Americans are likely to think of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as a time to celebrate the fresh start that a new year represents, but there is also a troubling side to the holiday’s history. In the years before the Civil War, the first day of the new year was often a heartbreaking one for enslaved people in the United States.
In the African-American community, New Year’s Day used to be widely known as “Hiring Day” — or “Heartbreak Day,”
Abraham Lincoln was more than just a foe of slavery. He was also a mixed-race eugenicist, believing that the intermarriage of blacks and whites would yield an American super-race.
Or at least, that’s what newspapers in 1864 would have had you believe. The charge isn’t true. But this miscegenation hoax still “damn near sank Lincoln that year,” in a tough re-election campaign amidst a bloody civil war when he and his Republican party were blindsided.
The “leading Republican journal of the country is the unblushing advocate of ‘miscegenation,’ which it ranks with the highest questions of social and political philosophy,” wrote the New York World, a Democratic paper. The miscegenation pamphlet was perhaps American history’s most successful fake news campaign.
The parallels to today are easy to see. Back then, telegraphs and other technological changes let news spread swiftly and gave rise to more starkly partisan newspapers. Public trust in government was in tatters. With little consensus or authority over the truth, the purest gauge of veracity was gut feeling. And in an America so deeply divided—especially over differences about race—what tended to feel real were stories that confirmed fears and biases.
How Civil War commanders wore their facial hair, in one chart:
More than 90 percent of commanders studied had some kind of facial hair, most sporting either the long beard or the short beard. Very few went with muttonchops or a goatee. However, there were some significant differences between North and South here.
When Abraham Lincoln became president in 1861, five former presidents were still alive.Chris DeRose tells how this ex-Presidents’ Club maneuvered, plotted, advised, and aided during the Civil War. DeRose’s book The Presidents’ War: Six American Presidents and The Civil War That Divided Them explores the stories of the ex-presidents who remained active, influential, and occasionally treacherous as the Union sought to save itself.
We are currently enjoying a master class in the art of political stupidity. Donald J. Trump has been schooling us for some time, but the Iran nuclear deal has touched off a new race to the bottom. Mike Huckabee said the agreement with Iran would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Ted Cruz called the Obama administration “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” Let’s not even get started on the Affordable Care Act, which Ben Carson once called “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
It’s tempting to rail against the media’s ability to elicit and amplify such stupidity. But none of this is new. Politicians have always resorted to dumb claims, blatant insults, bold exaggerations and baldfaced lies to gain press coverage and win votes.
Historian Joanne Freeman takes the long view on political shenanigans and tomfoolery in America.
To millions of Americans, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, Lee is a role model and Grant is—despite his gifted generalship and consequential presidency—an embarrassment. What happened? How did the hero of the war become a quasi-ignominious figure, and how did the champion of Southern slavery become, if not the war’s hero, its most popular figure?
Jamelle Bouie tackles this vexing question.
Smith’s book forces us to set aside our lofty notions about the war and regard it from a human perspective. “This war was a war about some of the greatest and most noble ideals in American history,” Smith told me in an interview. “This was about freedom, questions of national identity, questions of sovereignty, questions of personal liberty. And I’m not denying all of that. What I am saying is that we have to be very careful not to elevate those noble questions so much that they cloud or occlude our understanding of war.” Sensory history, Smith said, is one way to help us understand how it would have felt to be there
This letter is a summary of a conversation which President Abraham Lincoln had with three Kentuckians: Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, Albert Hodges, and Archibald Dixon. Hodges was the editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth and Dixon served in the U.S. Senate from 1852 to 1855. Bramlette had protested the recruiting of black regiments in Kentucky.
The letter offers an excellent glimpse into Lincoln’s thinking about his constitutional responsibility and why he changed his inaugural position of non-interference with slavery to one of emancipation. He said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
Lincoln closed with a reference to slavery that is reminiscent of his second inaugural address of 1865: “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”
IN THE AFTERMATH of the Battle of Gettysburg, both sides, leaving fifty thousand dead or wounded or missing behind them, had reason to maintain a large pattern of pretense—Lee pretending that he was not taking back to the South a broken cause, Meade that he would not let the broken pieces fall through his fingers. It would have been hard to predict that Gettysburg, out of all this muddle, these missed chances, all the senseless deaths, would become a symbol of national purpose, pride, and ideals. Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strange—and he did it with 272 words. The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration.
Historian Garry Wills explores The significance of the Gettysburg Address
Thomas Nast was perhaps the most famous artist to marry Christmas and the Civil War [PDF], but other commercial artists of lesser distinction followed suit. This large engraving, by popular Boston publisher Louis Prang & Company, opts for a more positive, universal vision of Christmas spirit across the land. The overflowing frame holds domestic scenes of boys and girls in bed, a tabletop Christmas tree “within” the house and a sleigh-ride “without,” and a smiling Santa Claus holding a steaming figgy pudding and what might be a bowl of warm punch.
In 1836, cotton from the South accounted for 59 percent of this country’s exports. Effectively, in the run up to the Civil War, our leading export was produced by slave labor. This cotton enriched our country financially and powered us into the modern world. “Whoever says industrial revolution,” wrote the historian Eric Hobsbawm, “must say cotton.”
The men and women who grew this cotton not only enriched through their labor, but through their very flesh. At the onset of the Civil War enslaved black people were valued at $3 billion, more than all the factories, railroads, and the productive capacity of America combined. This wealth was traded throughout the South regularly, and that trade enriched America even further.
It’s hard to argue with the Gettysburg Address. But in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?
“We’ve decided the Civil War is a ‘good war’ because it destroyed slavery,” says Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina. “I think it’s an indictment of 19th century Americans that they had to slaughter each other to do that.”
…Recent scholarship has also cast new light on the scale and horror of the nation’s sacrifice. Soldiers in the 1860s didn’t wear dog tags, the burial site of most was unknown, and casualty records were sketchy and often lost. Those tallying the dead in the late 19th century relied on estimates and assumptions to arrive at a figure of 618,000, a toll that seemed etched in stone until just a few years ago.
But J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has used sophisticated analysis of census records to revise the toll upward by 20%, to an estimated 750,000, a figure that has won wide acceptance from Civil War scholars.
Read the Atlantic’s reassessment of the Civil War
Last week, Frederick Douglass — who escaped slavery at 20 years old and whose words would help bring an end to the institution — was honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Emancipation Hall in Washington, D.C. In the 1960s and ’70s, far left activists like Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party and Angela Davis of Communist Party USA incorporated Douglass’ call to agitation in their various causes’ platforms. Yet in a fascinating turnaround, the brilliant abolitionist, writer and orator is developing a new – and perhaps, unexpected – political identity: Tea Party hero.
The recent rise in interest in Douglass by conservatives stems from their belief that his life epitomizes the self-reliance they champion, and his writings help provide justification for small government. It may be surprising to some that the fiery, black radical abolitionist of the 19th century, who once called Fourth of July celebrations “a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages,” could be inspiring to a Tea Party patriot. Or that social conservatives could find common cause with the man who bitterly attacked America’s Christianity as “a lie.” But that is exactly what is happening.
…But as Republican Speaker John Boehner took the stage, leading the ceremony that pushes Frederick Douglass deeper into icon status, calling Douglass “one of the greatest Americans who ever lived,” it became less clear than ever who will win the battle to claim the legacy of Frederick Douglass.
One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally “docile” or “content and loyal,” thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleon’s army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom.
As the historian Herbert Aptheker informs us in American Negro Slave Revolts, no one put this dishonest, nakedly pro-slavery argument more baldly than the Harvard historian James Schouler in 1882, who attributed this spurious conclusion to ” ‘the innate patience, docility, and child-like simplicity of the negro’ ” who, he felt, was an ” ‘imitator and non-moralist,’ ” learning ” ‘deceit and libertinism with facility,’ ” being ” ‘easily intimidated, incapable of deep plots’ “; in short, Negroes were ” ‘a black servile race, sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient to the whip, children in imagination.’ ”
Shortly before the 1860 presidential election The Atlantic’s editor, James Russell Lowell, came out in support of Abraham Lincoln, whom he commended as a “statesman” and a powerful voice against the spread of slavery. He predicted, accurately, that the election would prove to be “a turning-point in our history.”
Frederick Douglass called it “a sacred effort,” and Lincoln himself thought that his Second Inaugural, which offered a theodicy of the Civil War, was better than the Gettysburg Address. Garry Wills elaborates…
When Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg were working on the film Lincoln, they had many conversations with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Her book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is about Lincoln’s relationship with his cabinet. Both her book and the film showcase Lincoln’s remarkable political skills.
When Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, he appointed three men who’d competed with him for the Republican presidential nomination to his cabinet: New York Sen. William H. Seward, Ohio Gov. Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s distinguished elder statesman Edward Bates.
In Team of Rivals Goodwin recounts the life and work of our 16th president and his relationship with these powerful men.
Goodwin won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, No Ordinary Time, about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She has also written books about Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys.
A Poet?
A Genuine Poet?
A Racist?
Gay?
Gay? (lots of gay insinuations)
Prohibitionist?
A War Criminal?…
or Creative in Punishment?
Best played by Louis C.K?
Or Daniel Day Louis? was Spielberg Accurate?
In love with a mentally ill woman?
An Emancipator?
Ah, the nuances of Lincoln.
America’s deadliest day, as witnessed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, William McKinley, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Clara Barton