One President won a national election only to see a large portion of the country outright refuse to participate in our democracy rather than accept the result. That president was Abraham Lincoln.
But Lincoln concluded that those who conspired in an illegal plan to undo the American experiment in democracy had to be permanently banished from politics. It’s a lesson future Presidents and Republicans should not forget.
Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election was controversial because of his opposition to slavery. No one claimed the 1860 election result was fraudulent but most Southern states simply left Lincoln’s name off the ballot. The aftermath of Lincoln’s victory led to a civil war.
In the 2020 election, largely because of the damaged ego of a highly narcissistic candidate, a large reactionary Republican faction rejected the election loss.
Lincoln faced a violent rebellion that caused armed conflict. What Biden faces today is more difficult because of an effort to subvert the rules of democracy.
Because Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the Confederacy surrendered, we will never know how Lincoln would have governed during reconstruction. But Lincoln considered his legitimacy as the democratic leader of the entire nation to be beyond question and did not hesitate to send men to die for that principle to preserve the Union. He also advocated a carrot-and-stick approach, going relatively easy on most defeated rebels below the highest-ranking political and military leaders, and making it relatively easy for Southern states to begin governing themselves again once they accepted the abolition of slavery.
Congress also addressed this question directly by enacting laws to prevent former Confederate leaders from acquiring power after the Civil War provides a good lesson for our time. They enacted laws stopping those who would commit violence against a democratic government.
The Civil War provides a good lesson for stopping those who would commit violence against a democratic government.
One of the most pertinent statutes was (18 U.S. Code § 2383, which makes it illegal to incite, assist, or participate in a rebellion or insurrection against U.S. laws and authority. The punishment for insurrection can include a fine, up to 10 years in federal prison, and ineligibility for public office. This principle that involvement in direct insurrection or rebellion must lead to being exiled from politics was also added to the Constitution itself and with the addition of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to our Constitution.
- The 13th amendment to the US Constitution provides that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
- The 14th Amendment §3 gives Congress the authority to bar public officials who took an oath of allegiance to the US Constitution from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution. “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
- The 15th Amendment prohibits the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
President Lincoln understood these dangers posed by insurrectionists and separationists in1860 and the particular danger from Congress. But yet he didn’t bend, negotiate or surrender the Union.
Unfortunately, more than 170 years later we have Republicans from Lincoln’s party trying the same thing that Southern politicians tried in1860 which is trying to divide the Country and cast doubt and confusion over our free and honest election.
The New York Times reports that five Congressmen —
- Jim Jordan of Ohio
- Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona
- Louis Gohmert of Texas and
- Mo Brooks of Alabama
- Pennsylvania’s Scott Perry, who is described by the Times as the coordinator of the plans to replace the attorney general with Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer.
— all worked to overturn the election They all worked closely with one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows, the former North Carolina congressman who served as Trump’s chief of staff.
The political question is one of self-preservation rather than principle. To what degree can a democracy tolerate the actions of those who wish to destroy it? How much defiance and resistance is permissible before democratic institutions lose all meaningful authority?
We know one thing for sure that President Lincoln acted decisively to save the Union and democracy and he never hesitated to save the Union. In the next four years, we will see if the Republican Party is still the Party of Lincoln or Trump.
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I agree with AZ BlueMeanie but the length of my article “How Lincoln Dealt With Insurrections” didn’t allow me to also include the after affects cause by Lincolns death. I would have included this: After Lincoln’s death, nothing went according to plan. The new president, Andrew Johnson, was a Southerner and an overt white supremacist. He had opposed secession, but in every other way was sympathetic to the Confederacy.
Under Johnson, the government’s approach was pretty lenient in terms of whether to exclude or allow ex-Confederates to return to power. Although former Confederate president Jefferson Davis was barred from running for office, his vice president, Alexander H. Stephens who had given the infamous Cornerstone Speech in 1861, clearly identifying slavery and white supremacy with the Southern cause was allowed to serve as a congressman from Georgia in his later years.
Stephens even got a speaking role at the ceremony at which Congress accepted the gift of a painting of Lincoln’s first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s how far sectional reconciliation went, in the absence of real racial reconciliation. This was a mistake, lax rules and laws allowed far too many ex-Confederates to return to state and federal government. The clear result of this was the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow regime, in which formerly enslaved people supposedly granted the right to vote under the 15th Amendment were effectively disenfranchised and subjected to a reign of terror that lasted almost another hundred years.
If there is a lesson to be learned, then anyone who participated in, or fomented, the January 6 insurrection should be barred from ever serving in government again from the top down.”
As Paul Harvey would have said, “and now for the rest of the story”:
The Amnesty Act of 1872 passed on May 22, 1872, reversed most of the penalties imposed on former Confederates by the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted on July 9, 1868.
Specifically, the 1872 Act removed office-holding disqualifications against most of the secessionists who rebelled in the American Civil War, except for “Senators and Representatives of the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh Congresses, officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of departments, and foreign ministers of the United States.”
In the spirit of the act, then United States President Ulysses S. Grant, by proclamation dated June 1, 1872, directed all district attorneys having charge of proceedings and prosecutions against those who had been disqualified by the Fourteenth Amendment to dismiss and discontinue them, except as to persons who fall within the exceptions named in the act. President Grant also pardoned all but 500 former top Confederate leaders.
There was a great deal of discussion in 1865 about bringing treason trials, especially against Jefferson Davis. While there was no consensus in President Johnson’s cabinet to do so, on June 11, 1866, the House of Representatives voted 105–19 to support such a trial against Davis. Although Davis wanted such a trial for himself, there were no treason trials against anyone, as it was felt they would probably not succeed and would impede reconciliation. There was also a concern at the time that such action could result in a judicial decision that would validate the constitutionality of secession (later removed by the Supreme Court ruling in Texas v. White (1869) declaring secession unconstitutional).
Jefferson Davis remained under indictment until Andrew Johnson issued on Christmas Day of 1868 a presidential “pardon and amnesty” for the offense of treason to “every person who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion” and after a federal circuit court on February 15, 1869, dismissed the case against Davis after the government’s attorney informed the court that he would no longer continue to prosecute Davis.
(Jefferson Davis died December 6, 1889 from acute bronchitis complicated by malaria.)
The Reconstruction Era ended with the disputed election of 1876. In the Compromise of 1877 Democrats conceded the presidency to Hayes on the promise that all remaining troops would be removed from the South. In March 1877, Hayes was inaugurated; in April, the remaining troops were ordered out of the South. The Compromise allowed southern Democrats to return to power, no longer fearing reprisal from federal troops or northern politicians for their flagrant violence and intimidation of black voters.
With its most revolutionary aims thwarted by 1868, and economic depression and political turmoil taking even its most modest promises off the table by the early 1870s, most of the promises of Reconstruction were unmet.
(h/t Wikipedia entries for brevity)
Excellent piece. Eager to hear more from you on gerrymandering , 2008-09 financial meltdown and tax policy.