The new film Civil War is a historic cinematic achievement. British director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.

Perhaps that was Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces—Abu Ghraib-style torture by gas station attendants, government aerial bombings of civilians, summary execution of journalists, a massive California and Texas invasion of Washington, D.C.—that seem to add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our current path of polarization and political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.

There’s established logic in this message. Early in the film, I kept thinking of the late, great Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, who wrote in his anti-existentialist 1973 masterpiece The Trouble With Being Born: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

But Civil War never provides the illumination or certitude that inspires action. It’s too Hollywood, which is to say that it’s too unoriginal and too violent, with too many guns.

Indeed, the film is so over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days, the Russian and Chinese governments, and their media organs, routinely promote the idea that the U.S. is headed for, in the words of former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a “bloody civil war which [will] cost thousands upon thousands of lives.” Civil War brings that propagandist vision to cinematic life.

If the U.S. does see another civil war, it will almost certainly not involve the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing to a final shootout at the White House. Nor is it likely to involve fights between groups of states, like the California–Texas alliance the film depicts. Those visions—like much of this film, where the internet rarely enters the story and the main characters are traditional still photographers—are anachronisms, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than to 21st-century realities.

Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict won’t separate soldiers from civilians. It will be fought with cyberattacks, misinformation and disinformation, and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be political and legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives. It will also be diplomatic, because an American civil war would be, by definition, a world war. Our enemies will fund and fuel our conflict, while our allies will send emissaries to intervene and negotiate peace.

The fighting will not be between states, because the conflicts in our society are not primarily geographic. Our most bitter fault lines are around ideology, race, gender, age, class, education, and immigrant status. A civil war will map those divides within our metro regions, within our cities, even within our neighborhoods.

For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for those of us who are sympathetic to making California independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away and fire on Camp Pendleton, like South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. And we certainly aren’t going to send troops to march on Washington. We have no military, and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Newsom’s Fox News appearances.

No—if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown.

Unfortunately, that scenario now seems possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and a cowed Congress, using his military to punish cities and communities whose actions he doesn’t like. It’s also possible to imagine such a president invoking executive powers to shut down Congress (as Donald Trump attempted on January 6) or government agencies that won’t bend to his command.

In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, will have little choice but to take on national duties. Behaving more like countries, California and other unrepresented states might drift naturally to formal breakup, the current republic ending not with war but with written agreements between states and a disintegrated federal government.

To make a believable movie about such a real American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film Rashomon famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Perhaps the San Fernando Valley auteur Paul Thomas Anderson could pull off such a film (he used a similar technique in Magnolia). Maybe Drew Goddard, writer-director of the Lake Tahoe noir Bad Times at the El Royale, could manage it.

Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants, some of whom seem like cartoon villains. Instead, the director tells his story through the narrow perspectives of four journalists driving from New York to Washington. All but the main character, played by Kirsten Dunst, come off as callous, selfish, or vaguely ridiculous.

As the president is about to be executed, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait a second because “I need a quote.”

The film feels unimaginative because the idea of another American civil war is actually an old one. For example, Marvel made a much smarter film in 2016 about what drives us to war when feuding superheroes devoted to Captain America and Iron Man turned on each other in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

But watching this Civil War, I found myself thinking of the 1997 satire The Second American Civil War. That cable TV movie, with scenes filmed at Los Angeles City Hall and the State Capitol in Sacramento, envisioned a future that looks too much like our present, with Idaho sparking a civil war in a country badly divided by race, immigration, politics, and media nonsense.

Like Garland’s film, it hid from the harder questions by putting journalists at center stage. But for all its goofiness, that 27-year-old film was the wiser, more relevant, and more responsible movie.

“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer in the satire. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”

The post A Movie That Might Be Worse Than Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Americans get Sherman’s March all wrong. Ask anyone who’s seen Gone with the Wind, and they’ll tell you that U.S. General William T. Sherman’s roughly 250-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah marked the swan song of the Confederacy. They’ll recall the burning of Atlanta, a panoramic scene in the film that made cinematic history, and they’ll regard Sherman as most Georgians still do, as the man who laid waste to the state by slashing and burning his way to the coast.

But this story of fire and arms obscures an arguably more important story: Sherman’s famous March doubled as the largest emancipation event in American history, accomplishing on the ground what Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could do only on paper. It broke the back of the planter class, destroyed Confederate morale, and legitimized the freedom of thousands. And it’s here, deep in Georgia, along a slow-moving body of water known as Ebenezer Creek, where the American case for reparations began. This oft-forgotten origin story is one of the lasting legacies of Sherman’s great March, even if it’s also perhaps the least understood.

From the moment Sherman moved his men out of Atlanta in November 1864, enslaved people fled plantations to meet the soldiers—arriving day and night, as families or as lone escapees. Some made long, circuitous journeys. Others met the marchers right in front of large plantation homes. All acted as a force that propelled Sherman’s army forward. They pointed the way to hidden plantation treasures; they directed soldiers down clandestine footpaths through the woods; they supplied Sherman and his scouting parties with critical pieces of military intelligence. Formerly enslaved people also worked for the army as cooks, valets, or pioneers (a military term for road builders or ditch diggers). Some even lined the roadsides and cheered on the army as it marched past.

Many of the formerly enslaved people who ran to the army went a step further: They decided to follow the army, as refugees, in an effort to make their freedom more secure. Freed refugees had attached themselves to federal armies in other theaters of war but never on a scale such as this. Sherman would later speculate that by the time his army arrived in Savannah, as many as 20,000 freed refugees from slavery followed in its wake; many thousands more may have marched along before turning back somewhere along the way. If true, this number is astounding: 20,000 nearly matched the pre-war population of Savannah, antebellum Georgia’s largest city.

Sherman’s famous March through Georgia broke the back of the planter class, destroyed Confederate morale, and legitimized the freedom of thousands. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The army arrived at Ebenezer Creek, just 20 or so miles from Savannah, in early December 1864. As the lines pulled up to the bank and began building a temporary bridge across the water, Commander Jeff C. Davis of Indiana, the head of Sherman’s 14th Army Corps, ordered his men to hold the refugees back. Once his column came across, they pulled the bridge up; some reports say the soldiers burned it for good measure. Davis had pulled up temporary bridges before, but each time, the refugees had managed to make it across. But at Ebenezer Creek, a band of Confederate cavalry swung up from behind, causing chaos to break out on the bank. Freed men and women raced into the water. Shrieks and screams and bullets ripped through the air. And in the end, few made it to the other side. Many drowned. Others were either struck down during the attack or captured and re-enslaved. Blood was in the water—and all over the hands of the U.S. army.

The incident at Ebenezer Creek hung over the March, even as the army succeeded in taking Savannah some two weeks later. Survivors among the formerly enslaved mourned loved ones and wore the trauma of the crossing in the threads of their dampened clothes. The crossing soon became part of an emerging narrative of the March: that the army had shirked its responsibility for pursuing emancipation.

Nearly a month later, in the late evening of January 12, 1865, Sherman had to answer for what transpired on his March. He found himself sitting across from 20 of Savannah’s leading African American ministers. They had come to Sherman’s Savannah headquarters to discuss “matters relating to the freedmen of the state of Georgia.” Sherman and the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, called the meeting to resolve the refugee crisis now engulfing Savannah but also to quell reports that the army turned its back on the refugees. The meeting, however, quickly evolved into something more. It became a discussion about what emancipation would actually mean—and reparations played a role. As the lamp light dimmed low, the group’s chosen spokesman, Garrison Frazier, a man who had purchased his own freedom, offered a vision of freedom based on Black landownership. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor,” he said, before affirming, “We want to be placed on land until we can buy it and make it our own.”

Within days, Sherman responded. He announced his Field Orders No. 15, a military injunction that set aside a large strip of land exclusively for Black landowners. The land, which ran inland for 30 miles from Charleston, South Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, was to be divided into 40-acre plots; a separate order mentioned giving freed families the army’s “partially broken down” pack animals. Here lies the likely origin of the famous phrase “Forty Acres and a Mule.”

The orders represented the most drastic escalation in Reconstruction policy to date. It was, in effect, a formal mandate from the federal government to requisition Confederate property, redistribute it to freed families, and provide the startup materials needed to make something of it. This may not have been intended as reparations per se, but to those on the ground, it was an important start.

In his essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Dubois wrote that the “vision of ‘Forty Acres and Mule’” was destined for “bitter disappointment.” But for a brief moment, freed families claimed land as their own. New communities formed as self-governing “colonies.” And everywhere, men and women began to build new lives outside of slavery on the promise the Special Field Orders provided.

Sadly, this moment wouldn’t last. Shortly after the end of the war, President Andrew Johnson—Lincoln’s successor—began pardoning thousands of ex-Confederates, and invoking the widespread restoration of their property. One by one, freed people that had settled on homesteads within the “Sherman Reserve”—some 40,000 families stretched across 400,000 acres—lost their land to returning planters and ex-Confederates. The window for meaningful land reform closed about as fast as it opened.

Ever since, the idea of “Forty Acres and a Mule” has lived on as a symbol of America’s broken promise to Black America—a first, albeit unfulfilled, step toward righting slavery’s wrongs.

Yet while “Forty Acres and a Mule” represents an important precedent and a broken promise, we’d do well to remember that it also represents a basic, concrete fact of history: Sherman felt compelled to issue his Special Field Orders No. 15 because thousands of freed refugees from slavery had followed his army, and it was their being there—advancing the war effort and advancing their own freedom—that effectively forced him to issue the order. He had been backed into a corner and had a debt to pay. Thus if “Forty Acres and Mule” was a federal promise, it was also a promise trammeled into place by the thousands of freed men and women who followed the army and transformed Sherman’s March into a march for their own liberation. No one represents this movement more than those swept away in the dark waters of Ebenezer Creek.

Societies deal with the past by choosing which stories to tell—and when it comes to slavery, Americans have often told few, if any, stories at all. We have pretended, instead, that slavery’s past is too overwhelming, too historically vast, for us to process—and thus, to atone for. This is why some recent anti-Critical Race Theory curricula insist that slavery wasn’t necessarily an American institution, but an Atlantic-wide practice with a history four centuries deep.

But if we can broaden out our understanding of the past, we can also narrow in and use it to clarify and reveal. This work might require lancing myths and legends, but it also sets the ledger straight, allowing history to speak for itself. The journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates captured this sense in his widely read 2014 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Case for Reparations,” when he wrote, “If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runaway Oney Judge.”

We might only add that if the heroic image of William Sherman matters, so does the villainous figure of Jeff C. Davis. Or, more to the point, if Sherman’s March matters, so must Ebenezer Creek.

The post Sherman’s March Toward Reparations appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When the new Confederate insurrectionists entered the Capitol on January 6 with their old battle flag, their white aggrievement, and their plan to sabotage the democratic transition of power, the American system held firm and stayed functional—barely. Now all of us are tasked with not only renewing the basic functionality of the Union but remaking it, and there’s not a moment to lose. “Build Back Better” may have sounded quaint a few months ago: Now it’s a mantra.

But how?

May I suggest that we look to playwriting for examples of reconstruction. The theatre is not a place for answers, but it is by nature a place for questions about what works and what doesn’t. If all good writing is rewriting, then all good construction is reconstruction.

Even the job title playwright denotes that the writer makes or builds their play, the way one might make or build a barrel or a wheel. Plays are constructs, and the best of them are built and rebuilt over time for optimal function.

Many wags have compared our current political players to Shakespeare as a way to read their characters, but I would prefer to focus on American plays—not simply to make pithy parallels, but to show how our theater history reflects our national history, and how playwrights and other theatre artists have struggled with that reflection, constructing and reconstructing over the decades. We own this history, whether we want to or not.

After all, Lincoln was shot while watching Our American Cousin. Although that play had an all-white cast, the post-Civil War Reconstruction was a time of minstrel shows and blackface. Stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (faithful and otherwise) played nationwide. One of the first known plays by an African American writer, The Escape, Or A Leap to Freedom, by William Wells Brown, was published in 1858 but did not receive a full production until 1871. If the Reconstruction had not been stopped in its tracks by the Compromise of 1876 and the KKK, then we might have seen more plays about the Black experience—possibly even with actual African Americans playing themselves.

It wouldn’t be until the Civil Rights Era that BIPOC artists finally constructed a stage of their own design and peopled it freely, giving voice and body to actual people of color. Productions such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Ed Bullins’ Goin’ a Buffalo (1968), Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), and many more.

The dramatic breakthroughs didn’t only happen in cities. Using flatbed trucks as makeshift stages, playwright Luis Valdez reflected the fears and desires, not to mention the comedy, of grape pickers on strike in Delano, California, with actos such as Quinta Temporada. Perhaps for the first time, the workers saw themselves.

The progress could be slow. Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman became the first Asian American play to receive a major New York production—but not until 1972. It would be longer still before Native American playwrights could bring their stories to light on stage. But they did, with time. As Civil Rights legislation addressed our original sin of discrimination and reconstructed something closer to equity in housing, voting, and policing, American plays such as these put dark meat on the bone.

These plays have inspired new work on both stage and film ever since; they help us not just to see, but to feel what it was like to be a person of color in America in a time when discrimination still ruled. They question power. They zero in on the cracks in the monolith, and they summon drama to break through to the other side—whether in terms of race, gender, economics, or any other identifiers used to divide and monetize us.

Perhaps, in order to reconstruct for better function, we need a bit of deconstruction too—particularly when it comes to ideals and concepts. Plays don’t just mean what we think they mean today, because meaning changes over time. What signified as progressive in the 19th century may look regressive now. It’s inevitable that the progressive constructs of our moment will one day look chintzy, wrongheaded, ignorant. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying to point to the painful places where America can improve to build back as best we can.

Set in 1898 in “A Deep South of the Mind,” a play of mine called Ragged Time (1996) takes on the original sins of slavery and discrimination. In a scene between Abe the Newsboy, a Jewish immigrant and self-proclaimed hero of a thousand fights and Freda, the woman he loves, who happens to be an African American prostitute trying to pass, the following dialogue occurs:

ABE: This is history. You, me. Hell, we make our own history. No matter
what happened in the past. This country is our slate—right now, right here—and we get to rub it clean. (a fighting pose) I’m the slate. And look at me now! Abe the Newsboy!
FREDA: (with disdain) Real clean.
ABE: I think so. I come a long way. And my kid is gonna come a long way
further. And his kid. And all the way, till we finally get to Zion. That’s what
a kid can be to folks like us. (tenderly) You done a bad t’ing. I done bad
t’ings too. But it’s got to stop. It’s got to stop! This is a free country!
FREDA: Nothing free. We both know that.
ABE: But one day it’ll be.

The “bad t’ing” here involves the sale of an abandoned Mexican boy, whom they might foster. Talk about an American nuclear family.

Plays of the New Reconstruction must not be cowed by “safetyism” and censorship. Trigger warnings are fine, but plays are about triggers—and good ones are willing to shoot. If plays can’t tell it like it is, then they lose what power they have left. Plays test us, force characters to make choices, and follow the consequences—even when things get ugly.

In America Adjacent (2019), the brilliant young Filipino American playwright Boni B. Alvarez writes about a group of expectant mothers of so-called anchor babies. Their children will receive U.S. passports, but the mothers are beginning to wonder if America is all it’s cracked up to be.

Sampaguita, a Filipina from the provinces who speaks Visayan, not Tagalog, starts her American journey with youthful curiosity, but grows disillusioned. She begins to form her own judgement about the big lie about freedom, which feels more and more like a prison:

We hide in chairs, living in low volume, pretending to America we are not here … if we are willing to endure these hardships for our children, it means our country is not as good, no?” she asks. “If our country is not so good as the U.S., that means we, Filipinos, we are unimportant compared to Americans also. … It is as if—it seems if our islands drown in the ocean tonight, the world will not be affected. Like nothing happened. This is not true for America, I don’t think.

Speaking about his play, Alvarez told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m still trying to find my place. I think that’s why my plays don’t really offer solutions or timelines. My plays just offer you things to think about, from multiple lenses.”

We may have dodged the bullet of the New Confederacy on January 6, but plays of the New Reconstruction must imagine what might have happened had the bullet hit. In 1935, as Hitler solidified his half-nelson on the neck of the German people, Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, about a fictional American dictator’s rapid rise and the fall of democracy as we know it. No wonder the novel, and the play it became in 1936, have received renewed attention in the last five years.

The ancients desired catharsis in their staged tragedies so that they might cleanse and purify their minds and hearts, and thus renew, restore, and rebuild their human selves. Catharsis demands purgation. As in Lincoln’s time and during the Civil Rights Movement, we have reached a moment that calls us not only to bind open wounds, but to disinfect them.

Congresses and presidents and courts can only do so much. Art made by us and for us may well turn out to be the best disinfectant, its basic ingredients being truth, reconciliation, and recompense. These must go together if we are to ever truly sanitize the original sin of American injustice symbolized by the Confederate battle flag. Truth is essential. Reconciliation is a choice. Recompense is long overdue.

That’s why we need writers nationwide to engage directly in our New Reconstruction. Last year at USC’s School for Dramatic Arts, the actor David Warshofsky and I created New Theatre For Right Now, an event that will take place each fall, inviting actors and writers in our Master’s of Fine Arts program to deal head-on with the problems of our immediate present—from pandemic to protest, from climate change to loneliness. This and future years will give our student artists a new palate of themes from which to choose.

Chances are good that the next generation of United Statesians will be wondering how to build back the broken aspects of the national cultural institutions we hold dear. Writers can and should do the same. As one rebuilds a corroded barrel or a busted wheel, the new work of playwrights needs to test the function and then reconstruct our sense of who we really are, how we really feel, and why the Confederate battle flag and other symbols of injustice have no place in the Capitol, or anywhere else.

If thought moves at the speed of sound, then feeling moves at the speed of light. As our political thinkers in Washington, D.C., sound out ideas post-insurrection, what feelings will inspire change in the dramas yet to be told?

The post Can Playwrights Lead the Next American Reconstruction? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Wednesday, Elizabeth Mitchell, author of Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House, visited Zócalo live on Twitter with Break It Up author Richard Kreitner to discuss the little-known 1864 episode that illuminates Lincoln’s authoritarian side and his manipulation of the press. Their conversation explored the relationship between politics, media, and national security in today’s America, and the extent to which it should change how our society understands its 16th president.

In Mitchell’s new book, she focuses on a moment during the Civil War when two New York newspapers published a presidential proclamation from Lincoln declaring a draft of 400,000 additional men for active service. In response, Lincoln declared the announcement a forgery—in today’s terms, “fake news”—shut down both outlets and imprisoned telegraph operators, editors, and reporters, in addition to taking military possession of the Independent Telegraph Company’s New York offices to control the transmission of news. But ultimately, Mitchell found, there may have been more truth to the proclamation than Lincoln was willing to admit.

Today, Lincoln’s shutdowns of telegraph offices would be comparable to shutting down the internet, Mitchell told Kreitner, but pointed out that journalistic standards and readers’ expectations of a free, independent press, were different at the time. Anonymous reporting was a common and accepted practice, she said, describing a separate incident where Lincoln secretly purchased a newspaper in order to influence key voters shortly before an election.

The late 19th-century incident foreshadows contemporary reckonings with executive power and privilege. Mitchell and Kreitner considered the episode’s similarity to Trumpian attempts to undermine trust in the press in recent years. Kreitner also drew a comparison to the January 6 insurrection and the challenge of prosecuting crimes that involve a U.S. president.

“On a certain level,” Mitchell said, “[Lincoln] had an interpretive approach to the executive branch, and I think that the way it’s structured at this point, the executive branch gets that advantage—maybe to a dangerous degree.”

Quoted with Elizabeth Mitchell:

“A president has a lot of power, and they can easily strain past the powers that they are even granted … For democracy to work very well, all the other players in this democracy, which is everyone else, need to be on alert to be pushing for all of the laws that are on the books to be enacted and the protections to be executed.”

The post Is It Time to Consider Lincoln More Critically?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On December 9, 100 B.C., Romans assembled to vote for the two consuls who would serve as the Republic’s top magistrates for the coming year. The election promised to be momentous. Gaius Marius, the dominant political figure in the Roman Republic for the previous decade, was finishing his fifth consecutive consulship. Once an extraordinarily popular figure, Marius had only won his most recent consular term through widespread vote-buying and intimidation.

Marius’s behavior in office had been even worse than his campaign conduct. In alliance with two radical populists, the tribune Saturninus and the praetor Glaucia, Marius spent much of the year before the election mobilizing angry crowds that violently backed laws that benefitted their partisans and punished their rivals—in one case even beating their opponents with clubs after polling had begun. So Rome seemed ready to move on.

Marius was not on the ballot that day, but Glaucia was. Glaucia understood that an electoral victory might again depend upon violence and intimidation, and so his supporters came to the polling place, hoping he would win but ready to fight if that would prevent his loss.

Roman magistrates did not win election by simply carrying a majority of the popular vote. Roman elections for consul were instead decided when candidates won a majority of Rome’s 193 voting centuries. The voting centuries were neither equally distributed across property classes nor were they the same size. The wealthiest Romans had the most centuries in the assembly, but their centuries had far fewer members than the ones to which poorer Romans belonged. Romans nevertheless accepted that a successful consular candidate needed to win the support of 97 centuries, regardless of their raw vote total. This was, in a way, a Roman analog to our own Electoral College.

Also, as in 21st-century America, there was a ceremonial aspect to how Romans announced voting results. Each century announced its vote separately, one at a time, until the votes of 97 agreed. And, as the votes were cast on that December day, it became clear that Glaucia would lose the consulship to a man named Memmius. Rather than accept this outcome, he and his supporters rioted. They disrupted the vote counting, attacked Memmius, and beat him to death. The assembled voters fled in terror before the election could conclude.

The Roman historian Appian wrote that “neither laws nor any sense of shame” remained among Romans after the bloodshed began. Supporters of Glaucia battled in the streets with their rivals, before retreating, along with Glaucia and Saturninus themselves, to the Capitoline Hill, the ceremonial center of Rome’s Republic and the place from which our Capitol building derives its name. The insurrectionists then seized the Capitol and barricaded themselves on it.

The Roman Senate invoked a constitutional measure called the senatus consultum ultimum, a rare emergency action that empowered magistrates of the republic to use whatever means they had at their disposal to save Rome’s representative democracy. This time, the person the Senate chose to put down Glaucia’s seizure of the Capitol was none other than Glaucia’s associate, Marius.

Marius faced a wrenching decision. Much of what he had accomplished during the past year came from his deft use of populist rhetoric and political intimidation to excite a base he shared with Glaucia. Marius had looked the other way when Glaucia and Saturninus used mob violence to push Marius’s policy goals and punish Marius’s political adversaries. The senatus consultum ultimum meant that Marius could no longer pretend not to see Glaucia’s abuses. He had to act—or face charges that he was complicit in Glaucia’s insurrection.

Appian tells us that Marius “was vexed” about whether to defend his old ally or defend his state, but he ultimately chose to defend the Republic. He “armed some of his men reluctantly,” approached the Capitol with his troops, and surrounded the hill until the water supply was cut, forcing Glaucia and his men to evacuate.

But that didn’t end the crisis—it only relocated it. Marius, hoping for peaceful trials of his allies, granted Glaucia and his men safe passage down from the hill to the curia, the building where the Roman senate often met. Once Glaucia and his supporters reached the curia, though, an angry mob appeared and set upon the insurrectionists—killing them with a barrage of tiles broken off of the chamber’s roof.

No Roman woke up that December day imagining that the election to choose one of Rome’s top magistrates would end with one candidate killed during the voting and another dying with his supporters in the Senate House. Romans worried constantly about their lawful Republic descending into anarchic violence, but none imagined that this descent would happen so quickly or with such terrible results.

Americans today face a similar moment of shock, and reckoning. On a day when our Congress was supposed to perform the ceremonial task of accepting the electoral votes for our next president, this democratic exercise was halted by violence. Like Glaucia’s mob in 100 B.C., the Washington insurrectionists were incited by the candidate who was about to officially lose the election. With his encouragement, they marched to the Capitol carrying weapons and bombs, stormed through its gates, and interrupted the vote tallying. They were met with gunfire. At least one was killed.

Donald Trump could not even muster the integrity that Marius showed. Instead, Trump expressed love for his supporters, and offered only the most lukewarm criticism of their actions.

It is hard to overstate the damage that a day like this can cause to a republic. The violent disruption of the consular vote in 100 B.C. initiated two decades of political dysfunction that led to the first civil war in Rome’s recorded history. That fighting ultimately deprived hundreds of thousands of Romans of their lives or property.

That’s why Americans must not dismiss, or move quickly past, the events of January 6, 2021. Our leaders and regular citizens must respond far more forcefully to an assault that targeted not just the seat of government, but the democratic rights and protections we enjoy. We need to condemn more clearly the insurrectionists’ actions, to identify and punish all the perpetrators, and to remove the instigators from our public life. If we cannot do that, sedition, insurrection, and political violence threaten to become the most potent political tools in the America of the 2020s—just as they did in the Rome of the 90s B.C.

The post When a Violent Mob Stormed Rome’s Capitol appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was March 1994, and after 12 years of bloody civil war that left more than 75,000 dead or disappeared, Salvadorans were heading to the polls for the first democratic election in a generation. The United Nations peace accord signed two years earlier mandated the election and the presence of international observers.

I was one of hundreds of them. I’d volunteered to travel to El Salvador from my home in California to share the expertise I had gained from working on voting rights at the ACLU.

The voters, most of whom had come to the city from far-flung country villages for the election, continued to wait patiently in line, even as the early sun drove the temperature up on the treeless street.

When a red Toyota pickup with smoked windows slowly drove down the middle of the dusty street, I watched the line collectively recoil as people instinctively withdrew from the curb.

The truck was the signature vehicle of the infamous death squads, who had wreaked terror on the Salvadoran countryside for more than a decade, targeting anyone associated with the revolutionary Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, including peasant organizers, union members, and—as those in line clearly feared—poor people who dared to vote.

The courage and persistence of the voters I encountered in El Salvador reminded me of the fight for voting rights by African Americans during the Civil Rights movement. And the intimidation they faced recalled the threats, snarling dogs, raw display of armed power, and brutality against those who dared to exercise their right to vote that Americans long hoped we’d left far behind.

I hadn’t thought too much about that moment when the pickup truck cruised by a quarter century ago—until this month. Then I heard the U.S. president, during a nationally televised debate, urge white supremacist groups to “stand back and stand by,” and refuse to give guarantees about a peaceful transfer of power while warning of voter fraud.

And I heard his son’s call to action to supporters. “We need every able-bodied man and woman to join the Army for Trump’s election security operation,” said Donald Trump Jr. in a “defend your ballot” ad. “We need you to help us watch them.”

Those statements, with their implicit threat of violence upon voters, swiftly brought me back to El Salvador 26 years ago.

On our first morning in the capital, San Salvador, for training, a few of us walked to the market before collecting our United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) credentials. We wandered the city streets, passing pastel-colored buildings pockmarked with bullet holes. We heard the cries of vendors hawking cheese, shoe polish, head bands, baby clothes, watches, cassette tapes, and T-shirts. The aftermath of a wartime economy.

A faint smell of smoke grew stronger as we approached the plaza. Shopkeepers swept up broken glass. The night before, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA party, held a rally that ended in fistfights, a stabbing, and a fire. Strings of red, white, and blue flags waved limply across the park over a stack of smoldering tires.

At the market, I bought a pink straw hat. Everyone said San Miguel, where I’d be going to observe the elections, was the hottest place in El Salvador.

The credentialing center was at El Presidente, the fanciest hotel in San Salvador. The colonnaded building on top of a hill, surrounded by flame trees and magenta bougainvillea, was a stark contrast to the streets of the war-torn capital. Uniformed doormen greeted chauffeured cars delivering wealthy families with chubby, well-dressed children and huge carts of matching luggage. They were returning from Miami, New Orleans, and Los Angeles to vote.

As we waited in long lines for our credentials in the air-conditioned, marble-floored lobby, we chatted with international observers from Europe and Latin America. The ONUSAL rep instructed us to keep our credentials around our necks and visible at all times. They would identify and protect us.

The next day we attended a training at the Convent of San Jacinto on the outskirts of the capital. One wall was painted with a larger-than-life Christ breaking a rifle over his bended knee.

Our role on election day was to stand near the polling booths and create a visible presence so that the voters would feel safe; anyone who tried to menace voters would be deterred by the international observers. We were to take careful notes of any harassment or intimidation and report it to an official. We were not to approach anyone causing trouble or engage in any arguments. After being issued two bright blue shirts labeled Misión Observadora, we climbed into vans headed to our assigned spots.

San Miguel is a three-hour ride from the capital. The guardrails and boulders along the Pan American Highway were covered with election signs and slogans: a white star on a red background for the FMLN; a cross in red, white, and blue for ARENA; a white fish on green for the Christian Democrats—and a smattering of other colors and initials denoting the multitude of smaller parties in the race.

As we approached the Rio Lempa, we passed the charred remains of a large concrete-and-steel bridge. Our driver crept cautiously across a temporary low-lying, wooden pontoon bridge. He explained that the guerrillas had blown up the old bridge a few years earlier to keep the Army from crossing.

San Miguel, then a city of 180,000, was surrounded by farming villages, cornfields, and sugar cane. Our small hotel sat across from a barracks that once housed 15,000 soldiers, who had been financed, equipped, and trained by the United States. The heat was intense, and everything smelled like insecticide—the supermarket, the inside of the van, even the drinking water. At our local orientation, a doctor reminded us to watch out for sunstroke, sunburn, and bites from scorpions, snakes, and bugs. The region had just suffered a cholera epidemic, and she cautioned us not to drink the water or eat shellfish.

Over the next few days, we met with representatives of each of the parties. It seemed that everyone in town—except for us, the “official observers”—knew that the head of the local ARENA party, Eduardo, was a leader of the death squads in San Miguel. Eduardo followed us around and hovered over meetings where he did not belong. No one told him to leave.

The day before the elections, I was asked to translate at a meeting with local representatives of the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE), who were in charge of all the technical aspects of the electoral process. After five minutes or so, Eduardo sauntered in and sat down at a desk on the side of the small room. He wore a light blue polo shirt, a large gold cross around his neck, and a black leather fanny pack with the handle of a pistol clearly protruding. He lit up a Marlboro and fiddled idly with the phone; you could tell he wasn’t really using it. He wanted us all to know he was listening, especially to the local TSE workers’ answers to our questions.

As I translated, I heard myself start to stammer. I forgot the word for birth certificate, even though I’d used it 20 times in the past week. Fe de nacimiento, fe de Nacimiento, I repeated to myself as sweat dripped down my back.

Members of our delegation asked their prepared questions, and I continued struggling with words I should have known. Eduardo watched me. He watched the local delegates. I translated questions about ballot boxes, chairs, the ban on firearms and alcohol on election day. Inside I was panicking. He stayed in my line of sight.

Our guide had told us that, one day on his way to high school, he saw eight corpses on the street in San Miguel. How many was this man responsible for?

Eduardo finally got up, and as he left, he slapped one of the TSE officials on the back and whispered into his ear. I felt faint and desperate to get out of this dark, airless office.

By the time we concluded, I was trembling. With clammy palms, I shook hands with everyone. They seemed relieved that the meeting was over—whether it was because they had so much work to do before election day or, like me, were grateful to be out from under Eduardo’s watchful eye, I wasn’t sure.

That panicky feeling stayed with me the next morning as I watched thousands of Salvadorans line up to vote.

My dread abated somewhat as a steady stream of voters approached the polling booths without being harassed. Once the polls opened, Avenida Roosevelt was closed off, so no more vehicles could pass. Surly looking men in mirrored sunglasses occasionally strutted through the crowd, and though they sneered at us foreign observers, they kept their distance from the voters. Throughout the day we heard complaints of people’s names missing from the electoral lists, a shortage of ballots, sealed boxes of ballots being delivered already open to the TSE headquarters—irregularities that may have affected the outcome. But we witnessed no violence.

No presidential candidate received an absolute majority that day; in a second election held a month later, the ARENA party took power. Hearing the news back in the States, many of us were incredulous that a party associated with the death squads and other human rights abuses could have won the popular vote. The official U.N. report cited the irregularities: Hundreds of thousands of voters had been disenfranchised due to missing birth certificates or registration cards. The threat of violence was not the only obstacle the Salvadoran voters had faced.

These past few weeks I’ve watched footage of people all across the United States lining up to vote, with the president and his son’s warnings echoing in my ears alongside Eduardo’s presence while I translated in San Miguel.

The U.N. is not here, but organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights are recruiting lawyers and poll watchers across the country.

Tens of thousands have volunteered.

The post An Election Observer in El Salvador Looks Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many politicians of the period avoided serious talk of sectionalism and slavery at such “mixed” gatherings, in the interest of keeping things civil. But the holiday atmosphere lent itself to informality, and the men haphazardly started proposing ideas. Some favored letting individual states and territories decide whether or not they should have slavery within their borders, while others wanted to simply draw a geographic line from the Mississippi River to the Pacific, prohibiting slavery above the line and allowing it below. The conversation grew heated—and within minutes, two of the politicians came to physical blows, their colleagues pulling them apart as they rolled around on the floor like a pair of angry schoolboys. But despite the topic of discussion, sectionalism and slavery had little to do with this fistfight. It was the physical manifestation of an already strained relationship between two politicians who should have had a lot in common: Mississippi’s U.S. senators, Henry Stuart Foote and Jefferson Davis.

In the history of American politics there have been many ugly rivalries—Andrew Jackson versus John C. Calhoun, Lyndon Johnson versus Robert Kennedy—but none was more bitter than the animus between Foote and Davis, which lasted from the 1840s until Foote’s death in 1880. The two men despised one another, and the higher they rose in political circles, the greater their hatred became. Both were ambitious political climbers, but in different ways. Foote was a street fighter, while Davis, who would later become president of the Confederacy, was calculating and somber. Foote was more publicly aggressive, never missing an opportunity to prod Davis. Davis, who was more famous, met Foote’s jabs with intimidating, withering glares and steely silence. Foote resented Davis for his natural aloofness; Davis bristled at the venomous personal barbs that punctuated Foote’s rhetoric. For Davis, the violent encounter at the Washington boarding house was an uncommon loss of self-control, a rare emotional display of barbarism from a man who was accustomed to public formality. For Foote, the fight was business as usual.

Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 and moved with his family to Mississippi when he was a small boy. He attended the United States Military Academy and later became a successful planter. Born in 1804, Foote was a native Virginian who came to Mississippi while in his twenties. He practiced law and owned a newspaper. Both men became involved in politics during the Jacksonian period, and both were very ambitious. The genesis of their feud lay in the 1844 trial of local district court clerk John T. Mason, near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mason was accused of killing Davis’s brother-in-law in a duel, and Foote, then a successful attorney, led his defense. His closing argument dazzled the jury, who voted to acquit, ruling that the killing was an “excusable homicide.” As was his way, Foote trumpeted his success to anyone who would listen, angering Davis and his family, who naturally felt that the killer should be punished.

Davis and Foote both entered the U.S. Senate during the late 1840s, at a time when slavery was becoming the dominant national issue. Mississippi was one of the leading cotton-producing states, and its politicians joined the rest of the South in pushing back on perceived threats to slavery posed by Northerners, creating a siege mentality that dominated daily life. During these volatile times, both Foote and Davis wanted to be the leading political voice of their state on the Senate floor, which set them on a collision course.

Both men were pro-slavery ideologues, but aside from that, they agreed on almost nothing. During the months-long, tumultuous debates that culminated in the Compromise of 1850, the last political deal over slavery between the North and the South prior to the Civil War, Foote and Davis were consistently hostile toward one another on the Senate floor. At a time when some Southerners were already talking about secession, Foote was a unionist: He took a moderate position that secession was dangerous and claimed that slavery could be protected without alienating the North, and that compromise was possible. Davis was less willing to make any sort of compromise, taking a harder line. One witness who heard them both speak later compared Davis’s “dignified and commanding, soft and persuasive” oratory to Foote’s “[f]iery torrent of fierce invective and brilliant declamation.” In heated moments, Davis labeled Foote “a Constitutional liar,” while Foote claimed that Davis “speaks only for himself, and under the promptings of his own ambition.”

During all the turmoil, most Southern politicians, in Mississippi and beyond, rallied around Davis, whose honeyed pro-slavery oration on the Senate floor helped him emerge as one of the primary spokesmen for the South—a rational, stable presence during an angry, uncertain period. Davis’s increased national profile irritated Foote, who was also well known, but not as well respected. Foote exacted his revenge in 1851, when the two men faced each other in a contest to become Mississippi’s governor. Foote won the election, but his tenure as governor was a disaster, in part because Davis and his allies in the state worked tirelessly to undermine him. They held up legislation and funding for almost every initiative Foote advanced, and blocked his appointments to government posts.

After Foote’s term ended in 1854, he relocated to California, hoping to get a new political start. Davis likely thought that he would never have to worry about his rival again—but if so, he was sadly mistaken. Still hoping to capitalize on his name recognition in the South, Foote moved back east to Nashville, Tennessee in 1859. He arrived just in time to watch the nation come apart on the eve of the Civil War. The seceding Southern states formed the Confederacy, electing Davis as president, and Foote decided to run to represent Tennessee’s 5th District in the new Confederate Congress.

Foote’s hostility toward Davis was well known, and some political observers believed that his run for Congress was little more than a ploy to put him in position to continue his feud with the Confederate president. Foote won the race—and indeed, his tenure as a Confederate lawmaker seemed driven by his hatred for Davis. He was an instant critic, delivering verbal broadsides against the Davis administration that became more frequent and bitter as time wore on. He blamed Davis for Confederate military failures and for weaknesses in the Confederate economy, and frequently questioned his personal integrity. He called the president a despot and tyrant, and during one notable tirade, a “fiendish character responsible for more barefaced acts of corruption than any single individual has ever been known to commit in the same space and time in any part of Christendom.” (Foote admitted after the war that “not a day passed while I occupied a seat in the Confederate Congress that was not more or less signalized by my vehement opposition to Mr. Davis.”) Davis did his best to ignore the inflammatory rhetoric, but his allies did not—and tangled often with Foote on the floor of Congress, in verbal confrontations and at least two fistfights.

As the Confederacy began to crumble during the war’s latter stages, Davis became an easier target for abuse. Foote continued his rhetorical assaults on the president, and also demanded investigation after investigation of the administration’s conduct of the war. He attacked Davis’s political allies, his appointees, and anyone with whom the Confederate president was friendly. Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, who was Jewish, was a favorite target, inspiring a number of Antisemitic rants. Foote questioned the competence of Davis’s preferred generals in the field, going so far as to call Major General Thomas C. Hindman, Jr. a “fiend in human form.”

While other Confederate congressman disparaged Davis and complained about some of his decisions, few were as long-winded as Foote. Eventually, open sighs greeted Foote every time he stood up in the House chamber to speak. Newspaper reports of his tirades against Davis filtered into the North, where they were employed as propaganda, proving that the Confederate government was in disarray.

The end of the Confederacy, in 1865, did little to temper the ill will between Foote and Davis, who continued their sniping until Foote’s death in 1880. Davis lived until 1889, long enough to enjoy his own elevation to hero status throughout the South—an outcome that would have appalled Foote.

In the years immediately after the war, Davis slowly tried to rebuild his reputation, and Foote remained in Nashville practicing law. Both men also joined a battle of the books that took place in the years following the Civil War, as principal players in the conflict rushed to tell their sides of the story. Foote wrote a history of the Civil War and an ominously titled memoir, Casket of Reminiscences. Both of Foote’s books devoted a good deal of space to sharp criticism of Davis, calling him “a shameful, hypocritical and tyrannical chief executive,” and condemning “that compound of weakness, and corruption, and servility in the form of a cabinet which Mr. Davis so stupidly called around him.”

For his part, Davis privately criticized Foote for being “faithless to his trust as a representative in the Congress of the Confederate States”—but continued ignoring his rival in public. The former Confederate president also produced a massive, post-war tome, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. It did not mention Foote at all.

The post Jefferson Davis’s Lesser-Known Nemesis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Slave dealers bought enslaved individuals whom owners deemed surplus and warehoused them at pens in the District of Columbia until they had assembled a full shipment for removal southward. Half a mile west of the U.S. Capitol, and just south of the National Mall, sat William H. Williams’ notorious private slave jail, known as the Yellow House.

By the mid-1830s, the Yellow House was one more piece of the machinery that controlled slave society. Whip-wielding owners, overseers, slave patrollers, slave catchers with vicious dogs, local militias, and a generally vigilant white population, who routinely asked to see the passes of enslaved people whom they encountered on the roads, all conspired against a freedom seeker’s chances of a successful flight. Private and public jails lent further institutional support to slavery, even in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Some slave owners visiting or conducting business in Washington detained their bondpeople in the Yellow House for safekeeping, temporarily, for a 25-cent per day fee. But mostly it was a place for assembling enslaved people in the Chesapeake who faced imminent removal to the Lower South and permanent separation from friends, family, and kin. Abolitionist and poet John Greenleaf Whittier condemned “the dreadful amount of human agony and suffering” endemic to the jail.

The most graphic, terrifying descriptions of the Yellow House come to us from its most famous prisoner, the kidnapped Solomon Northup, who recounted his experiences there in Twelve Years a Slave. Northup, a free Black man from the North, was lured to Washington in 1841 by two white men’s false promises of lucrative employment. While in the capital, the men drugged their mark into unconsciousness, and Northup awoke enchained in the Yellow House’s basement dungeon. He vividly described the scene when his captor, slave trader James H. Birch, arrived, gave Northup a fictive history as a runaway slave from Georgia, and informed him that he would be sold. When Northup protested, Birch administered a severe thrashing with a paddle and, when that broke, a rope.

Northup, like most who passed through the Yellow House’s iron gate, was destined for sale in the Deep South. A few of William H. Williams’ captives attempted to evade that fate. In October 1840, Williams’ younger brother and partner in the slave trade, Thomas, purchased an enslaved man named John at Sinclair’s Tavern in Loudoun County, Virginia, for $600. Twenty years old, less than five feet tall, but referred to by the National Intelligencer as “stout made,” John escaped from Williams’ clutches while still in Virginia, but he was eventually apprehended in Maryland and retrieved by someone under William H. Williams’ employ. Despite his efforts to resist, John, like thousands of other enslaved people who ended up in the Williamses’ possession, was conveyed to the New Orleans slave market for auction to the highest bidder.

For the Williams brothers, every man, woman, and child they bought and sold were commodities in which they speculated. Their entire business was based on assuming the risk that they could buy low in the Chesapeake and sell high in the slave markets of the Old South. Occasionally, they even tried to profit by betting on people fleeing their owners. In 1842, Thomas Williams purchased two escapees from Auguste Reggio of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. According to Williams’ agreement, “It is … understood that … Enoch and John are sold as runaway slaves & are now absent.” Nevertheless, Williams was so confident that the police state of the Old South would soon apprehend them that he paid $650 apiece for two absconded men he might never see. In an undeniable gamble, the slave dealer wagered that they would both be recovered and fetch a far more handsome price in the New Orleans slave market than what he had paid for them.

Despite the odds against them, certain enslaved individuals who fell into the Williams brothers’ orbit determined to resist the system that oppressed them. In 1850, William H. Williams placed advertisements in the Baltimore Sun to alert the public to five enslaved people who had evaded his grasp. In May, Williams offered a $400 reward: $100 apiece for 26-year-old James; 25-year-old Sam, who was missing a front tooth; 20-year-old George; and the ailing Gusta, described as “ruptured,” likely indicating that he was suffering from a hernia.

In August, Williams again sought public assistance, this time in the recovery of “my MAN JOE,” a six-foot-tall 26-year-old who had been recently purchased from a doctor in Fauquier County, Virginia. Joe absconded near Fredericksburg and was heading, according to Williams’ prognostications, for Pennsylvania by way of Winchester, Virginia, where he had a grandmother and other relatives. Neither runaway ad mentioned whether the escapee had fled while in transit to Williams’ Washington slave pen or from the Yellow House itself.

One dramatic escape attempt from the Yellow House was documented in 1842 by Seth M. Gates, an antislavery New York Whig in the U.S. House of Representatives. Writing as an anonymous “Member of Congress” in the pages of the New York Evangelist, Gates described an unnamed “smart and active” woman deposited in Williams’ private prison who, the evening prior to her scheduled departure from Washington for sale in the Deep South, “darted past her keeper,” broke jail, “and ran for her life.”

She headed southwest down Maryland Avenue, straight toward the Long Bridge that spanned the Potomac and led to that portion of the District of Columbia ceded by Virginia. “It [was] not a great distance from the prison to the long bridge,” Gates observed, and on the opposite side of the river lay the Custis estate and its “extensive forests and woodlands” where she could hide.

Her flight took the keeper of Williams’ jail, Joshua Staples, by surprise. By the time he secured the other prisoners and set off in pursuit, she had a sizeable head start. Also working in her favor, “no bloodhounds were at hand” to track her, and the late hour meant that Staples had no horses available. A small band of men at his immediate disposal would have to overtake her on foot.

Although they “raised the hue and cry on her pathway” to summon the public’s aid, the woman breezed past the bewildered citizens of Washington who streamed out of their homes, struggling to comprehend the cause of all the commotion along the avenue. Realizing the scene unfolding before their eyes, residents greeted this act of protest in starkly different ways. Those who were antislavery prayed for her successful escape, while others supported the status quo by joining the “motley mass in pursuit.”

Fleet of foot and with everything to lose, the woman put still more distance between her and her would-be captors. In this contest of “speed and endurance, between the slave and the slave catchers,” Gates related, the runaway was winning. She reached the end of Maryland Avenue and made it onto the Long Bridge, just three-fourths of a mile from the Custis woods on the other side.

Yet just as Staples and his men set foot on the bridge, they caught sight of three white men at the opposite end, “slowly advancing from the Virginia side.” Staples called out to them to seize her. Dutifully, they arranged themselves three abreast, blocking the width of the narrow walkway. In Gates’s telling, the woman “looked wildly and anxiously around, to see if there was no other hope of escape,” but her prospects for success had suddenly evaporated. As her pursuers rapidly approached, their “noisy shout[s]” and threats filling the air, she vaulted over the side of the bridge and plunged into “the deep loamy water of the Potomac.” Gates assumed that she had committed suicide.

The unnamed woman who leaped from the bridge would not have been the first enslaved person imprisoned in the Yellow House to engage in a willful act of self-destruction. Whittier, the abolitionist, mentioned that among the “secret horrors of the prison house” were the occasional suicides of enslaved inmates devoid of all hope. One man in 1838 sliced his own throat rather than submit to sale. The presumed, tragic death of the woman who fled down Maryland Avenue, Gates concluded, offered “a fresh admonition to the slave dealer, of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes” as it testified to “the unconquerable love of liberty the heart of the slave may inherit.”

In antebellum Washington, D.C., African Americans were smothered by a Southern police state that treated them as property and demanded that they labor for the profit of others. Thousands upon thousands were swept up in the domestic slave trade, their lives stolen for forced labor in the Deep South. But a few, like the woman who fled the Yellow House, courageously transformed Washington’s public streets into a site of protest and affirmed their personhood in the face of oppression. Now, more than a century and a half later, echoes of that struggle can still be heard.

The post How the Yellow House Helped Make Washington, D.C. a Slavery Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Civil War was a time of great discord, tearing men away from their families and routines, pitting neighbor against neighbor and countryman against countryman. But it unified Americans in at least one crucial way. As illustrated by White’s services at the Confederate prison in Macon, it forged together twin traditions that still resonate in American life today: civil religion—the celebratory, peaceful tradition that unites a chosen nation “under God” that is not linked to any specific religion—and religious nationalism, with its emphasis on blood and sacrifice as guarantees of American success.

It was during the Colonial era that civil religion took root in America. Sociologist Philip Gorski has drawn attention to its emergence in seminal documents such as John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech from 1630, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. All three works define a sense of this budding American civil religion. Winthrop’s speech was a jeremiad specifically intended to chasten sinful listeners, but it also emphasized God’s covenant with the Puritans and a sense that they were a chosen people. The Declaration and the Constitution suggested that what was happening in America was unique, revolutionary, and exceptional. As early as 1777, Americans were commemorating the Continental Congress’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence, as they gathered for Fourth of July celebrations.

By the 1860s, Civil War hospitals and prisons provided fruitful atmospheres for civil religion, too. Chaplains and missionaries flocked to these spaces to minister to men with ample time on their hands and a keen interest in the afterlife, encouraging spiritual development by providing religious education and leading services, prayer meetings, and funeral services. Holidays, in particular, were a time when men fostered a deep connection to the Union. Confederate soldiers demonstrated a similar devotion during fast days, held periodically throughout the war. As remembered by hospital administrator Jane Woolsey in Hospital Days: Reminiscence of a Civil War Nurse, holiday sermons during Christmas (a religious holiday) and Thanksgiving (a civic celebration), filled the air with patriotic motifs such as “Rally Round the Flag, Boys” and “My Country ‘tis of Thee”. White reported that his fellow chaplain Charles Dixon delivered a Fourth of July service that included “warm and holy petitions for the President and the country” and national songs.

One might think imprisoned soldiers would not be receptive to such warm feelings for their country, but Union soldiers reveled in any chance to celebrate the Union—led, in large part, by President Abraham Lincoln, the stalwart defender, and epitome, of Union civil religion. Loved and respected by many Union soldiers when he was alive, Lincoln was revered by them in death. Special services within general hospitals after his assassination attracted large crowds of mourners. Two thousand people met in the open air to celebrate Lincoln’s life at Fort Monroe, Virginia, on the day of the president’s funeral in April 1865.

At the same time, Civil War hospitals and prisons were fertile ground for the growth of religious nationalism, an impulse that had never been a major force in U.S. civic life before. Religious nationalism’s martial undertones resonated with soldiers facing unprecedented high casualty rates, sacrifice and tribulation—including soldiers housed in Civil War prisons. Importantly, it justified the massive scale of death in this conflict, far surpassing that of any other war American had fought to date.

Union Chaplain Charles Alfred Humphreys described the transformation from purely civil religion to civil religion merged with religious nationalism in his memoir, Field, Camp, Hospital and Prison. While imprisoned in Lynchburg, Virginia, Chaplain Humphreys preached to his fellow captives on the Sabbath, reminiscing about religion at home. But instead of hearkening to feasts and celebrations and Lincoln’s comforting equanimity, Humphreys spoke to his audience about the Babylonian Captivity of the Hebrews. He emphasized the “duty of remembering still our country’s cause and serving it by patient endurance of our sufferings—as ‘they sometimes serve who only stand and wait.’” Detained at Kinston, North Carolina, the same Henry S. White who was later to be imprisoned at Macon emphasized the “sacred flag and its noble defenders,” as well as “our personal salvation and holiness.”

These messages, clearly needed in the prison environment, affirmed the reality of suffering but noted that it could be overcome. In a sense, all worldly suffering was temporary, for a Christian hoped to reach heaven. Soldiers also viewed these ideas through a more secular lens. These men were fighting to preserve the Union and their identity as American citizens.

After the Civil War, the twin ideologies continued to expand their importance in the U.S. The post-Civil War North adhered to a civil religion tied to a strong union, while the post-war South clung to the religious nationalism of the Lost Cause. Civil War battlefields became contested through monument building by Northern and Southern groups, valorizing the soldiers on their respective sides. While the North continued to industrialize at a fast rate and the South maintained much of their pre-war agricultural focus, these dueling ideologies gained adherents in the respective sections of the reunited country. By World War I, as U.S. strength was on the rise, the two regional bents unified into a single central ideology motivated by increased militarism and imperialism. Later, with the development of nuclear weapons, religious nationalism shifted away from sacrifice toward apocalypse and sacralization of the military.

While the average American seldom thinks about it today, many present-day patriotic demonstrations—from singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events and standing for the Pledge of Allegiance in school to calls for war to protect American interests in another region of the world—share their origins in Civil War hospitals and prisons. America has become a very different place than it was in the 1860s; but the Civil War chaplains would recognize it all.

The post The Civil War Chaplains Who Shaped Modern American Patriotism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Altogether, an estimated 50,000 of the blue and gray trekked to the Great Reunion, a grand commemoration at iconic Gettysburg, on that battle’s 50th anniversary: July 1 to 3, 1913.

Why did they go? According to the many politicians and generals who also came to the reunion, the reason was clear; there was an urgent need for unity. At that very moment, U.S. ground forces were in Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. Trouble in the Balkans threatened to escalate into a much larger European crisis. Not mentioned but certainly pressing were the many bitter divisions at home. Conservatives were continuously fighting progressives over Jim Crow and lynching, female suffrage, overseas expansion, immigration, and labor rights. In this time of peril, so said the organizers, only the finest of military heroes could save our great nation.

But as the famous and powerful gave their speeches, exalting the virtues of suffering and death, the vast majority of the old soldiers spent their time at Gettysburg seeking something else: proof of life and a chance to heal.

More than 50,000 people descended on Gettysburg in July of 1913 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the great Civil War battle. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

For half a century, survivors of the nation’s deadliest war struggled with memories of combat, the loss of comrades to bullets and disease, recurring nightmares, and lingering visions of killing fellow humans. Just as crippling was the loneliness. As supportive as family and friends could be, veterans needed other veterans to talk to, and their numbers were dwindling. An aging James Vernon, formerly a young lad in the 18th Virginia Infantry Regiment, said of warfare, “Those who were not there can form no idea of it.”

Tradition credits a fellow veteran for proposing a final, encompassing Civil War reunion, one Henry S. Huidekoper of the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, who had lost an arm at Gettysburg. In short order, Gettysburg businessmen and city officials adopted the idea, and within months the Pennsylvania governor and state legislature supported the project. A year before the anniversary, a commission of former high-ranking officers of the blue and gray solicited help from the federal government, and interest rapidly grew.

Six months out, it was evident that this was going to be a phenomenon. The Williamsburg, Virginia, Gazette predicted the reunion would be “the greatest gathering of conqueror and conquered in the history of the world.” Slated to speak were outgoing President William Howard Taft, Chief Justice Edward White, Speaker of the House Champ Clark, the newly elected President Woodrow Wilson, and a score of governors—plus bankers, business moguls, and time allowing, a few high-ranking Civil War officers. Every major newspaper was sending correspondents. The total budget for the affair, most of it coming from the Pennsylvania and New York state assemblies and the U.S. War Department, was $1.2 million (or about $31 million in 2019 dollars).

The famous and powerful gave speeches exalting the virtues of suffering and death, but the old soldiers were seeking something else: proof of life, and a chance to heal. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Yet only a few hand-picked veterans were invited to speak, and none were African American. Nor were nurses or other civilians given a chance to tell their story. The organizers expected perhaps 5,000 veterans would arrive by June 29, two days before the reunion’s official start. But the people came, like a collective flood. When the number exceeded 18,000 that day alone, the hosting U.S. War Department scrambled to accommodate the overflow. By July 1, the start of the anniversary celebration, veterans and tourists had transformed Gettysburg into the third largest city in Pennsylvania.

Once on site, veterans were not making declarations of peace and unity. Instead, their first inclination was to find specific locations that held personal meaning. Frail and failing Hugh Meller of Fairport, New York, was determined to see the room at the Western Maryland Railroad Station where he had been held captive for two days. With the help of two men, he ascended a stairway to the second floor. “All these later years I have feared that the old station had been demolished,” Meller told a reporter, “how glad I was when I saw the familiar building upon my arrival.” Confederate F. O. Yates wanted to see precisely where he clashed with Union infantry on July 3. “I charged within 50 feet of the Federal lines on top of Gettysburg Heights. I will see if I can find the exact spot where I was struck with a Federal ‘minnie’ ball,” he said. Samuel Marks, who served with the 53rd North Carolina Infantry, found the hill where he had to leave his dying brother behind.

While exploring Seminary Ridge, where the warring parties tangled on the battle’s first day and from which Confederates launched their doomed “Pickett’s Charge” in the contest’s final hours, two strangers immediately recognized a shared trait: each was missing a right arm. An ensuing conversation revealed that both received their wounds within minutes of each other, only a few hundred yards apart on that same ridge.

While the politicians proclaimed that the old soldiers had moved on from the Civil War, in reality, sectional animosities lingered. Many Confederates arrived in gray uniforms, lofting Confederate battle flags. Unionists, predominantly in civilian attire, reminded them who had won. The general white Southerner consensus was that the war was an invasion, while Northerners considered the Confederacy treasonous. Yet they reached for each other, hoping to make sense of their shared traumatic past.

Seven Gettysburg survivors traveled together all the way from Phoenix, Arizona, even though they fought for different states—Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Upon their arrival, the group retraced their steps, trying to piece together where each exactly stood and what had happened to them. After moments of initial confusion, the landmarks slowly became familiar, and the memories horrifically vivid. Yet in retelling their own struggle, they found understanding, empathy, even solace.

All the veterans came in hopes of finding fellow members of their old regiments. Unwittingly, reunion organizers made this very difficult: The vast “Great Encampment” was organized by state, but veterans were assigned to the area where they currently lived, not with the state they had served during the war. They were left to search a 2-mile area, often with little or no knowledge of their comrades’ locations. Joshua Vinson looked in vain for fellow members of his Virginia cavalry unit. By sheer chance, Remi Boerner happened upon an old friend from the 91st Pennsylvania. The two warmly embraced, having not seen each other since 1865. Former Hoosier Frank Fickas searched among the 74 tents housing men from his old home state. “Is there anybody here from the 14th Indiana?” he beckoned. Finally he saw a familiar face, and the man responded, “I’m here, Frank, the only one.”

Veterans who assembled at Gettysburg, like these former Union soldiers, had to work to find each other at the reunion. Organizers hadn’t placed regiments together. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Such was the pattern throughout the week. When queried by his hometown paper, a North Carolinian said, “How did we put in our time? We scattered.” A journalist from the local Adams County News marveled at how this “national reunion” was instead predominantly intimate and personal. “The old soldiers by twos and threes found each other, and in camp or on the field they spent hours talking.”

The Commemoration officially began at 3 p.m. on July 1 in the Great Tent, an immense, sweltering canopy that seated 13,000. Lindley Garrison, the U.S. Secretary of War was the day’s keynote. Like President Woodrow Wilson, who had appointed him, Garrison had no military experience himself. Still he felt qualified to pontificate grandly. “Fifty years ago today, there began here one of those conflicts between man and man, marked by such exhibitions of valor, courage, and almost superhuman endurance as to engrave itself upon the tablet of history,” he intoned. “Equal met equal, and in the domain of physical prowess all were worthy of medals of honor.” Garrison also contended that the veterans had put the past far behind them, claiming “the last embers of the former time have been stamped out.”

In speech after speech, bankers, congressmen, and governors proclaimed there existed a collective, patriotic, unifying amnesia. Notably, relatively few veterans listened to any of it. Heads of state implored veterans to forget, when they could not. “The arrival of the Secretary of War,” a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer observed, “stirred but passing interest in the hearts of the men … the vast majority [of veterans] spent the day out on the familiar old battlefield, in the tents of their comrades, or looking for the spots they occupied fifty years ago.”

Throughout July 2 and 3, the orations continued, placing veterans on pedestals—and consequently out of reach. On July 4, despite having initially rejected an invitation to attend, President Wilson arrived and delivered yet another ingratiating tribute to warriors and warfare. In a brief and stilted address, Wilson insisted “We are made by these tragic, epic things to know what it costs to make a nation—the blood and sacrifice of multitudes of unknown men …” Once again, few veterans were in attendance. Those who were present generally expressed disappointment. “President Wilson failed to stir the heart of the veterans,” observed one reporter, “not once was he interrupted by a handclap or a cheer.” Wilson departed after spending a mere 45 minutes on site. At least Wilson made an appearance. Former President Taft and Chief Justice White reneged on their invitations.

After this final oration, the veterans began to pack their bags, leave their tents, and start for home. They carried away an assortment of souvenirs. Conspicuously absent were instruments of death—bullets, bayonets, or swords. The old soldiers’ most cherished keepsakes were things that were living, or had once been alive. One man saved a pine sapling. Another held a branch from a tree that had shielded him in the battle. J.C. McMasters took wheat from the fields back to his Indiana home. A surgeon from New Orleans pocketed some oak leaves from the Copse of Trees, the iconic epicenter of fighting on the battle’s final day. Many leaned on walking sticks harvested from the groves, a support to them in multiple ways. At least one veteran lugged away a suitcase full of soil from the site where he had fought. “I shall make a garden box of it,” he reportedly said.

Men like Wilson and Garrison ambled back to Washington, declaring the reunion a lesson in selfless sacrifice for the nation’s youth, but hardly mentioning the event ever again. In contrast, the veterans remembered this last, great gathering for the rest of their lives, because it gave them a chance to tell their own stories, make their own music, and remember their own history—virtually none of which would appear in the official narratives.

The post How the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion Came to Be the ‘Greatest Gathering of Conqueror and Conquered’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.