Today I read this fascinating Dec 4/2023 article in the New Yorker magazine by historian Jill Lepore.
Her dramatic description of ex-president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, half-blind and worn down from two years in prison, coming into the court room in an old black coat and hat, smiling at the six freed slaves (on the jury of 18), as he was about to have his case dismissed, is equal to anything our top novelists could produce.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Though we live in a time when published fiction is weak, this is a golden age for published history. I don’t think our contemporary historians get anywhere near the attention and praise they deserve.
Fascinating too is the conundrum the U.S. government faced. Having committed to trying Davis in Richmond, Virginia, they realized that it was going to be impossible to get a conviction from a Virginia jury. So ultimately they used an easy way out, the argument of Davis’s lawyers that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (the ‘disqualification clause’ now being used in the attempt to prevent Donald Trump from running for president again). This, they said, had already punished Davis – it prevented him from running for office again (he was once a US senator), so trying him for treason in addition was redundant. The court took the easy way out and Davis walked out of the courtroom a free man.
His two years in prison, by the way, were partly due to the tactics of his lawyers, who delayed the trial as long as possible, allowing the northern public to cool off and lose interest.
Ms Lepore goes on to examine the politics of that time and this one. It only got worse after the trial. This is when the Ku Klux Klan began to take over the south. I doubt if many non-Americans are aware that in the election of Nov 1864, an election in the middle of the war that many thought Lincoln would lose because of his refusal to consider a negotiated settlement, he chose a democrat, Andrew Johnson as his vice-president running-mate. So when Lincoln was assassinated, democrat Johnson became president and soft-pedalled the emancipation of slaves in the south. Only when general Ulysses Grant took over the presidency in 1868, was the Ku Klux Klan, etc brought under some control by means of a second invasion of the south by the US Army.
Jill Lepore sees the trial of Jefferson Davis and the upcoming trials of Donald Trump as politically closely related, as if there had been no time in between. She thinks the current Department of Justice needs to learn from the Jefferson Davis fiasco.
If Donald Trump gets re-elected, how long will it be before new versions of the Klan begin operations?
The USA never really has recovered from the Civil War. That country is a crucial world leader. If it can survive the next ten years, I suspect that the healing that has struggled for a century and a half to close those wounds may finally succeed. So this is important to us all, no matter where in the world we live. Here is a link to the full article:
Alan Conrad 