Tag: jefferson davis
How Trump’s Criminality Harkens Back To The Violence Of The Confederacy

How Trump’s Criminality Harkens Back To The Violence Of The Confederacy

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Donald Trump broke new ground as the first president—the first American, period—to be impeached twice. However, thinking of him solely in those terms fails by a long shot to capture how truly historic his crimes were. Forget the number of impeachments—and certainly don't be distracted by pathetic, partisan scoundrels voting to acquit—The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote (Twice) is the only president to incite a violent insurrection aimed at overthrowing our democracy—and get away with it.

But reading those words doesn't fully and accurately describe the vile nature of what Trump wrought on Jan. 6. In this case, to paraphrase the woman who should've been the 45th president, it takes a video.

Although it's difficult, I encourage anyone who hasn't yet done so to watch the compilation of footage the House managers presented on the first day of the impeachment trial. It left me shaking with rage. Those thugs wanted not just to defile a building, but to defile our Constitution. They sought to overturn an election in which many hadn't even botheredthemselves to vote.

What was their purpose? In their own words, as they screamed while storming the Capitol: "Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!" Those were the exact same words they had chanted shortly beforehand during the speech their leader gave at the Ellipse. He told them to fight for him, and they told him they would. And then they did.

Many of those fighting for Trump were motivated by a white Christian nationalist ideology of hate—hatred of liberals, Jews, African Americans, and other people of color. Most of that Trumpist mob standsdiametrically opposed to the ideals that really do make America great—particularly the simple notion laid down in the Declaration of Independence that, after nearly 250 years, we've still yet to fully realize: All of us are created equal. The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was but another battle in our country's long-running race war.

As Rev. William Barber explained just a few days ago: "White supremacy, though it may be targeted at Black people, is ultimately against democracy itself." He added: "This kind of mob violence, in reaction to Black, brown, and white people coming together and voting to move the nation forward in progressive ways, has always been the backlash."

Barber is right on all counts. White supremacy's centuries-long opposition to true democracy in America is also the through-line that connects what Trump has done since Election Day and on Jan. 6 to his true historical forebears in our history. Not the other impeached presidents, whose crimes—some more serious than others—differed from those of Trump not merely by a matter of degree, but in their very nature. Even Richard Nixon, as dangerous to the rule of law as his actions were, didn't encourage a violent coup. That's how execrable Trump is; Tricky Dick comes out ahead by comparison.

Instead, Trump's true forebears are the violent white supremacists who rejected our democracy to preserve their perverted racial hierarchy: the Southern Confederates. It's no coincidence that on Jan. 6 we saw a good number of Confederate flags unfurled at the Capitol on behalf of the Insurrectionist-in-Chief. As many, including Penn State history professor emeritus William Blair, have noted: "The Confederate flag made it deeper into Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, than it did during the Civil War."

As for that blood-soaked, intra-American conflict—after Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, 11 Southern states refused to accept the results because they feared it would lead to the end of slavery. They seceded from the Union and backed that action with violence. Led by their president, Jefferson Davis, they aimed to achieve through the shedding of blood what they could not at the ballot box: to protect their vision of a white-dominated society in which African Americans were nothing more than property.

Some, of course, will insist the Civil War began for other reasons, like "states' rights," choosing to skip right past the words uttered, just after President Lincoln's inauguration, by Alexander Stephens, who would soon be elected vice president of the Confederacy. Stephens describedthe government created by secessionists thusly: "Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

In the speech he gave at his 1861 inauguration, Lincoln accurately diagnosed secession as standing in direct opposition to democracy.

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Davis, Stephens, and the rest of the Confederates spent four long years in rebellion against democracy and racial equality. In 1865, Lincoln was sworn in for a second term. On the ballot the previous year had been his vision, laid out at Gettysburg, of a war fought so that our country might become what it had long claimed to be, namely a nation built on the promise of liberty and equality for every American. Lincoln's vision won the election. He planned to lead the Union to final victory and, hopefully, bring that vision to life. Instead, John Wilkes Booth shot the 16th president to death.

Why did Booth commit that violent act, one that sought to remove a democratically elected president? Look at his own written words: "This country was formed for the white, not for the black man. And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution. I for one, have ever considered (it) one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation."

As author and Washington College historian Adam Goodheart explains, Booth was "motivated by politics and he was especially motivated by racism, by Lincoln's actions to emancipate the slaves and, more immediately, by some of Lincoln's statements that he took as meaning African Americans would get full citizenship." When Booth opened fire, his gun was aimed at not just one man, but at the notion of a multiracial, egalitarian democracy itself.

Trump may not have pulled a trigger, bashed a window, or attacked any police officers while wearing a flag cape, but he shares the same ideology, motive, and mindset as his anti-democratic, white supremacist forebears. They didn't like the result of an election, and were ready and willing to use violence to undo it. Secession, assassination, insurrection. These are three sides of a single triangle.

I hope, for the sake of our country and the world, we never have another president like Donald Trump. I hope we as a people—or at least enough of us—have learned that we cannot elect an unprincipled demagogue as our leader.

A person without principle will never respect, let alone cherish, the Constitution or the democratic process. A person without principle can only see those things as a means to gain or maintain a hold on power. A person without principle believes the end always justifies the means.

That's who Trump is: a person without principle. That's why he lied for two months after Election Day, why he called for his MAGA minions to come to Washington on the day Joe Biden's victory was to be formally certified in Congress, and why he incited an insurrection on that day to prevent that certification from taking place. His forces sought nothing less than the destruction of American democracy.

For those crimes, Trump was impeached, yes. But those crimes are far worse than those committed by any other president. Regardless of the verdict, those crimes will appear in the first sentence of his obituary. They are what he will be remembered for, despite the cowardice of his GOP enablers. Forever.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

It Has Always Been About Slavery

It Has Always Been About Slavery

“Our new government is founded 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.”
— Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, 1861

As if he had not already dumped enough fuel on a raging inferno, President Donald Trump has now taken up common cause with the Lost Cause: the historically inaccurate, myth-driven campaign to sanctify the Confederacy. The president was apparently not satisfied with merely showing his sympathy for white supremacists, insisting that their ranks include some “very fine people.”

A day or so later, he went on Twitter to bash the movement to take down Confederate monuments and statues — though he had previously said those decisions should be left to local authorities. Trump tweeted that he was “sad” to see the “history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

That is nonsense — sanitized blather that is widely repeated among Confederate sympathizers and apologists for Southern secession. As a Southerner born and bred, I’ve heard those arguments my entire life. And I’ve walked past elaborate memorials to men who preferred a broken, war-scarred land to a nation where black men and women could be free to own their bodies and their labor.

Neither history nor culture would be “ripped apart” by the removal of Confederate statues to museums, where they belong. Instead, the civic fabric can begin to mend when memorials to secessionists are removed from public spaces.

The mythology that honors those Confederate icons is as elaborate as it is false, with tentacles that extend through generations. There are, indeed, many “very fine people” among those who wish to keep such memorials in place, who continue to defend Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis as patriots. They don’t wish to wrest citizenship away from black and Jewish Americans, but they cannot admit that their ancestors supported the horrific institution of slavery.

But those who insist on honoring the mythology of the Lost Cause should consider this: White supremacists see the Confederacy for what it was. They know that Lee and Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest and P.G.T. Beauregard fought to preserve an institution that kept black men and women in bondage — never paid for their labor, whipped and beaten at the whim of their masters, their children and spouses sold off for profit.

That’s why so many rebel flags hover over white nationalist rallies; that’s why neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the Traditionalist Worker Party and other hate groups gathered at Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Lee. They weren’t there just to defend a piece of bronze. They were there to defend the ideology for which Lee was prepared to give his life — the South’s right to enslave men and women of African heritage.

Since Reconstruction, Confederate sympathizers have been about the business of constructing a competing narrative about the Civil War built on “alternative facts” — otherwise known as lies. They claim that the secessionists wanted to protect the South against “Northern aggression.” They insist the war was waged to defend states’ rights. (The states’ right to do what?)

According to Vice News, there are more than 1,500 Confederate memorials scattered throughout the country, most of them, as you might expect, in the 11 states of the Old Confederacy or border states such as Kentucky. A few, however, are in the Northeast, the Midwest and even the Far West.

Most of those memorials were erected long after the war ended — between 1890 and 1940, according to historians. That’s no coincidence: Those statues began to rise after Union troops pulled out of the South and white supremacists began to assume power once again. The KKK was created, Jim Crow laws were passed, and the lynching of innocent black people became commonplace. That’s what those statues commemorate.

If we are going to honor history, let’s do that. Let’s honor the facts, the sordid truth, the ugly reality: The Confederacy was built on a defense of the institution of slavery — an insistence that the white race was morally and intellectually superior and ordained by God to rule over the black race.
David Duke knows that. That’s why he was in Charlottesville.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

University Of Texas Moves Statue Of Confederate President Jefferson Davis

University Of Texas Moves Statue Of Confederate President Jefferson Davis

(Reuters) — The statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis was moved from its prominent place on the University of Texas campus in Austin on Sunday, according to footage published on social media and by local Austin American-Statesman newspaper.

Crews could be seen in the images and videos wrapping the larger-than-life bronze figure and using a large forklift to remove it from its pedestal.

The university said the figure would be refurbished and moved to an exhibit in the school’s Briscoe Center for American History within the next 18 months.

The southern Confederacy seceded from the United States, in large part to defend the practice of slavery, prompting the bloody 1861-65 U.S. Civil War.

A wave of opposition to the display of Confederate symbols in public places swept the United States after nine black people were murdered in a South Carolina church on June 17 by a white man who was pictured on social media with the Confederate battle flag.

The campus has several monuments to the Confederacy and its leaders, which will remain on public display, due in large part to a wealthy benefactor named George Washington Littlefield, who fought in the Civil War with “Terry’s Texas Rangers.”

Littlefield donated money to the university on the stipulation that the Southern heritage of Texas be preserved. The University of Texas at Austin opened in 1883.

A statue of Woodrow Wilson, the nation’s 28th president, was also removed from its location on Sunday, though its new home has not yet been determined, according to the school.

University of Texas President Gregory Fenves said earlier this month that the figure would be removed to “preserve the symmetry” of the main mall area where the statues stood.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Photo: Jefferson Davis statue at the University of Texas, Austin campus. Keith Ewing via Flickr.

Endorse This: ‘I Have Heard Enough About Heritage!’

Endorse This: ‘I Have Heard Enough About Heritage!’

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On the South Carolina House floor, debate raged long into the night over a series of amendments introduced to thwart and delay passage of a bill to bring the Confederate flag off the State House grounds. An impassioned plea to pass the bill — unchanged — came from an unlikely corner: Jenny Horne, a Republican House member and descendant of Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis.

With tears in her eyes, screaming at times, Horne implored her fellow state lawmakers to pass the bill without delay. “I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday. And if any of you vote to amend, you are ensuring that this flag will fly beyond Friday!”

Watch Horne’s speech in full — an extraordinary appeal for progress, reconciliation, and Southern pride at its best.

“I have heard enough about heritage!” she said. “I have a heritage. I am a lifelong South Carolinian. I am a descendant of Jefferson Davis. Okay? But that does not matter. It’s not about Jenny Horne. It’s about the people of South Carolina who have demanded that this symbol of hate come off of the State House grounds!”

Video viaC-SPAN.

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