On Tuesday, six Democratic lawmakers, themselves veterans of the U.S. military or intelligence services, released a video telling service members that they would stand behind them as they refused to obey unlawful orders.
On Thursday, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media that the message in the video was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” He followed that post with another saying: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He has continued to attack the lawmakers over the past two days.
For the president of the United States of America to call elected lawmakers traitors and demand they be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for making statements he perceives as threats to his policies is bizarre, outrageous, and anti-American. But it is not unprecedented.
In 1866, President Andrew Johnson accused Republicans of trying to overthrow the government, called congressmen traitors, and called for them to be hanged.
A former tailor from Tennessee, Johnson considered himself the representative of poor white men who he believed had been crushed before the Civil War by the elite southern enslavers who dominated the economy. Johnson opposed their rising oligarchy, but that did not mean he had any interest in protecting the rights—or even the lives—of formerly enslaved Black Americans.
Johnson was a southern Democrat who hated the congressional Republicans who wanted to protect Black rights and rebuild the nation on the basis of free labor. He thought they were expanding the federal government mostly to keep their party in power permanently, while the taxes their new bureaucracy required to protect Black Americans would destroy poor whites by raising taxes.
Elevated to the White House by the death of President Abraham Lincoln, Johnson intended to “restore” the Union much as it had been before the war except for the abolition of enslavement, an abolition he strongly supported because he believed slavery was what had enabled elite southern planters to amass their fortunes. Because Congress had adjourned in March and was not scheduled to reconvene until the following December, Johnson had free rein for eight months to rebuild the nation as he wished.
In summer 1865 he told the governors of the former Confederate states to organize new constitutional conventions and then he required those conventions to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, ending human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime, nullify the ordinance of secession, and repudiate the Confederate war debts, essentially defaulting on loans so that future rebels would find it hard to raise money to fund their rebellion.
They did so—more or less—but then went on to pass “Black Codes,” laws that differed from state to state but that generally pushed Black Americans back into subservience to their white neighbors. The codes bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working for white men, prohibited them from owning guns or gathering in groups, demanded submissive behavior, and permitted corporal punishment for those failing to obey the codes.
Black Americans had no right to vote to challenge these laws, and no right to sit on juries or to testify in court. So they were at the mercy of any white man who cheated them or any gang that raped, assaulted, or murdered freedpeople.
When southern states held elections to send representatives to Congress in fall 1865, voters reelected old leaders who had led the South out of the Union in 1861, including Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the former vice president of the Confederacy. In late November 1865, these southern leaders traveled to Washington, D.C., to take their seats in Congress.
On December 4, Johnson greeted the new Congress by congratulating it that Reconstruction was over. While congress members had been out of session, he explained, he had reorganized the former Confederate states. All that was left to do to restore the government was for Congress to seat the South’s representatives. They were already in Washington, D.C., marveling at the changes the war had wrought in what was, just four years before, a sleepy southern town.
Republicans were appalled by Johnson’s “restoration,” recognizing that it delivered Black Americans who had fought for the United States into the hands of those men who had fought to destroy it. Johnson was permitting southerners who had lost the war to win the peace. The Chicago Tribune declared: “The men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.”
Congress rejected Johnson’s solution to reconstruct the nation. There was no way northern lawmakers were going to rebuild southern society on the old, pre–Civil War blueprint, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states even more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it.
Congress refused to seat the southern delegates. Then, to come up with their own plan for reconstruction, congressmen appointed a committee of thirteen lawmakers as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. After months of hearings and deliberation, the committee proposed to reconstruct the nation on an entirely new basis. At the end of April 1866, it called for amending the Constitution for the fourteenth time.
They wrote an amendment that began by reiterating the Constitution had provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This was an explicit rejection of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied Black Americans could be U.S. citizens.
Then it said: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This outlawed the discriminatory laws put in place in southern states under the Black Codes and said the federal government would guarantee that states could not pass legislation that gave some citizens more rights than others.
The new amendment gave Congress the power to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provision of this article.”
Congress required southern states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted to the Union.
Johnson hated the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its protection of equal rights within the states; he hated its assertion of the power of the federal government to protect that equality.
So Johnson told southern politicians to ignore Congress’s order to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. He assured them that Democrats would win the 1866 midterm elections and that once back in power, Democrats could repudiate Republican “radicalism” and allow Johnson’s plan for reconstruction of the Union to proceed.
Johnson’s position energized ex-Confederates, who made the summer of 1866 a bloody one. In July, when a Unionist convention in New Orleans called for taking the vote away from former Confederates and giving it to loyal Black Americans, white mobs attacked the building where the convention was in session. The ensuing riots killed thirty-seven Black delegates and three white delegates to the convention.
Rather than condemning the violence in the South, Johnson egged it on. After denouncing Congress as an illegal body—because it had not seated southern representatives— and saying Republican lawmakers were trying to undermine the Constitution, he decided to rally voters to his side before the 1866 midterm elections with a speaking campaign. In August 1866 he set out on a “Swing Around the Circle,” speaking at rallies on a circuit from Washington to New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and back through the Ohio River valley to the capital.
In February, shortly after congressional Republicans had rejected his plan for reconstruction, Johnson had suggested that those Republicans were trying to overthrow the government and were no better than the Confederates. But on September 4, 1866, he went further. In Cleveland, Ohio, facing a crowd heckling him for his stand against Congress, Johnson called those who opposed his plan for reconstruction “traitors” and suggested they should be hanged.
It was a stunning moment. Just a year after the end of the devastating civil war, a president had called for hanging members of Congress because they did not support his policies.
Americans wanted no part of it. Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand control of the country to the former Confederates rioting in the South and a president who called for the hanging of congressmen. Rather than rebuking the Republicans in the midterm elections as Johnson had predicted, voters repudiated Johnson. They stood behind the principles in the Fourteenth Amendment and gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress.
Now firmly in control of rebuilding the South, the Republicans worked to make the Fourteenth Amendment a reality. But in every southern state other than Tennessee (where locals so hated their native son Johnson that they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment just to spite him), white men had ignored Congress’s plan for reconstruction.
So, on March 2, 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed southern states into five military districts and, as Johnson’s plan had done, required new constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. Unlike his plan, though, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to the conventions. It also required the states to guarantee Black male suffrage in their new constitutions and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.
With the Military Reconstruction Act, Republicans asserted that all men, poor and underprivileged as well as rich and educated, should have a say in American government. Leading Republican politician James G. Blaine later reflected that the Military Reconstruction Act was of “transcendent importance and…unprecedented character. It was the most vigorous and determined action ever taken by Congress in time of peace. The effect produced by the measure was far-reaching and radical. It changed the political history of the United States. But it is well to remember that it could never have been accomplished except for the conduct of the Southern leaders.”
On July 9, 1868, the final state ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, making it part of the Constitution of the United States of America.
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Notes:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-cleveland-ohio-2
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-host-tries-to-justify-trumps-calls-for-dems-hangings/
James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, vol. 2 (Norwich, CT: Henry Bill Publishing, 1893), p. 262.
Bluesky:
nashishereforit.bsky.social/post/3m6bhi4fg4c2a
This post has been syndicated from Letters from an American, where it was published under this address.