Book Talk by Historian Vernon Burton

 1-31-23

Book Talk by Professor Vernon Burton Emeritus Clemson University

Justice Deferred

From the Clemson library

The library is the humanities laboratory

A history of race in the US

The Supreme Court is a lens to view racial history

No biological reality of race

Race is a social construct

All the topics are in the book

Shows the TOC

Shows the Thurgood Marshall photo

the Dred Scott decision.  Taney knew better as did the others.

Reconstruction is the most misunderstood and exciting part of American history.

Terrorism began during Reconstruction.

The Colfax legitimized racial terror to kill people.

BTW raised money to fight segregation and fight for voting rights.

He was perhaps more right than used to be thought.

Not just black but also Chinese massacres.

The convoluted issue of what is race.

KKK in the 20’s complex

Charles Evan Hughes reevaluated as with Wilson.

Progressive Hughes was a champion of black justice

Hughes was a dedicated Baptist.

Thurgood Marshall 

Impeach Earl Warren sign

Great presentation by this author utilizing pictures from the book.

Larson Review Continued

 Yet to deny that a liberty-seeking people largely denied freedom and equality to the enslaved is to deny a self-evident truth. Mindless celebration of the American past is just that — mindless. But so is reflexive condemnation. The messy, difficult, unavoidable truth of the American story is that it is fundamentally a human one. Imperfect, selfish, greedy, cruel — and sometimes noble. One might wish the nation’s story were simple. But that wish is in vain.

A key lesson from Larson’s narrative is that ages past were not benighted by a lack of knowledge of the immorality of race-based slavery. To me, Larson’s unemotional account of the Republic’s beginnings confirms a tragic truth: that influential white Americans knew — and understood — that slavery was wrong and liberty was precious, but chose not to act according to that knowledge and that understanding.

And it was a choice: one made for convenience. Slavery and racism were not externally imposed forces that lay beyond human control. They were, rather, economic, political and cultural constructs that served the purposes of the powerful — in this case, white people — and because of this, they stood for centuries.

“Our forefathers came over here for liberty,” John Adams argued in 1765. “Providence never designed us for negroes, I know, for if it wou’d have given us black hides, and thick lips, and flat noses, and short woolly hair, which it han’t done, and therefore never intended us for slaves.” And yet in the same era Benjamin Rush could write: “Where is the difference between the British Senator who attempts to enslave his fellow subjects in America, by imposing Taxes upon them contrary to Law and Justice; and the American Patriot who reduces his African Brethren to Slavery, contrary to Justice and Humanity?” How, the Quaker Richard Wells asked in 1774, can Americans “reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom?”

The answer is painful, but must be stated plainly: Americans reconciled the gap between the ideal and the real, profession and practice, by blaming the Old World for imposing what was called a “necessary evil,” by crafting racist lies about Black inferiority, and by manipulating Scripture to find biblical sanction for slavery. “Race,” Larson observes, “offered a way for them to enslave others without the fear of becoming enslaved themselves.”

Does this make the national experiment irredeemable? Are the shadows of our failures so dark and so long that no light can emanate from our past? In Larson’s terms, does our inheritance of slavery overwhelm our legacy of liberty?

The centuries since America’s founding suggest the answer is a qualified no. The antislavery tradition in the country — one older than even the Revolutionary vernacular of liberty — offers a positive moral and political example of how a people can move from error to truth. For all the Constitution’s compromises with slaveholders, James Madison noted that the document did not explicitly recognize “property in man,” thus giving the antislavery project room to maneuver and to grow. Such was Frederick Douglass’s view when he insisted that the Constitution was a “glorious Liberty document.”

In a 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson, who had written of Black inferiority in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the free Black man and almanac author Benjamin Banneker argued for the natural extension of Jefferson’s own assertions in the Declaration of Independence to all human beings. “However variable we may be in Society or religion,” Banneker wrote, “however diversified in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family.” That is a truth we, too, must hold to be self-evident, even if our forebears chose not to do so.

Neither as rigorously argued as Sean Wilentz’s “No Property in Man” nor as original as Manisha Sinha’s “The Slave’s Cause,” Larson’s sober new book nevertheless repays reading, for it has a good deal to teach those who want to see the American story in overly simplistic terms. Which means someone should send several copies to Tallahassee — with express shipping

Review of Larson

 By Jon Meacham

Can the Country Come to Terms With Its Original Sin?

In Edward J. Larson’s “American Inheritance,” the Pulitzer-winning historian attempts to insert reason into a passionate public conversation.

• Jan. 17, 2023

AMERICAN INHERITANCE: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795, by Edward J. Larson

---

It was as bold an assertion as it was wrong. Last September, speaking in support of his state’s “Stop Woke” legislation, the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, gave a brief lecture on liberty and slavery. The American Revolution, he said, was what had “caused people to question slavery. … No one had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights and that we are all created equal. Then that birthed abolition movements.”

Facts, as John Adams once remarked, are stubborn things, and the fact of the matter is that the evils of slavery were being questioned long before 1776. Antislavery sentiment and arguments in the Atlantic world are nearly coeval with the rise of race-based slavery itself. African slavery existed in Spanish holdings in the New World as early as 1502; it had come to English North America by 1619. By 1652, leaders in Rhode Island (temporarily) abolished human enslavement, and Pennsylvania Quakers called for an end to slavery in 1688. The Massachusetts jurist Samuel Sewall published an antislavery tract, “The Selling of Joseph,” in 1700.

As early as 1680, a contemporary noted, the “two words, Negro and Slave,” had “by Custom grown Homogenous and Convertible” in the New World. On a visit to British North America around 1730, the cleric and philosopher George Berkeley reported finding “an irrational contempt of the blacks, as creatures of another species.” Note his terminology: Irrationality was a cardinal sin in a supposed Age of Reason.

Our own age has been hard on both reason and history. Too often the past has been deployed to fight the ideological wars of the moment, a tendency that reduces history to ammunition. And so Edward J. Larson’s “American Inheritance” is a welcome addition to a public conversation, in the wake of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, that has largely produced more heat than light.

“The role of liberty and slavery in the American Revolution is a partisan minefield,” Larson writes. “Drawing on a popular narrative presenting the expansion of liberty as a driving force in American history, some on the right dismiss the role of slavery in the founding of the Republic. Appealing to a progressive narrative of economic self-interest, and racial and gender bias in American history, some on the left see the defense of state-sanctioned slavery as a cause of the Revolution and an effect of the Constitution.” Larson, a prolific historian whose “Summer for the Gods” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998, writes that this polarity “has opened the way for rigorous historical scholarship” in the tradition of Edmund Morgan and Benjamin Quarles.

“American Inheritance,” then, comes to us as an effort to step into the blood-strewn chaos of the present to calm the madness of a public stage where passion has trumped reason. As Larson argues, liberty, slavery and racism — an essential element of slavery — have always been entwined. “One way or another,” he writes, “the American Revolution resulted in the first great emancipation of enslaved Blacks in the New World.”

No Second Acts

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I have no idea what he meant. Maybe it means this is my one & only act so I better make the best of it. I just remember my college English lit instructor telling me you can never go wrong quoting Fitzgerald. Maybe especially on a dismal, depressing, winter day in B'ham. So there!

The Dunning School

 

Echoes of Reconstruction: Who the Hell Was William Dunning & Did He Distort Reconstruction History?

by Chris Mackowski 

Posted on January 28, 2023

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog. 

A year ago I wrote a Martin Luther King Day essay on the critique the great Civil Rights leader had of the way the history of Reconstruction had been distorted by a number of white historians of the first half of the 20th Century. While the article was met with a number of supportive comments and an equal number of derogations, there were several questions raised about the “Dunning School” historians who directed the distortion. Shortly after the article went up, I was hospitalized and was not able to get back to responding to the inquiries from readers. 

In his speech commemorating the 100th Birthday of African American historian W.E.B. DuBois, King spoke about how the Dunning School manipulated the history of Reconstruction and how DuBois’s book Black Reconstruction had challenged that white consensus. Dunning School history systematically altered the history of Reconstruction along lines pioneered by adherents of the Lost Cause a quarter century earlier. But the Dunningites were not ex-Confederates trying to justify their struggle against the United States, they were academics with doctorates from fine universities in the South and North.

The Dunning School is named after its founding father, Professor William Dunning. William A. Dunning was a Northerner born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1857. A true Columbia man, he received his bachelor’s degree there in 1881, his master’s there in 1884, and his doctorate there in 1885. In 1885 he began teaching at Columbia University and in 1904 he was chaired as the Francis Lieber Professor. He later served as the president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. This was no obscure historian.

Dunning’s writings led many Southern students to enroll at Columbia to study under him. His doctoral students would take on a decades-long program of creating Reconstruction studies of most of the Confederate states. They would also create primary source collections that are still important today. The Dunning School’s work was disseminated in popular media. According to historian John Smith:

For decades it dominated the popular understanding of Reconstruction thanks to its dissemination in David W. Griffith’s film The Birth of the Nation (1915), Claude G. Bowers’s The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (1929), George Fort Milton’s The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals (1930), and Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind (1936) and the film of the same title that appeared three years later. (The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction ed. by  John Smith Kindle Locations 142-144). 

According to the Dunning School, Reconstruction history followed this timeline:

1. Lincoln had planned on a mild restoration of the Union without any fundamental changes in Southern society apart from the ending of slavery. His death removed his powerful guiding hand from restoration of the Union.
2. Southern whites accepted emancipation and hoped to restore orderly and peaceful state governments after the war.
3. Andrew Johnson organized new state governments after the war, mobilizing moderate white Southerners to assume the offices of the reconstructed state and local governments.
4. Radical Republicans, seeking profits and power, fought against Johnson’s efforts at reconciliation, going so far as to illegally impeach him.
5. Radicals cynically gave Black men the right to vote in order to maintain control of the South.
6. Blacks lacked the mental capacity to see that their real allies were Southern whites and that they themselves were mentally and morally incapable of participating in government.
7. The governments set up by the Radicals encouraged Black indolence and allowed the Radicals to steal the region’s wealth.
8. White leaders redeemed the Southern states from Black and Radical rule and installed fair governments in which all were protected, even though Blacks were disenfranchised.

The views of the Dunning School were transmitted through elementary and high school textbooks in the early 20th Century. In some Southern colleges, Dunningite volumes became the acceptable histories of Reconstruction. But the Dunning School scholars attracted an audience well beyond the South. When they were writing, white Americans were coming to terms with the emergence of the United States as a world power, controlling non-white peoples in places like Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The role of whites as a world-wide ruling race was more a popular proposition in 1900 than perhaps at any other time in American history. The “unnaturalness” of “imposing Black rule” over white Southerners seemed apparent to many Northern whites four decades after Reconstruction.

One of Dunning’s most influential books was Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877  (1907). Hopefully you can stand a Deep Dive into this paragon of distortion.

Dunning begins the book in the days after Emancipation. African Americans, who frequently left the plantations of their former enslavers when they were freed to look for sold-off family members, are described as “aimless” wanderers by Dunning:

With the collapse of the Confederacy all the slaves became free, and the strange and unsettling tidings of emancipation were carried to the remotest corners of the land. As the full meaning of this news was grasped by the freedmen, great numbers of them abandoned their old homes, and, regardless of crops to be cultivated, stock to be cared for, or food to be provided, gave themselves up to testing their freedom. They wandered aimless but happy through the country, found endless delight in hanging about the towns and Union camps, and were fascinated by the pursuit of the white man’s culture in the schools which optimistic northern philanthropy was establishing wherever it was possible.

Right after the war, former Confederate States under all-white government elected by all-white voters passed the Black Codes. These were designed to control the bodies and labor of Black people.  Incredibly, Dunning described the severe disabilities placed on Black freedom as a sensible response to the inferiority of blacks:

The restrictions in respect to bearing arms, testifying in court, and keeping labor contracts were justified by well-established traits and habits of the negroes; and the vagrancy laws dealt with problems of destitution, idleness, and vice.… A few of the enactments, such as that of Mississippi excluding the blacks from leasing agricultural land, were clearly animated by a spirit of oppression, reflecting the antipathy of the lower-class whites to the negroes; and others doubtless were lacking in practical sagacity and in the nicest adaptation to the purpose in hand; but, after all, the greatest fault of the southern law-makers was, not that their procedure was unwise per se, but that, when legislating as a conquered people, they failed adequately to consider and be guided by the prejudices of their conquerors. Sagacious southerners warned the legislators that some of their acts would produce a dangerous effect in the North. But the personnel of the new governments did not include the most shrewd and experienced politicians of the states, and the legislatures, in yielding to the tremendous pressure of social and economic distress, set lightly aside some very urgent considerations of political expediency. (Kindle Locations 710-726)

Dunning expressed a lot of sympathy for racist President Andrew Johnson who opposed the Civil Rights Act passed by Congress in 1866. The bill simply declared that non-white people born in the United States were citizens and that they were entitled to certain civil rights. Dunning wrote:

Johnson was soon obliged to confront another measure which was much more subversive than the Freedmen’s Bureau bill of his most cherished constitutional convictions. This was the Civil Rights bill, designed to secure to the freedmen through the normal action of the courts the same protection against discriminating state legislation that was secured in the earlier bill by military power. It declared the freedmen to be citizens of the United States, and as such to have the same civil rights ‘ and to be subject to the same criminal penalties as white persons; and it provided with great fullness for the punishment of any one who, under color of state laws, should discriminate against the blacks. It was a plain announcement to the southern legislatures that, as against their project of setting the freedmen apart as a special class, with a status at law corresponding to their status in fact, the North would insist on exact equality between the races in civil status, regardless of any consideration of fact. The constitutional questions involved in this measure were of the most profound and intricate nature, and the theory of citizenship which it embodied was such as to make conservative constitutional lawyers stare and gasp.

Later in the book, Dunning related that the reaction of Southern whites against the enfranchisement of Blacks was the imposition of Black Rule because in some jurisdictions most people were Black! The occupation military forces prevented violence against Black voters, which apparently gave Blacks an undeserved advantage. Here is how Dunning described this:

In these elections, as in the registration, the military authorities assumed the duty of promoting in every way participation by the blacks, and of counteracting every influence tending to keep them from the polls. The result of the elections was a group of constituent assemblies whose unfitness for their task was pitiful. 

The principal problem with the new constitutions was, according to Dunning was:

the guarantee of entire equality, civil and political, among the citizens regardless of race…

The rest of the book is filled with similar sympathies and prejudices presented as scientific history. This view would dominate popular understanding of the period for three-quarters of a century and still maintains a hold on the minds of some.

It Is True

 It is true that there are differences between Trump and DeSantis and the various factions of the Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement. But in the end, these forces are largely united in their desire to destroy America's multiracial democracy and replace it with a new apartheid Christofascist plutocracy. Whichever candidate ends up surviving the Republican Party's battle royal pit fight to become the 2024 presidential nominee, the mainstream news media and commentariat will earnestly play the roles of referee, color commentator and stenographer when they should instead be alerting police and prosecutors about the crimes against democracy and human decency being committed right in front of them.

The media must make it clear: Be it DeSantis or Trump or some other Republican who wins the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, U.S. democracy and the American people will suffer all the same. 

Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

1619 Project Viewing

 The New York Times Magazine issue that published the first edition of "The 1619 Project" came out on a Wednesday – August 14, 2019. The night before was unforgettable for its creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, who admitted to Salon, "I was a complete mess. I was anxious. I couldn't sleep because I had no idea."

She's referring to the question of whether she had an inkling as to how people would react to it – not the gargantuan cultural impact its essays, fiction, poetry and photographs would eventually have. "The 1619 Project" earned Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer Prize for her essay on democracy, the work's foundational text. In 2021 she became Howard University's inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism.

The project's goal was to invite a reconsideration of the United States' legacy of slavery on the 400th anniversary of the first time enslaved Africans set foot on Virginian soil. That it did, powerfully enough to set in motion a right-wing backlash that's still reverberating through state legislatures and school districts.

The Critical Race Theory canard is sold to justify the excision of Black history from school curriculums and criminalizing its teaching in the most basic sense, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are busily doing. There have been shoddily produced attempts at rejoinders to "The 1619 Project" in the form of the Trump Administration's "1776 Project" and a committee dedicated to creating a "patriotic" telling of Texas history dubbed the 1836 Project.

"The backlash is a sign of the success of the project,"
 said Hannah-Jones.

Book bans have also become a feature of these spasmodic reactions, but legislators haven't found a way to stop history lessons from being broadcast or streamed to people's televisions. Few TV adaptations of historic or cultural texts can match the depth of the written work, but in distilling "The 1619 Project" into six installments partly presented from the perspective of Hannah-Jones' personal history, it becomes more easily consumable and attainable to a much broader swath of people. 

"Part of the backlash, I think, is people are just really surprised by what we argue in the project and there are certain Americans who think, if this were true, certainly I would have heard about it before," Hannah-Jones recently told reporters at a Hulu-hosted press conference for the Television Critics Association. "And then, of course, there's the backlash that is strictly political, which is this project exposes power, exposes hierarchy, exposes that we were founded on lofty ideals of democracy and freedom and also the practice of slavery and what does that mean for the country that we live in today.

"To me, the backlash is a sign of the success of the project," she added. "If there weren't lots of Americans who were ready and willing to have a different understanding of our country, you wouldn't see such intensity against the project."

Before that event Hannah-Jones sat down with Salon to discuss what it means to see "The 1619 Project" evolve from a magazine issue, a podcast and a book into a documentary series that blends history with what she describes as artistic "breaths."

When you were conceiving "The1619 Project," did you have any idea of how it would be received after its publication?

No, I didn't. As a journalist, you can work really hard on something, you can think it's really important and powerful, but you have no control over how it goes into the world and how people respond to it. And there's so much grabbing your attention at any one time. And this was thousands of words on slavery and its legacy. So no, I had no expectation whatsoever, and in fact, a lot of trepidation. But of course I have been continuously awed by how people have responded to the work.

Related to that, did you think that it would ever become a TV series or streaming series?

No. I'm an old school print journalist, I've spent my entire career in print and didn't even conceive of it as something that would be turned into television. So that's been an amazing bonus, because of course I understand the power of the medium. But it's not a medium I've ever worked in.

With regard to the Hulu version of "1619," what do you perceive are the strengths of seeing a visual version of this work?

I think that what having this as a docuseries does is, in some ways, democratizes access. I come from, as you can see in the documentary, a very working class community in a small town or a small city in Iowa. And I think a lot about, as we were deciding to turn this into television, this is something my family will watch. People want this information but frankly, like most Americans, no matter what your education or occupation, are not reading a 500-page book, right? Or they're not reading 10,0000-word magazine essays. But that doesn't mean they don't want the information.

So to me, that is the beauty. You're able to connect with people on a different level. You appeal to different senses, and I think, different parts of the brain when you have television. But also, you're able to get people this type of information who may not have access to it in the same way. So that, to me, is really the strength of this type of storytelling. And it's been really interesting, because, you know, now it's been a magazine, a book, a podcast, and you see all of the different ways you can bring storytelling to bear on a single project.

I also think that in this day and age – and this is going to sound naïve but I stand by this – I do think that when you put the visual in front of somebody that makes the fact a little less deniable, unless somebody is really married to the lie, by dint of the perspectives that are brought by historians, experts, people who lived this history.  And I know that you've gone through it, with everything that came out and in terms of the backlash to the project. So, I'm curious to know, were you thinking about that when you were selecting what to put into these episodes? Were there elements or people that you included in order to make the details undeniable?

What we spent a lot of time on is one, how do you humanize this history? How do you find representatives that are trying to carry the weight of this history, the people who are living today? And that really is the beauty of the series. Yes, I can teach you about this history, and I can argue that this history is impacting real human beings. But are you seeing those real human beings? Are you seeing the story of the way that something that happened 100 years ago or 200 years ago is still playing out in the lives of regular people whom you can relate to? You can see your own struggles or your own stories in their stories. . . . Once we selected which essays we wanted to build the episodes around, the first things we were thinking about were, who are the people, the real regular people that we will tell these stories through?

When I first read "The 1619 Project" in the New York Times, all of these concepts marry together in each of the essays, but these specific episode titles – "Democracy," "Race," "Music," "Capitalism," "Fear" and "Justice" – can you talk about why you chose to break down the series that way?

Sure, we really wanted to get those that distill the American identity with the most strength, that if you wanted to understand how slavery has shaped our entire country, what are the subject areas that most help explain that? But also, we think we know so much about and in fact, we don't.

So, of course, Democracy and Capitalism are the two pillars that have this notion of American exceptionalism, that we are the oldest greatest democracy in the history of the world, and that capitalism is the freest economic system in the history of the world, and that we were built upon these two ideas. So we wanted to really challenge those core ideas of American identity.

Race was important, because race is something that we believe we understand . . . but we really don't. How can you understand the legacy of slavery if you don't actually understand how race was constructed? So that was really critical.

I Claim to Be

 I claim to be a man of letters, but the only line I know from Dylan Thomas is “fight, fight, the dying of the light” and I quit on Twain after that silly story about the jumping frog. I am such a phony. Holden Caulfield would understand.

Florida's War on Books is Real

 Florida's war on books is real. Gov. DeSantis wants to keep young people from reading. He is right about one thing: reading books is a dangerous thing, a clear and present danger to preferred ignorance.

For those who are paying attention, it's been obvious for some time that Florida's mega-MAGA governor, Ron DeSantis, is aggressive with book bans because he would just prefer it if kids didn't read books at all. So while it was infuriating, it was not surprising to read that the investigative journalism team at Popular Info had discovered that teachers in Manatee County, Florida were told that every book on their shelves was banned until otherwise notified. Failure to lock up all their books until they could be "vetted" by censors, teachers were warned, put them at risk of being prosecuted as felons.

The facts of this situation are straightforward: A Florida law signed by DeSantis requires that every book available to students "must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate," in most cases, the school librarian. This may sound reasonable on its surface, but as the situation in Manatee County shows, in reality, it's about creating a bottleneck preventing books from getting into the hands of students. Even more importantly, it's about establishing the idea that books are inherently dangerous objects, to the degree that no student can be allowed to handle one without heavy-handed surveillance.

-Amanda Marcotte from Salon.com

Eric Foner on the 14th Amendment

 By Eric Foner

Mr. Foner is the author of “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.”

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The 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War, has been back in the news of late, mostly because the Supreme Court has taken aim at past decisions, notably Roe v. Wade, that employed it to protect Americans’ liberties. The amendment remains the most significant addition to the Constitution since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Its magnificent first section established the principle of birthright citizenship and prohibited the states from denying to any person the equal protection of the laws, laying the foundation for many of the rights Americans prize.

Long-forgotten provisions of the 14th Amendment are suddenly crying out for enforcement. Section Two provides for a reduction in the number of representatives allocated to states that deny the right to vote to any “male citizens.” (Today this penalty would apply to the disenfranchisement of women as well.) Even at the height of the Jim Crow era, when millions of African Americans were prevented from voting, this penalty was never implemented. But with many states seriously limiting voting rights, its time may have come.

Section Three bars from public office anyone who took an oath to support the Constitution and subsequently participated in or encouraged “insurrection.” The events of Jan. 6, 2021, have focused new attention on this stipulation, which could be applied to participants in the uprising who previously held military, political, or judicial positions, including former President Donald Trump.

Then there is Section Four, which offers a way out of the current impasse over increasing the debt ceiling. “The validity of the public debt of the United States,” it declares, “shall not be questioned.” What were those who wrote, debated and ratified this provision trying to accomplish? The section arose from political conflicts over the way the Civil War had been financed. To pay the war’s enormous cost, Congress printed legal tender paper money (the “greenbacks”), raised taxes to unprecedented heights, and authorized the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of interest-bearing bonds. Nearly all the laws authorizing the issuance of bonds specified that the government would redeem the notes in gold. The one exception was the act related to the “five-twenties,” bonds redeemable in five years and payable in 20, which was silent on how those who had lent money to the government by purchasing these bonds would be repaid.

This oversight, to quote the historian Irwin Unger, led directly to “a decade of intense and exasperating conflict.” Democrats sought to score political points by demanding that the five-twenties be repaid in paper money (which had deteriorated considerably in value), not gold. It would constitute an enormous unearned windfall, they insisted, for banks and large investors who had purchased these bonds with greenbacks to receive gold back from the government. “Who has asked us to change the Constitution for the benefit of the bondholders?” Senator Thomas Hendricks of Indiana asked when the amendment was being debated. “Why give them this extraordinary guarantee?”

Republicans pointed out that much of the benefit of payment in gold would be enjoyed by ordinary Americans, who had purchased them from a small army of agents deployed by the financier Jay Cooke. They insisted that the sanctity of the national debt was as much a moral legacy of the Civil War as emancipation itself.

The idea of paying the five-twenties in greenbacks was closely identified with “Gentleman George” Pendleton, the scion of a prominent Virginia family and the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1864, who hoped to ride it all the way to the White House. What came to be called the Pendleton Plan made its way into the Democrats’ national platform of 1868 over the strenuous objections not only of Republicans but also Democrats tied to Wall Street, like the financier August Belmont, the Rothschild banking family’s representative in the United States, who naturally preferred to be paid in gold rather than paper money.

Section Four was the Republicans’ response. While the language is certainly infelicitous (surely Congress could have found better wording than declaring it illegal to “question” the validity of the national debt), the historical context makes its purpose clear. In the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Congress began the nation’s first large experiment in interracial democracy, granting the right to vote to African American men in all the former Confederate states except Tennessee. This propelled Republicans to control of governments throughout the South. But Republicans feared that at some future time, former Confederates might return to power there. Their congressional representatives might join Northern Democrats in repudiating all or part of the national debt while honoring the Confederate one (this latter possibility was explicitly prohibited by Section Four).

The nation needed to be made “safe from the domination of traitors,” declared Representative James Ashley, Republican of Ohio, “safe from repudiation.” The 14th Amendment would help accomplish these goals. Whatever one thinks of Civil War-era fiscal policy, the amendment’s language is mandatory, not permissive — the validity of the public debt “shall not be questioned.” Today, over a century and a half after the amendment’s ratification, this promise is no longer considered an “extraordinary guarantee”; it is an essential attribute of a modern economy.

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Our Constitution is not self-enforcing. The 14th Amendment concludes by empowering Congress to implement its provisions. But if the current House of Representatives abdicates this responsibility, throwing the nation into default by refusing to raise the debt limit, President Biden should act on his own, taking steps to ensure that the federal government meets its financial obligations, as the Constitution requires.