The Assassination of President Lincoln Continues to Reverberate and Haunt America

As we celebrate the joyful mystery of Easter, let's remember the greatest American, who died on April 15, 1865. It is vital now, when some Americans, foolish or unpatriotic, are trying to erase the memories of the Civil War that serve to remind us of the great struggle to free slaves and establish the ascendancy of the Union that the Founders had fought so hard to establish. • THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN. On April 14,1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. At 10:15 p.m., Booth slipped into the box and fired his .44-caliber single-shot derringer pistol into the back of Lincoln’s head. After stabbing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt onto the stage and shouted, “Sic semper Tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!” -- the Virginia state motto), adding "the South is avenged." At 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, died from the bullet wound, becoming the first US President to be assassinated. His body was taken to the White House, where it lay until April 18, when it was carried to the Capitol Rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. On April 21, Lincoln’s body was taken to the railroad station and boarded on a train that carried it to Springfield, Illinois, his home before becoming President. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the train’s railroad route and paid their respects in hushed silence to their fallen leader during the train’s solemn progression through the North. Lincoln was buried on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield. • LINCOLN'S LAST SPEECH. Four days before his death, on April 11, 1865 -- and two days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House -- President Lincoln gave his last speech from the window above the North Portico of the White House. As consolation for not speaking to the crowd gathered in front of the White House on April 10, Lincoln promised to speak the next day and issued a special request for the Marine band : “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it.” As the crowd laughed and cheered, Lincoln added, “It is good to show the rebels that with us they will be free to hear it again.” • Today's revisionist fools who are trying to erase history should think about that encompassing gesture. • The thousands who were jubilantly celebrating the Union victory expected a celebratory tone from the President when they gathered to hear him, as he had promised, on April 11. Lincoln waited several minutes for the noise to subside. His friend, journalist Noah Brooks, then held up a single candle to illuminate Lincoln’s prepared text. But, Lincoln spoke not of celebration but of the seemingly insurrmountabl problems of rebuilding the Union that had so painfully been saved -- how to incorporate millions of newly freed slaves, along with their former Confederate owners, whom many Northerners believed should be punished for their failed rebellion. • Lincoln described the dilemma : “We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier, to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.” • The boisterous crowd fell silent as Lincoln delivered his remarks. Most of his speech dealt with specifics about the recently established free-state government in Louisiana, which Lincoln hoped could serve as a model for other former Confederate states during Reconstruction. Critics (especially abolitionist Radical Republicans) were attacking Louisiana’s government, especially because it didn’t extend the right to vote to blacks. Lincoln chided them and also those who were determined to remove all local powers from the former Confederate states : “Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. The amount of constituency, so to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all, if it contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand, instead of only about twelve thousand, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers. Still the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is `Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it? Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State Government?' ” • For the first time, Lincoln publicly expressed his support for limited black suffrage, which he had previously discussed only in private because of the constraints imposed by his leadership of the War as Commander-in-Chief. After concluding with the strange statement that he might be on the verge of making “some new announcement to the people of the South,” Lincoln withdrew, leaving many in the audience disappointed. The speech didn’t go over well with Lincoln’s critics, either : Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the leading Radical, claimed the President was only promoting “confusion and uncertainty in the future -- with hot controversy.” • And, that "hot controversy," coming from the President who had set out to save the Union even if it required Civil War, is important because of Lincoln’s rejection of federal control in the southern states. In fact, his plea was for states' rights to govern Reconstruction, allowing the South to find its own way back into full integration with the Union. • As it turned out, Lincoln wouldn’t get the chance to put more of his Reconstruction policies into effect. One member of the crowd outside the White House that night was the handsome young actor John Wilkes Booth, who hissed to his companion about Lincoln’s address : “That means n—- citizenship! Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” • • • PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON AND RECONSTRUCTION. In the two years following the assassination of President Lincoln at the end of the Civil War in April 1865, Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson angered many northerners and Republican members of Congress with his conciliatory policies towards the defeated South. Johnson was a southerner, a former Tennessee Governor and US Senator. He was the only southern Senator to remain loyal to the Union in 1861 when the Civil War began, and was chosen by Lincoln as his Vice President running mate in 1864, although Johnson was a Jackson Democrat who supported slavery but who opposed secession. Once in office qfter Lincoln's death, Johnson focused on quickly restoring the southern states to the Union. He granted amnesty to most former Confederates and allowed the rebel states to elect new governments that often included ex-Confederate officials, who soon enacted black codes -- measures designed to control and repress the recently freed slave population. When the US Congress convened in December 1865, it refused to seat the newly elected southern members, and Johnson found himself at odds with the abolitionist Radical Republicans, who viewed the president’s approach to Reconstruction as too lenient. In 1866, Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill and the Civil Rights bill, legislation aimed at protecting blacks. That same year, when Congress passed the 14th Amendment granting citizenship to blacks, the President urged southern states not to ratify it -- although ratification came in July 1868. During the 1866 congressional elections, Johnson launched a multiple-city speaking campaign, in which he tried to win support for his Reconstruction policies. The tour proved to be a failure, and the Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress and set about enacting their own Reconstruction measures. Hostilities between President Johnson and Congress continued to mount, and in February 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Johnson. Among the 11 charges, he was accused of violating the Tenure of Office Act by suspending Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (1814-1869), who opposed Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. In May 1868, the Senate acquitted Johnson of the charges by one vote. • Johnson did not run for re-election in 1868. He had hoped the Democrats would choose him as their presidential nominee, but they opted instead for Horatio Seymour (1810-1886), a former governor of New York. Civil War hero Ulysses Grant, the Republican candidate, won the election and became the 18th US President. • African Americans made up the overwhelming majority of southern Republican voters during Reconstruction. Beginning in 1867, they formed a coalition with northern carpetbaggers who moved South either to profit form the post-Civil War chaos or to be reformers wanting to reshape the South into a new North because they believed the North was a more advanced society (one-sixth of the electorate) and southern scalawags (one-fifth), who were non-slaveholders who had sided with the Union and during Reconstruction wanted either to profit from the chaos or to keep the hated “rebels” from regaining power in the postwar South by developing the region’s economy and ensuring the survival of its debt-ridden small farms by gaining control of southern state legislatures for the Republican Party. • Congress’ passage of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 marked the beginning of the Radical Reconstruction period, which would last through the 1870s. That legislation divided the South into five military districts and outlined how new state governments based on universal (male) suffrage -- for both whites and blacks -- were to be organized. The new state legislatures formed in 1867-69 reflected the revolutionary changes brought about by the Civil War and emancipation : For the first time, blacks and whites stood together in political life. But, southern secessionists opposed the influence of northerners and freed slaves as they watched their way of life being brutally uprooted by northern and southern Republicans who shared a modernizing vision of upgrading the southern economy and society, one that would replace the inefficient southern plantation system with railroads, factories, and more efficient farming. They actively promoted public schooling and created numerous colleges and universities. As an example, Northerners were especially successful in taking control of southern railroads, aided by state legislatures. In 1870, Northerners controlled 21% of the South's railroads (by mileage) -- 19% of the directors were from the North. By 1890, they controlled 88% of the mileage and 47% of the directors were from the North. • Abraham Lincoln's death was the event that changed the course of American history irrevocably and for the worse, as Lincoln's immense presence was removed at the exact moment when the Nation first engaged in discussion about how to heal the wounds of the Civil War -- the foremost of which was the immense issue of how to treat freed slaves ("Freedmen"). During the Civil War, on August 22, 1862, a few weeks before signing the Emancipation Proclamation and after he had already discussed a draft of it with his cabinet in July, President Lincoln wrote a famous letter in response to an editorial by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune which had urged complete abolition. Lincoln differentiates between "my view of official duty" -- that is, what he can do in his official capacity as President -- and his personal views. Officially he must save the Union above all else; personally he wanted to free all the slaves : "I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was.' If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free." • Also revealing was his letter a year later to James C. Conkling, an Illinois Whig politician, on August 26, 1863, which included the following excerpt : "I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive -- even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept....Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they strove to hinder it." • Much has also been made in some quarters by the notion that Lincoln wanted to send freed slaves back to Africa. That is false. As President, on July 14, 1862, Lincoln sent a bill to Congress that allowed the Treasury to issue bonds at 6% interest to states for slave emancipation compensation to the slave owners. The bill was never voted on by Congress. But, as late as the Hampton Roads Conference in 1865, Lincoln met with Confederate leaders and proposed a "fair indemnity," possibly $500,000,000, in compensation for emancipated slaves. The correlative idea of colonization of freed slaves was long seen by many as an answer to the problem of slavery. And, one of President Lincoln's policies during his administration was the VOLUNTARY colonization of African American Freedmen. But, he firmly opposed compulsory colonization, and in one instance ordered the Secretary of War to bring some colonized blacks back to the United States. • • • SOUTHERN DEMOCRAT ASCENDANCY AND JIM CROW LAWS. After his assassination, Abraham Lincoln's conciliatory, practical and large-hearted expression of brotherhood was replaced by the views of those who descended on the South to uproot its culture and destroy its sense of self-worth. The wounds of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which ended in 1877, have never been properly healed and America continues to suffer from the tragic war that was necessary to save it as a Union, but that divided it as a people, a division that remains today. During Reconstruction, 1865 - 1877, Republican political leaders passed federal laws that provided civil rights protections in the South for Freedmen, the African Americans who had formerly been slaves, and former free blacks. • But, in the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in southern legislatures, having used insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, to disrupt Republican organizing, run Republican officeholders out of town, and intimidate blacks to suppress their voting. Extensive voter fraud was also used. In 1877, a national Democratic Party compromise to gain southern support in the presidential election resulted in the government's withdrawing the last of the federal troops from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every southern state. These southern, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, officially segregating black people from the white population. Blacks were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote but gave no relief to most blacks. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures. In Louisiana, by 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5% of eligible black men. The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 1896–1904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other southern states, there were also the effects of invisibility. Within a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians. Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. For instance, even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate in sports or recreation, a segregated culture had become common. • In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of black Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted European Americans from meeting the requirements. Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat elected from New Jersey, but he was the first southern-born president of the post-Civil War period. He appointed southerners to his Cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated workplaces, although Washington, DC, and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo -- an appointee of President Wilson -- was heard to express his opinion of black and white women working together in one government office : "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?" Wilson introduced segregation in federal offices, despite much protest from African-American leaders and groups. He appointed segregationist southern politicians because of his own firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of black and European Americans alike. At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, the 50th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal", Wilson addressed the crowd : "How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men!" One historian noted that the "Peace Jubilee" at which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies." The Civil Rights Act of 1875, introduced by Charles Sumner and Benjamin F. Butler, stipulated a guarantee that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in public accommodations, such as inns, public transportation, theaters, and other places of recreation, but an 1883 Supreme Court decision ruled that the act was unconstitutional in some respects, saying Congress was not afforded control over private persons or corporations. With white southern Democrats forming a solid voting bloc in Congress, because of their having outsized power to keep seats apportioned for the total population in the South (although hundreds of thousands had been disenfranchised), Congress did not pass another civil rights law until 1957. • After World War II, African Americans increasingly challenged segregation, as they believed they had fully earned the right to be treated as full citizens because of their military service and sacrifices. The Civil Rights Movement was energized by a number of flashpoints, including the 1946 blinding of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard while he was in US Army uniform. In 1948 President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed services. As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and used federal courts to attack Jim Crow statutes, the European-dominated governments of many of the southern states countered by passing alternative forms of restrictions. The NAACP Legal Defense Committee (a group that became independent of the NAACP) -- and its lawyer, Thurgood Marshall who was destined to become the first black US Supreme Court Justice -- brought the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) before the Supreme Court. In its pivotal 1954 decision, the Court unanimously found that legally mandated (de jure) public school segregation was unconstitutional, but de jure segregation was not brought to an end until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. • The Jim Crow laws and the high rate of lynchings in the South were major factors which lead to the Great Migration during the first half of the 20th century. Because opportunities were so limited in the South, African Americans moved in great numbers to northern cities to seek better lives, becoming an urbanized population ill-prepared ot cope with either the north or life in big cities. • • • DEAR READERS, there are now severe racial tensions in the United States. The problems of poor education and joblessness caused by official indifference, the drug epidemic among young black Americans (and perhaps among young whites as well), and the cynical organization of black Americans for Progressive purposes tied to destroying constitutional America, and the fear of the American white majority for its safety as these organized young black Americans attack police and refuse to follow the norms of protest and compromise -- these issues are real. They must be addressed if America is ever again to see racial peace. But, as Lincoln said, "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel....And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling." His point would be well-taken today. It is not the President who can solve every racial problem. It is Americans, black and white, coming together, who will solve the critical issues related to race in America. • So, as we celebrate Easter, spare a thought for Mr. Lincoln and his hopes for an America united and free, full of the brotherhood that allows for individual and regional differences instead of today's nonsensical drive toward revisionist uniformity concerning the Civil War and the ruthless use of race as a tool to divide and pit Americans against each other. • "What if..." the "What If" related to the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln continues to haunt America.