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On the sidelines of the commemorations marking the 50th anniversary last month of the pivotal civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery led in 1965 by Dr Martin Luther King, a group called Students Unite planned a peaceful march to the Live Oak cemetery, a burial place for Confederate soldiers that includes the grave of Edmund Winston Pettus.
Pettus was a Confederate general and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and the bridge that was a crucial crossing point for the 1965 marchers was named after him. Students Unite was continuing a campaign waged over the decades to rename the bridge.
The group’s plan for a demonstration was thwarted, however, by the prospect of a confrontation with a small but vocal band of people who identify with the Confederacy that was defeated a century and a half ago in the American Civil War.
It served as a reminder that in the minds of some, the civil war, fought partly over the divisive institution of slavery, never quite ended.
It is ironic that today’s Republicans are key defenders of “states’ rights”.
It did, of course — not long after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Unionist commander Ulysses S.
Grant on April 9, 1865. Five days later — and 150 years ago today — the president whose leadership was pivotal to the Unionist cause lay dead. Abraham Lincoln had been shot the previous day, during a night out at the theatre, by a prominent actor whose stage talents he admired.
John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy involved an elaborate decapitation: the plan was to kill Lincoln, vice-president Andrew Johnson and secretary of state William Seward, thereby provoking a crisis that would enable the Confederacy politically to make up for its losses on the battlefield.
Only one part of the plot succeeded, however. The 16th president of the US became the first one to be assassinated. Seward survived an attack, and the man deputed to kill Johnson got cold feet. The newly reunited US remained intact.
What’s more, the Republican party, which had been formed in 1854, just six years before it put up Lincoln as a presidential candidate, more or less monopolised the White House until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ascendancy. There is, of course, considerable irony in the fact that today’s Republicans are key defenders of “states’ rights”, a slogan that was once a byword for the right to perpetuate slavery.
In his initial incarnation as a nationwide politician, Lincoln had not questioned that right, declaring in his first inaugural address that he did not believe he had the right to overturn slavery in states where it existed. He insisted, however, that the slave terrain could not be extended. And he appears to have realised some years before he became president that “this nation cannot exist half slave and half free”.
His ascendancy nonetheless triggered a string of secessions, leading to a short-lived entity known as the Confederate States of America. In his second inaugural address — delivered on March 4, 1865, less than six weeks before he was assassinated — Lincoln summed up the dilemma: “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”
It cost lives on a monumental scale and for much of his tenure at the helm Lincoln’s countenance tended to be appropriately mournful. The Union’s triumph wasn’t by any means a foregone conclusion: a succession of incompetent or reticent Union generals frequently wrested defeat from the jaws of victory.
But eventually the tide turned, arguably in part because in the middle of the war Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, liberating all slaves, which became the 13th Amendment in 1865. A hundred years later, however, the descendants of slaves were still striving for civil and voting rights. It was a different president Johnson — Lyndon, not Andrew, but a successor nonetheless to the legacy of another assassinated head of state — who pushed for and signed the civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965.
Fifty years later, however, many key issues remain unresolved in practice, amid evidence of regression on some fronts.
Back in 1865, Lincoln was greeted on his re-election by a missive from the recently formed International Workingmen’s Association, based in London and headed by a German exile called Karl Marx, which described the re-elected president as “the single-minded son of the working class” who would “lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world”.
Just a few months later, Marx and the IWA felt obliged to dispatch a second message, addressed this time to Andrew Johnson, hailing Lincoln as “a man neither to be browbeaten by adversity nor intoxicated by success”, and as “one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great without ceasing to be good”. That’ll do very well as an epitaph.
Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2015
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