engage with politics. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/democracy-and-depression-a-crossnational-study-of-depressive-symptoms-and-nonparticipation/F130385CE49E480832DC3A07B43A2CD4">In my work</a>, I’ve found that citizens who suffer from depression are less politically engaged. I’m currently exploring how politics impact citizens’ mental health, especially in the wake of an election.</p>
<h2>The politics of depression</h2>
<p>Psychologists have long recognized depression as a frequent response to loss. <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/On-Death-and-Dying/Elisabeth-Kubler-Ross/9781476775548">Elisabeth Kübler-Ross</a> famously named it as one of the five stages of grief, along with denial, anger, bargaining and ultimately, acceptance. Other research has since <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2190/3KGF-52BV-QTNT-UBMX">questioned this concept of stages</a>, finding instead that some people <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/205661">experience just one or two of these emotions</a>.</p>
<p>While scholars have written about <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/expressive-partisanship-campaign-involvement-political-emotion-and-partisan-identity/7D2A2C87FBEBBE5DABAAF9658B3162AA">anger</a> and <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2508.00161">denial</a> in relation to politics, we know far less about depression. Evidence I’ve compiled suggests it’s relatively common. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2004/11/11/voters-liked-campaign-2004-but-too-much-mud-slinging/">a 2004 Pew Research Center survey</a> found that 29% of Kerry supporters felt depressed in the wake of George Bush’s reelection and <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2008/11/11/most-in-poll-put-trust-in-obama/">a 2008 Associated Press poll</a> found 25% of Republicans were upset following the election of Barack Obama. Polling data from 2010, 2012 and 2016 reveal similar results.</p>
<p>This data captures the intensity of emotions we feel from electoral loss. The website <a href="https://psychcentral.com/blog/grief-loss-after-the-election/">PsychCentral</a> noted that traffic to their “5 Stages of Grief & Loss” page was up by 210% the day after Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 – and their most popular article was “<a href="https://psychcentral.com/blog/healing-after-the-election/">Healing after the Election</a>.” Similarly, <a href="https://trends.google.com/">Google Trends</a> data on grief-related searches spiked following the 2008 and 2016 elections.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366834/original/file-20201031-13-18me6nc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366834/original/file-20201031-13-18me6nc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366834/original/file-20201031-13-18me6nc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366834/original/file-20201031-13-18me6nc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366834/original/file-20201031-13-18me6nc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366834/original/file-20201031-13-18me6nc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366834/original/file-20201031-13-18me6nc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Grief-related searches on Google spiked after the 2008 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Google Trends</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The evidence is clear: Many Americans feel depressed after elections. </p>
<h2>Coping with post-election blues</h2>
<p>There is no easy way to make depression disappear, but there are actions we can take to cope.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Focusing on healthy living will help restore your energy. Give yourself breaks from the news – and politics. Get enough sleep, eat well and get some exercise. </p></li>
<li><p>Limit time on <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144139">social media</a>, or better yet, log off altogether for a few days. While it’s a way to connect with other people and share information, it’s also a key source of political misinformation, echo chamber conversations and polarized thinking. Overall, too much time on Facebook or Twitter <a href="https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751">can intensify anxiety and depression</a>. </p></li>
<li><p>Seek out social support. Talk to a trusted family member, friend, community leader – or find a social support group in your area. While that may be a bit more challenging in a pandemic, with the need for social distancing, it’s still possible to pick up the phone, get on a FaceTime call or set up a virtual appointment with a mental health professional. But also remember <a href="https://www.apa.org/topics/depression">Goldilocks’ rule</a>: Social isolation intensifies negative feelings, but so does spending too much time talking about problems.</p></li>
<li><p>Affirm the value of democracy. Electoral loss is scary because it means having to contend with unwanted or disliked policies – and can create extreme polarization. But accepting loss is <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199276382.001.0001/acprof-9780199276387">part and parcel of democracy</a>. One way to <a href="https://theconversation.com/bridging-americas-divides-requires-a-willingness-to-work-together-without-becoming-friends-first-143648">bridge political differences</a> is to join a group, such as <a href="https://www.buildingbridgers.com/">Building Bridgers</a>, which brings together citizens with diverse political views to engage in structured conversations. </p></li>
<li><p>Once you’ve accepted the outcome, get involved with politics. Elections are just the start of what is a complex policymaking process. Participating <a href="http://staging.nonprofitvote.org/documents/2010/11/the-psychological-benefits-of-political-participation.pdf">is empowering and can help alleviate psychological distress</a>. There are many ways to contribute, from contacting elected officials, protesting, running for local office or donating money to joining advocacy organizations or starting a political discussion group.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Ultimately, democratic societies select leaders through voting, but one unsavory part of the process is that many citizens don’t get their preferred choice. </p>
<p>Being on the losing side of an election may create distrust in the system and dissatisfaction with democracy. My research shows that it hits us emotionally, too. But instead of letting hurt sideline you from politics, use it to fuel the passion you felt before the election.</p>
<p>[<em>Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-understand">Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149125/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Ojeda does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Every election triggers distress for some people. Here are some ways to possibly cope.Christopher Ojeda, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1483042020-10-19T13:36:36Z2020-10-19T13:36:36Z20/20 vision needed in 2020: How this U.S. election compares to other tumultuous votes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364015/original/file-20201016-17-1u4crmp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=62%2C26%2C5865%2C2955&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">This combination of Sept. 29, 2020, file photos show President Donald Trump, left, and former Vice President Joe Biden during the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sharp-eyed 20/20 vision has been hard to maintain in the maelstrom of 2020, with daily fears and passions often clouding analysis. </p>
<p>Here’s one helpful tool on one high-profile event: As the American presidential campaign concludes, a measure of depth and context can be applied to the chaos by comparing the Donald Trump-Joe Biden battle to tumultuous U.S. elections of the past.</p>
<p>Americans have been whiplashed by crises in 2020. The COVID-19 cyclone alone has been traumatic: There have been well over 200,000 deaths (and counting), staggering <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/ten-facts-about-covid-19-and-the-u-s-economy/">economic damage</a>, including layoffs and business failures, and mental health challenges (for example, <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/2020-09/issue-brief-increases-in-opioid-related-overdose.pdf">a record number of deadly opioid overdoses</a>), to name just a handful of the pandemic-fuelled tribulations.</p>
<p>Add in compounding stresses like flareups in <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/race-relations-2020-issue-poll-george-floyd/index.html">racial tensions</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/23/donald-trump-portland-oregon-mayor-ted-wheeler-teargas-federal-agents">urban protests</a> against systemic racism. Wrap everything up in an election year that never promised calm waters thanks to Trump’s voracious appetite for provocation on immigration, taxes, health care and a host of other issues. </p>
<p>The hypnotic grasp of the daily news cycle has been further intensified by the president’s behaviour since his positive COVID-19 diagnosis. The coronavirus has <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-circle-covid-1.5749693">invaded the White House</a> and its occupants have had no qualms about sharing it. </p>
<p>Given Trump’s simultaneous refusal to pledge he’ll accept the results of the election, it’s tempting to see a <em>Game of Thrones</em>-like scenario unfolding. For those familiar with the television version of the George R.R. Martin saga, the Sept. 26 Rose Garden celebration of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination became something of <a href="https://ew.com/recap/game-of-thrones-recap-red-wedding-castamere/">a Red Wedding moment</a> when a horde of participants were felled, at least temporarily, by COVID-19. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1312373023077543937"}"></div></p>
<p>Fast forward to a Nov. 3 Battle of Winterfell, with the president, his “stand by” Proud Boys, and loyal Republican “white walkers” gearing up for combat.</p>
<h2>Americans have been here before</h2>
<p>And yet for all the current chaos, the United States has experienced moments like this before — and an awareness of this history could help put 2020 into perspective.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/jqadams/campaigns-and-elections">1824 election</a> is an early example of problematic volatility in American political history. There were four major candidates, all self-identified as members of a crumbling Democratic-Republican Party. One nominee was disabled by a stroke, but remained in the race — and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives when no candidate received a majority in the Electoral College. </p>
<p>Matters then went from bad to worse. Andrew Jackson, leading strongly in the popular vote, was denied victory when Henry Clay (who had placed fourth in the popular vote) threw his support to John Quincy Adams. Jackson supporters saw a “corrupt bargain” as Adams then named “Judas” Clay as his secretary of state.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Portraits of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364014/original/file-20201016-17-epekfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364014/original/file-20201016-17-epekfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364014/original/file-20201016-17-epekfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364014/original/file-20201016-17-epekfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364014/original/file-20201016-17-epekfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364014/original/file-20201016-17-epekfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364014/original/file-20201016-17-epekfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 1824 election showdown between Andrew Jackson (left) and John Quincy Adams (right) was notoriously nasty and chaotic.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Creative Commons)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Vitriolic campaigning never let up on the road to the 1828 election. Jackson was castigated as a drunk adulterer married to a bigamist; Adams was denounced as an effete “academician” wearing silk underwear. Adams’ wife was also accused of being born out of wedlock.</p>
<h2>1860’s election spurred a war</h2>
<p>Adams’ presidency was often hamstrung by 1824’s fallout. In 1860, the U.S. election had exponentially more disastrous results. Bad went not just to worse, but to hell. </p>
<p>The presidential contest was troubled enough: Four major candidates (again) as a disbanded Democratic convention in Charleston, S.C., gave way to an imploding second try in Baltimore. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A portrait of Abraham Lincoln" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364025/original/file-20201016-19-1oykhp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364025/original/file-20201016-19-1oykhp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364025/original/file-20201016-19-1oykhp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364025/original/file-20201016-19-1oykhp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364025/original/file-20201016-19-1oykhp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364025/original/file-20201016-19-1oykhp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364025/original/file-20201016-19-1oykhp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans won the 1860 election, resulting in the Civil War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Library of Congress)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans won, but the U.S. Civil War was the result as southern states moved to secede. The devastation of the four-year struggle was unparalleled in American experience — and remains so. “<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/oliver-wendell-holmes-jr-a-life-in-war-law-ideas-stephen-budiansky-book-review/">Immense the butcher’s bill has been</a>,” wrote young Lieut. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., his thoughts echoed by many others as the death toll climbed to 750,000.</p>
<p>Lincoln’s election, of course, was not the root cause of the Civil War — though he was denounced as “<a href="https://nation.time.com/2012/10/25/lincoln-to-the-rescue/3/">that damned long-armed ape</a>” in some quarters. The 1860 vote, on the contrary, provides an example of the way a troubled election, then and now, can be a symptom of deeper volatility; in this case, a symbol of the profound tensions emanating from issues like slavery and sectional struggles over government policies for economic development. </p>
<h2>1968: Richard Nixon re-emerges</h2>
<p>So does the election of 1968 — another event that unfolded as <a href="https://time.com/5071384/1968-historic-lessons-for-2018/">volcanic tremors shook American society</a>. Protests spurred by the Vietnam War drove Lyndon Johnson into retirement; there were riots in more than 100 cities amid the civil rights movement; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. stoked outrage, grief and anxiety.</p>
<p>At the Democratic convention in Chicago, violent street clashes shocked television viewers. A “police riot” was widely condemned, with Mayor Richard Daley’s Windy City strong-arm approach contrasting half-absurdly, half-horrifyingly with nominee Hubert Humphrey’s call for a “<a href="https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/07/26/mpr-documentary-the-politics-of-joy-a-radio-remembrance-of-hubert-humphrey">politics of joy</a>.” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3XzdltsTfvE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A look at the police violence against anti-war protesters at the Democratic convention in 1968, courtesy of Democracy Now.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Richard Nixon and the Republicans forged a winning campaign strategy that paired “law and order” (the very words back in play in 2020) with a <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/1997/1209/120997.opin.column.1.html">“secret plan” to end the Vietnam ordeal</a>.</p>
<p>That was accompanied by a “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4129605?seq=1">southern strategy</a>” designed to bring white voters into the GOP (an approach that remains a party mainstay).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Richard Nixon waves from the steps of a helicopter." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364031/original/file-20201016-13-pm65g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364031/original/file-20201016-13-pm65g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364031/original/file-20201016-13-pm65g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364031/original/file-20201016-13-pm65g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364031/original/file-20201016-13-pm65g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364031/original/file-20201016-13-pm65g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364031/original/file-20201016-13-pm65g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this Aug. 9, 1974, photo, President Richard Nixon waves goodbye from the steps of his helicopter outside the White House, after he gave a farewell address to members of the White House staff after announcing his resignation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Chick Harrity)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There have been other volatile elections: 1800, 1912, 1952, 2000 and 2016, for example. Their disruptive tensions have taken their toll. Tooth-and-nail presidential battles have sometimes been followed by terrible consequences — including the horrors of the Civil War (and Iraq) and the resistance to social and economic reforms that regularly tarnished the country’s post-Depression and <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/great-society">post-Great Society history.</a></p>
<h2>The heavy weight of the past</h2>
<p>Of equal importance, especially as the challenges of 2020 are contemplated, is the sheer burdensome weight of the past. Weaknesses in political processes are as old as the U.S. Constitution itself (including the periodic failure of <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/checks-and-balances#:%7E:text=Checks%20and%20balances%20operate%20throughout,to%20the%20other%20two%20branches.&text=Within%20the%20legislative%20branch%2C%20each,of%20power%20by%20the%20other.">“checks and balances”</a> or the monkey wrenches lurking in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/upshot/electoral-college-votes-states.html">Electoral College</a>). </p>
<p>The racism that poisoned the atmosphere in 1860 has remained tragically potent ever since — just as it was before the Civil War, of course. It’s impossible to pinpoint the origins of other inequities still plaguing American society, straining the safety and limiting the opportunities of women, people of colour, the poor, LGBTQ+ citizens and the disabled. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Obama smiles with his right hand raised as he takes the oath of office at his inauguration." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364089/original/file-20201018-17-fuqk5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Barack Obama takes the oath of office at his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, U.S. Air Force/Flickr)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Whatever the woeful permutations of 2020 to date, this troubled election is again serving as a symptom and a symbol of a troubled society. Barack Obama was elected <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-u-s-presidential-win-sent-a-message-to-the-world-1.695214">in 2008 on a wave of “hope and change,”</a> and yet amid the tumult 2020, that optimism seems a distant memory. Whatever this year’s immediate outcomes, history suggests anything but a quick resolution to deeply rooted problems.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148304/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronald W. Pruessen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The U.S. presidential election is again serving as a symptom and a symbol of a troubled society. Whatever the outcome, history suggests anything but a quick resolution to deeply rooted problems.Ronald W. Pruessen, Professor of History, University of TorontoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1459952020-09-17T11:25:37Z2020-09-17T11:25:37ZFrom Washington to Trump, all presidents have told lies (but only some have told them for the right reasons)<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358440/original/file-20200916-16-l9zkoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C52%2C2176%2C1690&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President Nixon at a White House news conference in March 1973.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/NixonsWatergateTestimony/d59d9c49c6164dbdafc4647310ca0c26/photo?Query=nixon&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=7400&currentItemNo=10">AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi, File</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Michael Cohen, in his recent <a href="https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510764699/disloyal-a-memoir/">book,</a> has called President Trump a <a href="https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/09/08/Michael-Cohens-tell-all-book-out-Tuesday-calls-Trump-liar-bully/1041599562972/">“fraud,” a “bigot,” a “bully” – and, most emphatically, a “liar”</a>. The Trump administration’s response to this book simply reverses the accusation, calling Cohen someone <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cohen-trump-book/2020/09/05/235aa10a-ef96-11ea-ab4e-581edb849379_story.html">who attempts to “profit off of lies”</a>. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, the media has often noted the frequency with which President Trump lies. The Washington Post, for instance, maintains a running database of what it terms the President’s “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2">false or misleading claims</a>” – which now number over 20,000, or an average of 12 per day. </p>
<p>Media’s accounts of Trump’s lies would seem to indicate that most people are wholeheartedly opposed to lying – and, in particular, opposed to being lied to by presidents. And yet a recent <a href="https://progressive.org/dispatches/lies-more-lies-presidential-history-lueders-200810/">survey of presidential deception</a> found that all American presidents – from Washington to Trump – have told lies, knowingly, in their public statements.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://phil.washington.edu/people/michael-blake">political philosopher</a>, with a focus on how people try to reason together through political disagreement, I argue that not all lies are the same. </p>
<p>History shows examples of presidents who have lied for a larger public purpose – and have been forgiven. </p>
<h2>The morality of deception</h2>
<p>Why, though, are lies thought so wrongful in the first instance?</p>
<p>Immanuel Kant, in the 18th century, provided one powerful account of <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577415.001.0001/acprof-9780199577415-chapter-4">the wrongness of lying</a>. For Kant, lying was wrong in much the same way that threats and coercion are wrong. All of these override the autonomous will of another person, and treat that person as a mere tool. </p>
<p>For Kant, human beings were morally special precisely because they could use reason to decide what to do. When a gunman uses threats to coerce a person to do a particular act, he disrespects that person’s rational agency. Lies are a similar disrespect to rational agency: One’s decision has been manipulated, so that the act is no longer one’s own.</p>
<p>Kant defended these conclusions without exception. Kant regarded any lie as immoral – even one told to <a href="http://www.mesacc.edu/%7Edavpy35701/text/kant-sup-right-to-lie.pdf">a murderer at the door</a>. </p>
<p>Modern-day philosophers have often accepted Kant’s account, while seeking exceptions from its rigidness. In his book “Ethics for Adversaries,” philosopher <a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/arthur-applbaum">Arthur Applbaum</a> <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691057392/ethics-for-adversaries">explains</a> why citizens might sometimes consent to being deceived, which might be useful in understanding presidential deception. </p>
<p>For example, a political leader who gives honest answers about a forthcoming military operation would likely imperil that operation – and most people would not want that. The key, though, is that people might accept such deception, after the fact, because of what that deception made possible. </p>
<p>To take one example: The British government sought to deceive the Nazi command about its plans for invasion – which entailed <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/06/d-day-would-be-nearly-impossible-pull-off-today-heres-why/">lying even to British allies</a>. Applbaum argues that what might seem like simple deception might become justified, if those deceived could eventually consent – after the fact – to being so deceived.</p>
<h2>Honorable lies?</h2>
<p>History reveals examples of how presidents must sometimes lie, and how their lies might sometimes be morally defensible. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358427/original/file-20200916-18-vkbj10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C21%2C2019%2C1513&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358427/original/file-20200916-18-vkbj10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358427/original/file-20200916-18-vkbj10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358427/original/file-20200916-18-vkbj10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358427/original/file-20200916-18-vkbj10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358427/original/file-20200916-18-vkbj10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358427/original/file-20200916-18-vkbj10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leaders could lie for many reasons, and some lies might be morally defensible.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mobili/43673422552/in/photolist-29xgGY1-2hKoNBg-2j1pTjB-2hspAbt-2iQpJ3v-2jjMAs3-RstBMm-RfyVW8-2j4Sr86-2gQ51vv-NZZjP5-2iNirUn-2iUnp18-MG2Grz-2iyLLE3-2iWsiDV-2iPdXoT-5oZqVC-2ixpw1Y-2hKrrmT-2ipMPiT-2hKsymy-TBXjDU-2hx4j17-26maq25-PdLjs-2hKoTPA-2hiFkvJ-2hKoSTs-2hKsCuJ-P6wqKa-2iV4QKp-LqVmws-299JgzE-2iQpFM3-25pSpbv-2hHkLEC-2iJDa2u-QpuRP5-LMgAhE-2j8hpCk-Y6nwUN-2hKrr1h-2hXFKWP-2hHY2Cg-2iM55ri-2j7Yrs9-M96MPT-2iuTs8d-NhAJd8">Mobilus In Mobili</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was convinced that Hitler’s expansionism in Europe was a threat to the liberal democratic project itself, but he faced an electorate without any will to intervene in a European war. Roosevelt chose to insist publicly that he was opposed to any intervention – while doing everything he could to prepare for war and to covertly help the <a href="https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2017/01/04/how-franklin-d-roosevelt-prepared-us-for-wwii/">British cause</a>. </p>
<p>As early as 1948, historian Thomas Bailey noted that Roosevelt had made a calculated choice to both prepare for war and insist he was doing no such thing. To be open about his view of Hitler would have led to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=CVqTXJjmtmUC&pg=PA298&lpg=PA298&dq=roosevelt+lying&source=bl&ots=0frUEvK02d&sig=ACfU3U3djJZzxplhbGcQwVXwPOAqWJaa2w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiQ_cKC_evrAhUBip4KHUTjDqY4ChDoATAGegQICBAB#v=onepage&q=the%20man%20in%20the%20street&f=false">his defeat in the 1940 election.</a></p>
<p>Prior to Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln made similar calculations. Lincoln’s lies regarding his negotiations with the Confederacy – described by <a href="https://www.marlboro.edu/live/profiles/32-meg-mott">Meg Mott</a>, a professor of political theory, as being “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/24/politics/presidents-lie/index.html">devious</a>” – may have been instrumental in preserving the United States as a single country.</p>
<p>“Honest Abe” Lincoln was willing to open peace negotiations with the Confederacy – knowing that much of his own party thought that only unconditional surrender by the South would settle the question of slavery. At one point, Lincoln wrote a note to his own party asserting – falsely – that there were “<a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0021.104/--hampton-roads-peace-conference-a-final-test-of-lincolns?rgn=main;view=fulltext">no peace commissioners</a>” being sent to a conference with the Confederacy. </p>
<p>A member of the Congress later noted that, in the absence of that note, the 13th Amendment – which ended the practice of chattel slavery – <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0021.104/--hampton-roads-peace-conference-a-final-test-of-lincolns?rgn=main;view=fulltext">would not have been passed</a>.</p>
<h2>Good lies and bad lies</h2>
<p>The problem, of course, is that a great many presidential lies cannot be so easily linked to important purposes. </p>
<p>President Bill Clinton’s lies about his sexual activities were either simply self-serving or told to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Fe88rwSW8ywC&pg=PT507&lpg=PT507&dq=bill+clinton+%22the+lie+saved+me%22&source=bl&ots=AJY7EQZHoq&sig=ACfU3U2uGl7_XXWvjxHXE5jYNH0XyzOZyA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjFsPGE0enrAhWTvJ4KHY_WB5MQ6AEwC3oECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=bill%20clinton%20%22the%20lie%20saved%20me%22&f=false">preserve his presidency</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, President Richard Nixon’s insistence that he knew nothing about <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-insists-that-he-is-not-a-crook">the Watergate break-in</a> was most likely a lie. John Dean, Nixon’s legal counsel, confirmed years later that the president <a href="https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/08/07/john-dean-uncovers-what-nixon-knew-about-watergate">knew about, and approved of</a>, the plan to rob the Democratic National Committee headquarters. This scandal eventually ended Nixon’s presidency. </p>
<p>In both cases, these presidents faced a significant threat to their presidencies - and chose deception to save not the nation, but their own power. </p>
<h2>President Trump and truth</h2>
<p>It is likely that President Trump has lied <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/podcast-glenn-kessler-david-corn-lies-washington-post-fact-checker/">more than previous presidents</a> in public – and, perhaps more significantly, he has also apparently lied about a wider variety of topics than his predecessors.</p>
<p>Soon after being elected he claimed, falsely, that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/trump-inauguration-crowd-sean-spicers-claims-versus-the-evidence">his inaugural crowd</a> was the largest ever. More recently, he insisted that Hurricane Dorian was likely to affect the coast of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/politics/trump-sharpie-hurricane-dorian-alabama/index.html">Alabama</a> – and he seems to have altered a map with a Sharpie to bolster his false claim. The pattern of deception has continued, most recently with his acknowledgment that he <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coronavirus-bob-woodward_n_5f58fd32c5b6b48507fabc99">deceived the public</a> about the coronavirus – and then his insistence <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-is-lying-about-lying-1058436/">that he had done no such thing</a>. </p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>What is striking about these lies, in contrast to the lies of previous presidents, is that they have generally been told in the absence of a particular and acute threat to either the president’s power or to the preservation of the United States. </p>
<p>Presidents have lied for good reasons and for bad ones, but very few have chosen to lie without a particularly unusual threat to themselves or their nation. If some presidential lies might be forgivable, it could be only because of the good to the nation those lies bring about; and President Trump’s lies seem unlikely to meet that test.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145995/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Blake has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.</span></em></p>Some presidents have lied for honorable reasons, while for others the lies have been simply self-serving.Michael Blake, Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy and Governance, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1438872020-08-06T12:33:23Z2020-08-06T12:33:23Z1864 elections went on during the Civil War – even though Lincoln thought it would be a disaster for himself and the Republican Party<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351401/original/file-20200805-20-m2d7k5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C2%2C844%2C592&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Soldiers and African American workers standing near caskets and dead bodies covered with cloths during Grant's Overland Campaign. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2019633431/">Matthew Brady/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The outlook was not promising in 1864 for President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection. </p>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of Americans had been <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/the-civil-war-year-by-year-1773748">killed, wounded or displaced</a> in a civil war with no end in sight. Lincoln was unpopular. Radical Republicans in his own party doubted his commitment to Black civil rights and condemned his friendliness to ex-rebels.</p>
<p>Momentum was building to replace him on the ballot with Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. A <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Lincoln/lTQSlhUUEOQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=pomeroy+%22want+of+intellectual+grasp%22&pg=PA481&printsec=frontcover">pamphlet</a> went viral arguing that “Lincoln cannot be re-elected to the Presidency,” warning that “The people have lost all confidence in his ability to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union.” An embarrassed Chase offered Lincoln his resignation, which the president declined.</p>
<p>The fact remained that no president had won a second term since Andrew Jackson, 32 years and <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/">nine presidents</a> earlier. And no country had held elections in the midst of civil war.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A Lincoln-Johnson campaign ticket" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351398/original/file-20200805-237-1nthsww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1086&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Lincoln-Johnson campaign ticket.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000744/">King & Beird, Printers, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1864/Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Arguments for postponing</h2>
<p>Some urged that the June Republican convention be postponed until September to give the Union one more shot at military victory. Other Republicans went further, arguing that the country should “<a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020712/1864-04-26/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1864&index=17&date2=1864&words=election+postpone+Postponing&searchType=basic&sequence=0&sort=date&state=&rows=20&proxtext=postpone+election&y=11&x=15&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=3">postpone</a> … a Presidential election for four years more … (until) the rebellion will not only be subdued, but the country will be tranquillized and restored to its normal condition.”</p>
<p>Holding the election during civil war would render “the vote … <a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020712/1864-04-26/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1864&index=17&date2=1864&words=election+postpone+Postponing&searchType=basic&sequence=0&sort=date&state=&rows=20&proxtext=postpone+election&y=11&x=15&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=3">fraudulent</a>,” argued the New York Sunday Mercury, in a widely reprinted article. The nation would “flame up in revolution, and the streets of our cities would run with blood.”</p>
<p>But Lincoln’s party renominated him. He was a canny political strategist who calculated that nominating Democratic Unionist and military Governor of Tennessee Andrew Johnson for vice president would attract disaffected Democrats and speed national reunification.</p>
<p>Johnson proved to be a disastrous choice for Black civil rights, but in 1864 his candidacy shrewdly balanced the ticket.</p>
<p>Yet a military victory that could also help Lincoln’s standing and prospects was elusive. General Ulysses S. Grant led <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/overland-campaign-1864">the Overland Campaign</a> against Confederates, led by General Robert E. Lee, across much of eastern Virginia that spring. After 55,000 Union casualties – about 45% of Grant’s army – <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/petersburg-wearing-down-lees-army">Grant laid siege to Petersburg</a>.</p>
<p>By the time <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/democrats-nominate-mcclellan-to-challenge-lincoln-aug-31-1864-227488">Democrats met in August to nominate General George B. McClellan</a>, there was still no end in sight to the war. Lincoln had removed McLellan from command of the Union Army of the Potomac in 1862, but the general was still a commissioned officer. Yet McClellan’s party was in disarray. He opposed a peace settlement with the Confederacy while the Democratic Party platform committed him to it.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Lincoln having a nightmare about being defeated." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351392/original/file-20200805-239-13982e8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The artist portrays a president tormented by nightmares of defeat in the election of 1864. The print probably appeared late in the campaign.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2003689256/">Currier & Ives/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Defeat ‘seems exceedingly probable’</h2>
<p>Without scientific polling, Lincoln and his advisers predicted defeat. </p>
<p>At the end of August, Lincoln <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.4359700/?sp=1&st=text">wrote</a> to his Cabinet, “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”</p>
<p>Abraham Lincoln understood that the war for the Union was about the integrity of a constitutional republic, not the president or the party. It was about “<a href="https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/gettysburg/good_cause/transcript.htm">a new birth of freedom</a>” and not about him. And that meant his victory in the election was less important to him than the fate of the entire country.</p>
<p>Yet Lincoln also made contingency plans in the event he lost, asking Frederick Douglass to help <a href="http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mal&fileName=mal1/356/3565200/malpage.db&recNum=0">free enslaved people</a> in rebel-held areas.</p>
<h2>Soldiers vote absentee</h2>
<p>It was a bitter campaign. Lincoln’s opponents tarred him with racist and bestial characterizations. Republicans fought back, charging Democrats with being treasonous.</p>
<p>But no slogan discrediting the opposition was as effective in building support for Lincoln as the September Union military victories at <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Mobile-Bay">Mobile Bay</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Atlanta">Atlanta</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>General Grant <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/campaigns-and-elections">made sure soldiers voting absentee</a> sent their mail-in ballots. He furloughed others to go home to vote in person.</p>
<p>Even on the eve of the election, there were still calls to delay or cancel the vote. </p>
<p>Lincoln, who would go on to win, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3253/3253-h/3253-h.htm#Glink2H_4_0273">assured</a> those critics, “We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143887/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Calvin Schermerhorn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lincoln’s chances of reelection in 1864 were dim. He was presiding over a bloody civil war, and the public was losing confidence in him. But he steadfastly rejected pleas to postpone the election.Calvin Schermerhorn, Professor of History, Arizona State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1422462020-08-04T12:17:21Z2020-08-04T12:17:21ZPolitical conventions today are for partying and pageantry, not picking nominees<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350661/original/file-20200731-18-1fgn93i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C14%2C4825%2C3170&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Delegates after Donald Trump accepted the GOP presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio on Thursday, July 21, 2016. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/delegates-celebrate-as-balloons-drop-from-the-rafters-after-news-photo/578671712?adppopup=true">Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/via Getty</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In August the Democratic and Republican national conventions will take on new, uncharted formats. Due to COVID-19 concerns, gone are the mass gatherings in large convention halls, replaced with a switch to mostly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-republican-national-convention-came-undone/2020/07/24/705c0afa-cdd8-11ea-bc6a-6841b28d9093_story.html">online formats</a>. </p>
<p>This is just the latest modification in presidential nominating conventions since they were first introduced in the 1830s. </p>
<p>Initially, conventions were insulated meetings of representatives from the state parties, with <a href="https://conventions.cps.neu.edu/history/1832-1890/">convention delegates on their own</a> determining which candidate became the party’s presidential nominee. </p>
<p>By the early 20th century, convention participants began to receive information about public preferences from commercial public opinion polls and a small number of presidential primaries, which constrained conventions in their choice of presidential nominees. </p>
<p>Today’s national conventions ratify <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-selectionprocess-factbox/how-selecting-u-s-presidential-candidates-became-the-peoples-choice-idUSKCN0WW001">a candidate already chosen by the voters</a> in primaries and caucuses. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of George Washington" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350665/original/file-20200731-19-m2msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Washington didn’t need a nominating convention to become president. Everyone who followed did.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/george-washington-portrait-painting-by-constable-hamilton-news-photo/507014168?adppopup=true">Painting by Constable-Hamilton, 1794, Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Insulated conventions</h2>
<p><a href="https://conventions.cps.neu.edu/history/1789-1832/">George Washington needed no formal nomination</a>, as he was the overwhelming choice for president among those who would make up the Electoral College. </p>
<p>Subsequent early presidential candidates were nominated by their party’s members in Congress. But if a state did not have a representative from a particular party in Congress, it had no say in the party’s presidential nomination.</p>
<p>In the 1830s, <a href="https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-party-conventions">political parties switched to national conventions</a>, which were meetings of representatives from the state parties. Each state was allotted delegates proportional to its Electoral College vote, and early conventions consisted of just a few hundred delegates. These delegates sought to find a popular candidate to head the party’s general election ticket, but had little information on who this candidate might be.</p>
<p>Candidates’ names were placed into contention by being nominated, and seconded, by a convention delegate. The winning candidate was determined by <a href="https://conventions.cps.neu.edu/history/1832-1890/">a series of roll-call votes</a> of state delegations that continued until one candidate won the required number of delegates. </p>
<p>Candidates did not attend the conventions; the <a href="http://www.uvm.edu/%7Edguber/POLS125/articles/ellis.htm">norm of the day was that politicians were not to openly campaign</a> for the presidency. Instead, managers of the various candidates bargained with state party leaders to accumulate the required number of delegates. </p>
<p>If one candidate began gaining strength in the rounds of voting, that candidate experienced a <a href="https://doleinstitute.org/get-involved/civic-engagement-tools/political-glossary/">bandwagon</a> of new support as other delegates wanted to be on the winning side. </p>
<p>Sometimes none of the early contenders was able to secure the winning total, and the convention turned to a compromise candidate instead. These late-round compromise candidates were known as “<a href="http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/polk/aa_polk_horse_3.html#:%7E:text=In%20horse%20racing%2C%20a%20%22dark,days%20old%20at%20the%20time.">dark horses</a>.” James Polk became the Democratic nominee in 1844 as one of these dark-horse candidates. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-political-parties-platforms-and-do-they-matter-141422">Party platforms</a>, encompassing the party’s positions on issues, were introduced in the 1840s.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Portrait of James Polk" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350667/original/file-20200731-15-y7a7yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350667/original/file-20200731-15-y7a7yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=834&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350667/original/file-20200731-15-y7a7yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=834&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350667/original/file-20200731-15-y7a7yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=834&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350667/original/file-20200731-15-y7a7yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1048&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350667/original/file-20200731-15-y7a7yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1048&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350667/original/file-20200731-15-y7a7yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1048&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Polk became the Democratic nominee in 1844 as the first dark-horse candidate.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/polk/aa_polk_subj_e.html">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>How Lincoln won the nomination</h2>
<p>At the <a href="https://www.greatamericanhistory.net/nomination.htm">1860 Republican convention</a>, a half-dozen potential candidates split the initial vote, although New York Senator William H. Stewart was considered the front-runner. </p>
<p>Candidate Abraham Lincoln’s strategy was to prevent Stewart’s nomination on the first ballot. Lincoln’s campaign managers would consolidate anti-Stewart delegates behind him in subsequent rounds. Lincoln’s managers won over some delegates by arguing that Lincoln was the most electable candidate, who could draw votes from farmers and businessmen as well as abolitionists. </p>
<p>While Lincoln requested that his managers not make any deals, they did promise a Cabinet position to <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/simon_cameron/402226">powerful Pennsylvania Senator Simon Cameron</a> to gain support from that state’s delegation. Lincoln’s managers also packed the public audience in Chicago with his supporters, a task made easier by the use of <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-abraham-lincoln-is-gop-nominee-in-an-upset">counterfeit public tickets</a>. </p>
<p>Lincoln won the nomination on the third round of voting.</p>
<h2>Public gets a voice</h2>
<p>In the 20th century, information about public preferences became available, which would help delegates to determine who would be their party’s most popular presidential candidate.</p>
<p>Early in the century, a handful of states adopted presidential primaries to select delegates, though most states continued to use <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/reformingthepresidentialnominationprocess_chapter.pdf">traditional methods</a> such as appointment by state or local party leaders or selection at local caucuses. Thus, the vast majority of 20th century convention delegates remained representatives of their state parties, not supporters of specific candidates.</p>
<p>An early use of presidential primaries in 1912 proved disastrous. Former <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/roosevelt/campaigns-and-elections">President Theodore Roosevelt ran for president again</a>, won 10 of the 13 presidential primaries and was favored by the progressive wing of the Republican Party. </p>
<p>But the majority of Republican convention delegates were party regulars who supported the current president William Taft instead. In addition, by this time a new norm had taken hold, to renominate sitting presidents.</p>
<p>Roosevelt <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1912-republican-convention-855607/">lost the Republican nomination</a>, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/june-22/">founded the Progressive Party in protest</a>, was nominated by that party and <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/03/11/this-years-gop-presidential-battle-isnt-the-first-or-even-the-deepest-party-divide/">split the Republican vote</a> in the fall general election, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Newspaper with headlines announcing two nominees of a split GOP." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350668/original/file-20200731-21-3ci183.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 1912, as this newspaper reports, the Republicans split over two presidential candidates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn86063758/1912-06-25/ed-1/?sp=1&st=single">University of South Carolina via Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Demise and comeback of primaries</h2>
<p>With the divisive results from the 1912 Republican convention and the waning of the Progressive Movement, which championed state adoption of primary laws, presidential primaries went out of favor. </p>
<p>In the middle of the 20th century, typically only 15 states held presidential primaries, selecting only one-third of the convention’s delegates. Few candidates ran in these presidential primaries, as primaries were not seen as a successful pathway to the nomination. </p>
<p>The public, however, still influenced presidential nominations as newly reliable public opinion polls measured support for potential nominees. In the mid-20th century, the candidate at the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/40/1/22/1836743">top of the national polls</a> almost always was nominated by the national conventions.</p>
<p>Other changes came to 20th-century conventions. Franklin Roosevelt was the first presidential nominee to attend a convention when he gave an <a href="https://www.fdrlibrary.org/dnc-curriculum-hub">acceptance speech in 1932</a>, broadcast nationally by radio. </p>
<p>Presidential primaries became somewhat more influential after World War II, when some candidates adopted a strategy of running in presidential primaries. Other candidates avoided running in primaries and relied on a traditional strategy of courting the party’s elite who would be delegates at the convention. </p>
<p>Running in presidential primaries was a risky strategy: A candidate who lost in a primary could see their presidential bid end, but even someone who won every single primary would not earn enough delegates to secure the nomination.</p>
<p>The goal of candidates entering the primaries was to convince party leaders of the candidate’s vote-winning abilities. <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/campaign-of-1960">John F. Kennedy in 1960 used primary victories</a> to convince Democratic convention delegates that he would be the most popular candidate. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1968">Hubert Humphrey, in 1968, became the last candidate</a> nominated for president without running in any of the presidential primaries.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Democratic Convention celebrates after Hillary Clinton accepted the presidential nomination July 28, 2016." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350669/original/file-20200731-16-1m643pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">It’s the party: The Democratic Convention celebrates after Hillary Clinton accepted the presidential nomination on July 28, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/balloons-and-confetti-fall-following-a-speech-by-democratic-news-photo/584453302?adppopup=true">Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>All over but the shouting</h2>
<p>Today’s conventions are ratifying rather than nominating conventions. Their main contribution is to bring the party together in support of their nominee. </p>
<p>While in the past, convention delegates chiefly represented their state’s party, <a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ELECTION-DELEGATE-TRACKER/0100B5DR3JT/index.html">today’s delegates are bound to support specific candidates</a> based on the outcomes of the presidential primaries and caucuses. </p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>By accumulating these bound delegates, a party’s presumptive nominee becomes apparent by mid- to late spring. That’s when one candidate takes a commanding lead in the delegate totals and the other candidates withdraw from the race. Even in the unusually long Democratic contests of 2008 and 2016, by the time of the last primaries in June, one candidate had already secured the support of 50% of delegates. </p>
<p>Today’s conventions also approve the presidential nominee’s choice of a running mate. As <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/0706/For-Biden-a-VP-search-fraught-with-significance">has happened with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden</a>, the selection of a presumptive presidential nominee in spring gives them plenty of time to vet potential vice presidents. </p>
<p>In addition, modern conventions sign on to <a href="https://theconversation.com/search/result?sg=fffeac47-d74b-40a3-b3a6-4ef7ea32ffa2&sp=1&sr=1&url=%2Fwhat-are-political-parties-platforms-and-do-they-matter-141422">a party platform written before the convention</a> and which has been strongly influenced by the nominee’s positions. </p>
<p>Once begun as places to make deals and deliberate on possible candidates and positions, today’s conventions are public relations events, stressing the character, issues and strong party support for the party’s presidential ticket.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142246/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Norrander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Political conventions used to pick presidential nominees in private. Now the public picks the nominee and then the party has a big party at the convention, writes a scholar of US elections.Barbara Norrander, Professor, School of Government & Public Policy, University of ArizonaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1426202020-07-31T12:22:32Z2020-07-31T12:22:32ZWhy a Canadian hockey team’s name recalls US Civil War destruction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350483/original/file-20200730-13-fp5gmd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3522%2C2340&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Czech-born goaltender for a Canadian hockey team wears a jersey recalling the 1864 burning of Atlanta, Georgia.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Flames-Predators-Hockey/a0c87ed448414065a8e72a4c6e41fae8/128/0">AP Photo/Mark Zaleski</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As the National Hockey League gets its abbreviated season back underway, a team with a name hearkening back to the Civil War will <a href="https://www.nhl.com/flames/schedule/2020-08-01/MT">take the ice</a> – in Canada.</p>
<p>In September 1864, having conquered the city of Atlanta, U.S. Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman proposed marching his army to the coastal city of Savannah, Georgia, destroying railroads, factories, farms and other major sources of Confederate power along the way. <a href="https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/rethinking-shermans-march/">Sherman’s March to the Sea</a> was an example of a military strategy called, in Sherman’s words, the “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4361/4361-h/4361-h.htm">hard hand of war</a>,” in which an army destroys not only military targets but takes supplies from the residents, leaving the civilian population demoralized and short of food and shelter.</p>
<p>In 2017, I was in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, for a conference, when I took an opportunity to see a hockey game between the Calgary Flames and the Ottawa Senators. There, as I sat high up in the seats with a beer and a burger, the word “Flames” was in the air, and a light show depicted flames on the ice and around the arena’s perimeter. I wondered if I, an early American historian, was the only person in the place thinking about how a 21st-century hockey team connected with Gen. Sherman’s 1864 Atlanta campaign and the destructive journey to Savannah.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Soldiers chop up railroad tracks and burn buildings." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350498/original/file-20200730-13-10ifgwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 1864, the Union Army destroyed railroad tracks and burned buildings in Georgia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.09326/">Alexander Hay Ritchie engraving after F.O.C. Darley drawing.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A city ablaze</h2>
<p>There were actually two conflagrations of Atlanta – one that was authorized and another that was not. </p>
<p>The Sherman-authorized burning targeted Confederate military resources, including machine shops, railroad depots and arsenals. When the fires reached munitions housed in a machine shop, the explosion made the Atlanta night “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4361/4361-h/4361-h.htm">hideous</a>,” Sherman wrote. </p>
<p>Despite orders that nonmilitary structures not be torched, Union soldiers drunk with either rage or with spirits went on to burn much more. As the fire spread, Sherman noted that “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4361/4361-h/4361-h.htm">the heart of the city was in flames all night</a>.” </p>
<p>When Sherman and his army rode out of Atlanta on the morning of November 16, 1864, he and others looked back “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4361/4361-h/4361-h.htm">upon the scenes of our past battles</a>.” There stood Atlanta, Sherman recalled, “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4361/4361-h/4361-h.htm">smouldering and in ruins</a>, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.” </p>
<p>As they left the ruined city behind, a band “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4361/4361-h/4361-h.htm">struck up the anthem</a> of ‘<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.100010565/">John Brown’s soul goes marching on</a>’; the men caught up the strain, and never before or since have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ done with more spirit, or in better harmony of time and place.” </p>
<p>Ulysses S. Grant, the Union commander who would later become the 18th president of the United States, commented in his memoirs that Gen. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-h/4367-h.htm">was managed with the most consummate skill</a>” and “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-h/4367-h.htm">was one of the most memorable in history</a>.” Grant, like others, argued that its <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-h/4367-h.htm">success contributed to Abraham Lincoln being elected</a> to a second – and, as it turned out, fatal – term. “The news of Sherman’s success reached the North instantaneously, and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-h/4367-h.htm">set the country all aglow</a>,” Grant wrote.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An 1864 photo of Atlanta, showing chimney stacks where buildings used to be." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350523/original/file-20200730-33-jpz3qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In November 1864, downtown Atlanta stood in ruins, with chimney stacks showing where buildings used to be.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2005681133/">George N. Barnard/Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Southerners, of course, saw Sherman’s fiery and destructive march differently. Southern writer Eliza Andrews, then 24, <a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/andrews/andrews.html">wrote in her journal</a> during the war that “The dwellings that were standing all showed signs of pillage, and on every plantation we saw the charred remains of the gin-house and packing-screw, while here and there, lone chimney-stacks, ‘Sherman’s Sentinels,’ told of homes laid in ashes. The infamous wretches[!]” </p>
<p>According to Sherman biographer James Lee McDonough, Sherman’s name would “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/William-Tecumseh-Sherman/">come to symbolize that terrible time in Atlanta</a>, when a deep and lasting scar, which rankles to this day, was created in the hearts of many Southerners.”</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="332" src="https://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/2365546468/" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" seamless="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<h2>A wound that still burns</h2>
<p>More than a century later, the National Hockey League decided to add a team in Atlanta, as well as one in New York. To select a name for the Atlanta team, its owner, the real-estate developer and owner of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, Tom Cousins, held a contest in 1971 that received 10,000 entries.</p>
<p>The name chosen was “Flames,” though hockey writer Stephen Laroche notes in his book “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/changing-the-game-a-history-of-nhl-expansion/oclc/967847196&referer=brief_results">Changing the Game: The History of NHL Expansion</a>,” that it got only 198 of the total ballots.</p>
<p>Even in the early 1970s the memory still burned of Union troops under Sherman’s command setting fire not only to factories, farms and warehouses but also to homes and shops in the city center that were destroyed in the unauthorized fire.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two hockey players vie for control of the puck." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350490/original/file-20200730-33-1pjyblb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In the 1970s, the Flames called Atlanta home.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Blackhawks-Flames-Mikita/f787161f5a4f4f1d8d17995650d22970/71/0">AP Photo/Joe Holloway Jr.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By bringing the Atlanta Flames into the NHL, the league began its own march into the South. It was a slow start, but the sport would eventually win over fans in the former Confederacy. In the 2020 season, the <a href="https://www.nhl.com/standings/2019/conference">NHL has teams in Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and Florida</a> – which has two.</p>
<p>A group of Canadian businessmen led by Nelson Skalbania bought the Flames and moved the team to Calgary after the 1979-1980 season. They <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/name-game-football-baseball-hockey-basketball-how-your-favorite-sports-teams-were-named/oclc/1083042707&referer=brief_results">kept the name</a> because some of the team’s new owners were in the oil industry, which is also associated with flames.</p>
<h2>Named for calamity</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A basketball player dunks." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350487/original/file-20200730-35-1fdvwcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The University of Illinois at Chicago Flames are named for a different fire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/flames-guard-braelen-bridges-with-the-slam-dunk-during-the-news-photo/1206487220?adppopup=true">Jeffrey Brown/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Naming a sports team after a destructive event may seem peculiar. Strangely, it is not – especially when it comes to destruction by fire. I’m writing from a suburb of Chicago, where the <a href="http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1740.html">Great Fire of 1871</a> killed 300 people, destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, and left homeless more than 100,000 people – a third of the city’s population. It also provided scorching monikers for the professional soccer team, the <a href="https://www.chicagofirefc.com/">Chicago Fire</a>, the <a href="https://uicflames.com/">University of Illinois at Chicago Flames</a> and the short-lived <a href="https://americanfootballdatabase.fandom.com/wiki/World_Football_League">World Football League team from Chicago</a>, also called the Fire for its one and only season in 1974.</p>
<p>Also, the <a href="https://www.nhl.com/avalanche/">Colorado Avalanche</a>, the <a href="https://www.nhl.com/hurricanes/">Carolina Hurricanes</a>, and the <a href="https://cyclones.com/">Iowa State Cyclones</a> are all named after devastating natural forces. </p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>The Atlanta Flames were unique, however, for being named after an intentional destructive event, not a <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/why-named-carolina-hurricanes-florence-sports-teams-natural-disaster-1120674">force of nature or a natural tragedy</a>.</p>
<p>The Civil War echoes elsewhere in the NHL, too, with the <a href="https://www.nhl.com/bluejackets/">Columbus Blue Jackets</a> – the only team from Sherman’s home state of Ohio – which celebrates the Blue Jackets’ goals with <a href="https://www.nhl.com/bluejackets/news/cannon-crew-blue-jackets-goal-celebration/c-305805094">booming cannon fire</a>. As professional hockey resumes across North America, even fans newly aware of the country’s struggle with the legacy of slavery may not be thinking about their Civil War history. But the team names are there to remind them anyway.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A hockey player controls the puck behind his own net." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350485/original/file-20200730-27-1mdv0mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Are the Columbus Blue Jackets still fighting for the Union?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Wild-Blue-Jackets-Hockey/1192b2b3cf574c0b8e23c135eaa07b51/116/0">AP Photo/Paul Vernon</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142620/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher J. Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A 21st-century hockey team is connected with Gen. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and the destructive journey to Savannah.Christopher J. Young, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Director of the Center for Innovation and Scholarship in Teaching and Learning, and Professor of History, Indiana UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.