As usual, Paul Krugman gives the prrogressive position on just where this country stands.
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Battles of the BudgetBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 3, 2013 238 Comments
The centrist fantasy of a Grand Bargain on the budget never had a chance. Even if some kind of bargain had supposedly been reached, key players would soon have reneged on the deal — probably the next time a Republican occupied the White House.
For the reality is that our two major political parties are engaged in a fierce struggle over the future shape of American society. Democrats want to preserve the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and add to them what every other advanced country has: a more or less universal guarantee of essential health care. Republicans want to roll all of that back, making room for drastically lower taxes on the wealthy. Yes, it’s essentially a class war.
The fight over the fiscal cliff was just one battle in that war. It ended, arguably, in a tactical victory for Democrats. The question is whether it was a Pyrrhic victory that set the stage for a larger defeat.
Why do I say that it was a tactical victory? Mainly because of what didn’t happen: There were no benefit cuts.
This was by no means a foregone conclusion. In 2011, the Obama administration was reportedly willing to raise the age of Medicare eligibility, a terrible and cruel policy idea. This time around, it was willing to cut Social Security benefits by changing the formula for cost-of-living adjustments, a less terrible idea that would nonetheless have imposed a lot of hardship — and probably have been politically disastrous as well. In the end, however, it didn’t happen. And progressives, always worried that President Obama seems much too willing to compromise about fundamentals, breathed a sigh of relief.
There were also some actual positives from a progressive point of view. Expanded unemployment benefits were given another year to run, a huge benefit to many families and a significant boost to our economic prospects (because this is money that will be spent, and hence help preserve jobs). Other benefits to lower-income families were given another five years — although, unfortunately, the payroll tax break was allowed to expire, which will hurt both working families and job creation.
The biggest progressive gripe about the legislation is that Mr. Obama extracted less revenue from the affluent than expected — about $600 billion versus $800 billion over the next decade. In perspective, however, this isn’t that big a deal. Put it this way: A reasonable estimate is that gross domestic product over the next 10 years will be around $200 trillion. So if the revenue take had matched expectations, it would still have amounted to only 0.4 percent of G.D.P.; as it turned out, this was reduced to 0.3 percent. Either way, it wouldn’t make much difference in the fights over revenue versus spending still to come.
Oh, and not only did Republicans vote for a tax increase for the first time in decades, the overall result of the tax changes now taking effect — which include new taxes associated with Obamacare as well as the new legislation — will be a significant reduction in income inequality, with the top 1 percent and even more so the top 0.1 percent taking a much bigger hit than middle-income families.
So why are many progressives — myself included — feeling very apprehensive? Because we’re worried about the confrontations to come.
According to the normal rules of politics, Republicans should have very little bargaining power at this point. With Democrats holding the White House and the Senate, the G.O.P. can’t pass legislation; and since the biggest progressive policy priority of recent years, health reform, is already law, Republicans wouldn’t seem to have many bargaining chips.
But the G.O.P. retains the power to destroy, in particular by refusing to raise the debt limit — which could cause a financial crisis. And Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use their destructive power to extract major policy concessions.
Now, the president has said that he won’t negotiate on that basis, and rightly so. Threatening to hurt tens of millions of innocent victims unless you get your way — which is what the G.O.P. strategy boils down to — shouldn’t be treated as a legitimate political tactic.
But will Mr. Obama stick to his anti-blackmail position as the moment of truth approaches? He blinked during the 2011 debt limit confrontation. And the last few days of the fiscal cliff negotiations were also marked by a clear unwillingness on his part to let the deadline expire. Since the consequences of a missed deadline on the debt limit would potentially be much worse, this bodes ill for administration resolve in the clinch.
So, as I said, in a tactical sense the fiscal cliff ended in a modest victory for the White House. But that victory could all too easily turn into defeat in just a few weeks.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Obama's Fiscal Cliff Deal
I give up. After reading various opinions, pro and con, on the President's so-called fiscal cliff deal, I realize that I cannot come to a conclusion about the result. Only time will tell if this is a good or bad deal for the American people. I do note that it is telling that most of the House members who voted nay are from the former slave states.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
The Civil War Continues (another example)
..The Civil War Endures in the Fiscal Cliff Fight
John B. Judis
John B. JudisSenior Editorview bioNo Confidence The Civil War Endures in the Fiscal Cliff Fight Obama's Tax Hike
Republican House members from the East and the Far West strongly backed the Senate resolution. In the East, House Republicans were 24 to one in favor, with New York and Pennsylvania unanimous. In the Far West, Republicans voted by 17 to eight in favor. The Midwest was split, with 27 against and 21 for, with Michigan and Illinois in favor, and Ohio, the Speaker’s state, against 7 to 6. This back of the envelope tally suggests that, to a surprising extent, the Civil War divisions endure, and even supersede in this case the partisan divisions between Republicans and Democrats.
John B. Judis
John B. JudisSenior Editorview bioNo Confidence The Civil War Endures in the Fiscal Cliff Fight Obama's Tax Hike
Republican House members from the East and the Far West strongly backed the Senate resolution. In the East, House Republicans were 24 to one in favor, with New York and Pennsylvania unanimous. In the Far West, Republicans voted by 17 to eight in favor. The Midwest was split, with 27 against and 21 for, with Michigan and Illinois in favor, and Ohio, the Speaker’s state, against 7 to 6. This back of the envelope tally suggests that, to a surprising extent, the Civil War divisions endure, and even supersede in this case the partisan divisions between Republicans and Democrats.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Give Up on the Constitution?
Let’s Give Up on the ConstitutionBy LOUIS MICHAEL SEIDMAN
Published: December 30, 2012
.AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.
Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?
Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.
As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all 13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.
No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring it. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Thomas Jefferson thought every constitution should expire after a single generation. He believed the most consequential act of his presidency — the purchase of the Louisiana Territory — exceeded his constitutional powers.
Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — 150 years ago tomorrow — he justified it as a military necessity under his power as commander in chief. Eventually, though, he embraced the freeing of slaves as a central war aim, though nearly everyone conceded that the federal government lacked the constitutional power to disrupt slavery where it already existed. Moreover, when the law finally caught up with the facts on the ground through passage of the 13th Amendment, ratification was achieved in a manner at odds with constitutional requirements. (The Southern states were denied representation in Congress on the theory that they had left the Union, yet their reconstructed legislatures later provided the crucial votes to ratify the amendment.)
In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation. In 1954, when the court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Robert H. Jackson said he was voting for it as a moral and political necessity although he thought it had no basis in the Constitution. The list goes on and on.
The fact that dissenting justices regularly, publicly and vociferously assert that their colleagues have ignored the Constitution — in landmark cases from Miranda v. Arizona to Roe v. Wade to Romer v. Evans to Bush v. Gore — should give us pause. The two main rival interpretive methods, “originalism” (divining the framers’ intent) and “living constitutionalism” (reinterpreting the text in light of modern demands), cannot be reconciled. Some decisions have been grounded in one school of thought, and some in the other. Whichever your philosophy, many of the results — by definition — must be wrong.
IN the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.
Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country.
What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify military action against Iran solely on the merits, without shutting down the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as commander in chief. Congress might well retain the power of the purse, but this power would have to be defended on contemporary policy grounds, not abstruse constitutional doctrine. The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.
The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity. And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.
What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit.
If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace. Of course, that does not mean that people agree at the ground level. If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.
If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.
Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, is the author of the forthcoming book “On Constitutional Disobedience.”
Published: December 30, 2012
.AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.
Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?
Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.
As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all 13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.
No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring it. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Thomas Jefferson thought every constitution should expire after a single generation. He believed the most consequential act of his presidency — the purchase of the Louisiana Territory — exceeded his constitutional powers.
Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — 150 years ago tomorrow — he justified it as a military necessity under his power as commander in chief. Eventually, though, he embraced the freeing of slaves as a central war aim, though nearly everyone conceded that the federal government lacked the constitutional power to disrupt slavery where it already existed. Moreover, when the law finally caught up with the facts on the ground through passage of the 13th Amendment, ratification was achieved in a manner at odds with constitutional requirements. (The Southern states were denied representation in Congress on the theory that they had left the Union, yet their reconstructed legislatures later provided the crucial votes to ratify the amendment.)
In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation. In 1954, when the court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Robert H. Jackson said he was voting for it as a moral and political necessity although he thought it had no basis in the Constitution. The list goes on and on.
The fact that dissenting justices regularly, publicly and vociferously assert that their colleagues have ignored the Constitution — in landmark cases from Miranda v. Arizona to Roe v. Wade to Romer v. Evans to Bush v. Gore — should give us pause. The two main rival interpretive methods, “originalism” (divining the framers’ intent) and “living constitutionalism” (reinterpreting the text in light of modern demands), cannot be reconciled. Some decisions have been grounded in one school of thought, and some in the other. Whichever your philosophy, many of the results — by definition — must be wrong.
IN the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.
Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country.
What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify military action against Iran solely on the merits, without shutting down the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as commander in chief. Congress might well retain the power of the purse, but this power would have to be defended on contemporary policy grounds, not abstruse constitutional doctrine. The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.
The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity. And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.
What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit.
If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace. Of course, that does not mean that people agree at the ground level. If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.
If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.
Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, is the author of the forthcoming book “On Constitutional Disobedience.”
The Republican Party is the Old Confederacy
On the Fiscal Cliff, Obama Does What He Can Against 200 Years of Bad Faith
by Michael Tomasky Jan 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST
The fiscal-cliff impasse had its roots in—where else?—the old South, with its lunatic blend of obstructionism and greed at the public trough, writes Michael Tomasky.
While most liberals were stewing at Barack Obama yesterday for his “capitulation” on tax rates, I confess that I was feeling philosophical about it, and even mildly defensive of him. He is negotiating with madmen, and you can’t negotiate with madmen, because they’re, well, mad. I also spent part of yesterday morning re-reading a little history and reminding myself that rascality like this fiscal-cliff business has been going on since the beginning of the republic. So now I’d like to remind you. It’s always the reactionaries holding up the progressives—and usually, needless to say, it’s been the South holding up the North—and always with the same demagogic and dishonest arguments about a tyrannical central government. We’ll never be rid of these paranoid bloviators, and if no other president could stop them I don’t really see why Obama ought to be able to.
(L) portrait of Alexander Hamilton and (R) James Madison (Bettmann/Corbis)
This history of legislative hostage-taking begins with the odious three-fifths compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. That much I trust you know. What you may not know is that the Southern states, backers of the three-fifths rule in this case in order to get greater representation in the House of Representatives, had opposed a different three-fifths rule earlier, back in the Articles of Confederation days. Then, three-fifths of all slaves were going to be counted for purposes of deciding how much federal tax each state owed.
In other words, the South had said, count slaves as part human for the purposes of taxation? Nevah! Count them as part-human for the purposes of representation, however—well, Yankee, now you’re talking. The South is still doing exactly the same thing today, never paying its freight, its cornpone pols inveighing against the evil government while the Southern states are collectively the most dependent on Washington largesse of all states and regions. The hypocrisy has a long pedigree.
Just three years after the three-fifths compromise we had the so-called Great Compromise of 1790, or the “dinner table bargain” mediated by Jefferson between Hamilton and Madison. Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume the states’ debts and establish public credit. Madison was dead set against it, partly on the grounds that his state of Virginia would be a big loser in any such assumption. This was true, but it also put Madison squarely against progress: against the government protecting investment capitalism, against the industrial revolution itself.
Fortunately, Jefferson brought them together, and equally fortunately, Madison was no John Boehner. He agreed not to support but also not to openly oppose Hamilton’s bill, on the condition that a new nation’s capital were built in some agrarian spot, which turned out to be a certain parcel along the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia.
This one sort of worked out, because the men involved were actual statesmen, and each side got something meaningful. But usually, American history is the history of positive developments being prevented from happening, or at least perverted, because of hostagelike demands made by the reactionaries.
Thus could California become a state in 1850, and a free one, but only provided that the Northern states would accept a much strengthened Fugitive Slave Act, which non-slave states had tried to challenge (a reactionary Supreme Court ruled with the South in 1842), and provided that the federal government would assume Texas’s crushing debt. Thus did we get Bleeding Kansas, the little precursor to the Civil War. And so on and so on.
American history usually is the history of positive developments being prevented from happening, or at least perverted, because of hostagelike demands made by the reactionaries.
Well, you might say, the North got its revenge with the Civil War and Reconstruction. But Southern and agrarian-reactionary elements continued to find ways to bottle up progress well into the 20th century—somehow managing to persuade northerners that they somehow had the right to chair the major congressional committees, where they made sure (except during the Depression) that very little progressive social legislation could see the light of day. This finally changed in the ’60s and ’70s for a few brief shining moments, when most of the legislation that attempts to make ours a more equitable society was passed (and most of which, contrary to right-wing mythology, was quite successful). Then came Ronald Reagan and eventually Newt Gingrich, the interests of the agrarian reactionaries now cleverly fused to those of the corporate titans ready to spend billions in common cause against progress.
On MSNBC earlier today, Republican Rep. Tom Cole said, "We ought to take this deal right now and we'll live to fight another day.", On MSNBC earlier today, Republican Rep. Tom Cole said, "We ought to take this deal right now and we'll live to fight another day."
What unites all these movements are pretty much the same motives that drive today’s right wing: hatred of government and taxation, constant (and almost always baseless) fear that a central authority is going to rob their liberty, and so on. They are bound together also by a kind of psychology and mindset, a conviction that they represent the good simple folk while their opponents speak for the shifty and the shiftless.
Mitch McConnell may have cut a deal with Joe Biden. But don’t forget, even though he agreed to something, and even though it went through the Senate, now it goes to the House, where all these historic resentments fester and boil. They are not now limited to the South, but the region remains their locus (think of it this way: if those 11 states of the Confederacy somehow weren’t around, we’d obviously be having no such fights).
So I’m feeling for Obama. A number of presidents have had to deal with this kind of behavior, and most haven’t done it very well. If the House will pass today the deal Obama and Joe Biden worked out last night with the Senate—higher tax rates at $400,000 and up, a higher estate tax rate, an extension of unemployment benefits, and a delay in the sequester—he will have done all right. Liberals who think he should just stand tough because he “holds all the cards” aren’t recognizing two important things.
First, he simply doesn’t hold all the cards. The Republicans control the House, and they have enough to block in the Senate. Where I come from, those are cards, and serious ones. Second, they aren’t remembering that his opponents draw on and are part of this nation’s long and often tragic history of people who represent an obsolescing minority viewpoint but do so all the more tenaciously precisely because they secretly know the viewpoint to be both of those things. We will never be rid of them. Obama is having to cross swords with a particularly intense concentration of the type, and right now, he’s doing alright.
by Michael Tomasky Jan 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST
The fiscal-cliff impasse had its roots in—where else?—the old South, with its lunatic blend of obstructionism and greed at the public trough, writes Michael Tomasky.
While most liberals were stewing at Barack Obama yesterday for his “capitulation” on tax rates, I confess that I was feeling philosophical about it, and even mildly defensive of him. He is negotiating with madmen, and you can’t negotiate with madmen, because they’re, well, mad. I also spent part of yesterday morning re-reading a little history and reminding myself that rascality like this fiscal-cliff business has been going on since the beginning of the republic. So now I’d like to remind you. It’s always the reactionaries holding up the progressives—and usually, needless to say, it’s been the South holding up the North—and always with the same demagogic and dishonest arguments about a tyrannical central government. We’ll never be rid of these paranoid bloviators, and if no other president could stop them I don’t really see why Obama ought to be able to.
(L) portrait of Alexander Hamilton and (R) James Madison (Bettmann/Corbis)
This history of legislative hostage-taking begins with the odious three-fifths compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. That much I trust you know. What you may not know is that the Southern states, backers of the three-fifths rule in this case in order to get greater representation in the House of Representatives, had opposed a different three-fifths rule earlier, back in the Articles of Confederation days. Then, three-fifths of all slaves were going to be counted for purposes of deciding how much federal tax each state owed.
In other words, the South had said, count slaves as part human for the purposes of taxation? Nevah! Count them as part-human for the purposes of representation, however—well, Yankee, now you’re talking. The South is still doing exactly the same thing today, never paying its freight, its cornpone pols inveighing against the evil government while the Southern states are collectively the most dependent on Washington largesse of all states and regions. The hypocrisy has a long pedigree.
Just three years after the three-fifths compromise we had the so-called Great Compromise of 1790, or the “dinner table bargain” mediated by Jefferson between Hamilton and Madison. Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume the states’ debts and establish public credit. Madison was dead set against it, partly on the grounds that his state of Virginia would be a big loser in any such assumption. This was true, but it also put Madison squarely against progress: against the government protecting investment capitalism, against the industrial revolution itself.
Fortunately, Jefferson brought them together, and equally fortunately, Madison was no John Boehner. He agreed not to support but also not to openly oppose Hamilton’s bill, on the condition that a new nation’s capital were built in some agrarian spot, which turned out to be a certain parcel along the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia.
This one sort of worked out, because the men involved were actual statesmen, and each side got something meaningful. But usually, American history is the history of positive developments being prevented from happening, or at least perverted, because of hostagelike demands made by the reactionaries.
Thus could California become a state in 1850, and a free one, but only provided that the Northern states would accept a much strengthened Fugitive Slave Act, which non-slave states had tried to challenge (a reactionary Supreme Court ruled with the South in 1842), and provided that the federal government would assume Texas’s crushing debt. Thus did we get Bleeding Kansas, the little precursor to the Civil War. And so on and so on.
American history usually is the history of positive developments being prevented from happening, or at least perverted, because of hostagelike demands made by the reactionaries.
Well, you might say, the North got its revenge with the Civil War and Reconstruction. But Southern and agrarian-reactionary elements continued to find ways to bottle up progress well into the 20th century—somehow managing to persuade northerners that they somehow had the right to chair the major congressional committees, where they made sure (except during the Depression) that very little progressive social legislation could see the light of day. This finally changed in the ’60s and ’70s for a few brief shining moments, when most of the legislation that attempts to make ours a more equitable society was passed (and most of which, contrary to right-wing mythology, was quite successful). Then came Ronald Reagan and eventually Newt Gingrich, the interests of the agrarian reactionaries now cleverly fused to those of the corporate titans ready to spend billions in common cause against progress.
On MSNBC earlier today, Republican Rep. Tom Cole said, "We ought to take this deal right now and we'll live to fight another day.", On MSNBC earlier today, Republican Rep. Tom Cole said, "We ought to take this deal right now and we'll live to fight another day."
What unites all these movements are pretty much the same motives that drive today’s right wing: hatred of government and taxation, constant (and almost always baseless) fear that a central authority is going to rob their liberty, and so on. They are bound together also by a kind of psychology and mindset, a conviction that they represent the good simple folk while their opponents speak for the shifty and the shiftless.
Mitch McConnell may have cut a deal with Joe Biden. But don’t forget, even though he agreed to something, and even though it went through the Senate, now it goes to the House, where all these historic resentments fester and boil. They are not now limited to the South, but the region remains their locus (think of it this way: if those 11 states of the Confederacy somehow weren’t around, we’d obviously be having no such fights).
So I’m feeling for Obama. A number of presidents have had to deal with this kind of behavior, and most haven’t done it very well. If the House will pass today the deal Obama and Joe Biden worked out last night with the Senate—higher tax rates at $400,000 and up, a higher estate tax rate, an extension of unemployment benefits, and a delay in the sequester—he will have done all right. Liberals who think he should just stand tough because he “holds all the cards” aren’t recognizing two important things.
First, he simply doesn’t hold all the cards. The Republicans control the House, and they have enough to block in the Senate. Where I come from, those are cards, and serious ones. Second, they aren’t remembering that his opponents draw on and are part of this nation’s long and often tragic history of people who represent an obsolescing minority viewpoint but do so all the more tenaciously precisely because they secretly know the viewpoint to be both of those things. We will never be rid of them. Obama is having to cross swords with a particularly intense concentration of the type, and right now, he’s doing alright.
Foner on the Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln Raymond VerdaguerBy ERIC FONER
(Eric Foner is our leading Lincoln scholar on slavery. His work is definitive as opposed to Holzer. It is amazing that after 150 years the EP is still being parsed. Such are the significant issues that surround Lincoln scholarship. . . FLH)
Published: December 31, 2012
ONE hundred and fifty years ago, on Jan. 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln presided over the annual White House New Year’s reception. Late that afternoon, he retired to his study to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. When he took up his pen, his hand was shaking from exhaustion. Briefly, he paused — “I do not want it to appear as if I hesitated,” he remarked. Then Lincoln affixed a firm signature to the document.
.Like all great historical transformations, emancipation was a process, not a single event. It arose from many causes and was the work of many individuals. It began at the outset of the Civil War, when slaves sought refuge behind Union lines. It did not end until December 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which irrevocably abolished slavery throughout the nation.
But the Emancipation Proclamation was the crucial turning point in this story. In a sense, it embodied a double emancipation: for the slaves, since it ensured that if the Union emerged victorious, slavery would perish, and for Lincoln himself, for whom it marked the abandonment of his previous assumptions about how to abolish slavery and the role blacks would play in post-emancipation American life.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lincoln’s statement in 1864 that he had always believed slavery to be wrong. During the first two years of the Civil War, despite insisting that the conflict’s aim was preservation of the Union, he devoted considerable energy to a plan for ending slavery inherited from prewar years. Emancipation would be undertaken by state governments, with national financing. It would be gradual, owners would receive monetary compensation and emancipated slaves would be encouraged to find a homeland outside the United States — this last idea known as “colonization.”
Lincoln’s plan sought to win the cooperation of slave holders in ending slavery. As early as November 1861, he proposed it to political leaders in Delaware, one of the four border states (along with Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) that remained in the Union. Delaware had only 1,800 slaves; the institution was peripheral to the state’s economy. But Lincoln found that even there, slave holders did not wish to surrender their human property. Nonetheless, for most of 1862, he avidly promoted his plan to the border states and any Confederates who might be interested.
Lincoln also took his proposal to black Americans. In August 1862, he met with a group of black leaders from Washington. He seemed to blame the presence of blacks in America for the conflict: “but for your race among us there could not be war.” He issued a powerful indictment of slavery — “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people” — but added that, because of racism, blacks would never achieve equality in America. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated,” he said. But most blacks refused to contemplate emigration from the land of their birth.
In the summer of 1862, a combination of events propelled Lincoln in a new direction. Slavery was disintegrating in parts of the South as thousands of slaves ran away to Union lines. With the war a stalemate, more Northerners found themselves agreeing with the abolitionists, who had insisted from the outset that slavery must become a target. Enthusiasm for enlistment was waning in the North. The Army had long refused to accept black volunteers, but the reservoir of black manpower could no longer be ignored. In response, Congress moved ahead of Lincoln, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, authorizing the president to enroll blacks in the Army and freeing the slaves of pro-Confederate owners in areas under military control. Lincoln signed all these measures that summer.
The hallmark of Lincoln’s greatness was his combination of bedrock principle with open-mindedness and capacity for growth. That summer, with his preferred approach going nowhere, he moved in the direction of immediate emancipation. He first proposed this to his cabinet on July 22, but Secretary of State William H. Seward persuaded him to wait for a military victory, lest it seem an act of desperation.
Soon after the Union victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a warning to the Confederacy that if it did not lay down its arms by Jan. 1, he would declare the slaves “forever free.”
Lincoln did not immediately abandon his earlier plan. His annual message to Congress, released on Dec. 1, 1862, devoted a long passage to gradual, compensated abolition and colonization. But in the same document, without mentioning the impending proclamation, he indicated that a new approach was imperative: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he wrote. “We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.” Lincoln included himself in that “we.” On Jan. 1, he proclaimed the freedom of the vast majority of the nation’s slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion. It also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 slaves in bondage. But the remaining 3.1 million, it declared, “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
The proclamation did not end slavery in the United States on the day it was issued. Indeed, it could not even be enforced in most of the areas where it applied, which were under Confederate control. But it ensured the eventual death of slavery — assuming the Union won the war. Were the Confederacy to emerge victorious, slavery, in one form or another, would undoubtedly have lasted a long time.
A military order, whose constitutional legitimacy rested on the president’s war powers, the proclamation often disappoints those who read it. It is dull and legalistic; it contains no soaring language enunciating the rights of man. Only at the last minute, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist, did Lincoln add a conclusion declaring the proclamation an “act of justice.”
Nonetheless, the proclamation marked a dramatic transformation in the nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln’s own approach to the problem of slavery. No longer did he seek the consent of slave holders. The proclamation was immediate, not gradual, contained no mention of compensation for owners, and made no reference to colonization.
In it, Lincoln addressed blacks directly, not as property subject to the will of others but as men and women whose loyalty the Union must earn. For the first time, he welcomed black soldiers into the Union Army; over the next two years some 200,000 black men would serve in the Army and Navy, playing a critical role in achieving Union victory. And Lincoln urged freed slaves to go to work for “reasonable wages” — in the United States. He never again mentioned colonization in public.
Having made the decision, Lincoln did not look back. In 1864, with casualties mounting, there was talk of a compromise peace. Some urged Lincoln to rescind the proclamation, in which case, they believed, the South could be persuaded to return to the Union. Lincoln refused. Were he to do so, he told one visitor, “I should be damned in time and eternity.”
Wartime emancipation may have settled the fate of slavery, but it opened another vexing question: the role of former slaves in American life. Colonization had allowed its proponents to talk about abolition without having to confront this issue; after all, the black population would be gone. After Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln for the first time began to think seriously of the United States as a biracial society.
While not burdened with the visceral racism of many of his white contemporaries, Lincoln shared some of their prejudices. He had long seen blacks as an alien people who been unjustly uprooted from their homeland and were entitled to freedom, but were not an intrinsic part of American society. During his Senate campaign in Illinois, in 1858, he had insisted that blacks should enjoy the same natural rights as whites (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), but he opposed granting them legal equality or the right to vote.
By the end of his life, Lincoln’s outlook had changed dramatically. In his last public address, delivered in April 1865, he said that in reconstructing Louisiana, and by implication other Southern states, he would “prefer” that limited black suffrage be implemented. He singled out the “very intelligent” (educated free blacks) and “those who serve our cause as soldiers” as most worthy. Though hardly an unambiguous embrace of equality, this was the first time an American president had endorsed any political rights for blacks.
And then there was his magnificent second inaugural address of March 4, 1865, in which Lincoln ruminated on the deep meaning of the war. He now identified the institution of slavery — not the presence of blacks, as in 1862 — as its fundamental cause. The war, he said, might well be a divine punishment for the evil of slavery. And God might will it to continue until all the wealth the slaves had created had been destroyed, and “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.” Lincoln was reminding Americans that violence did not begin with the firing on Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861. What he called “this terrible war” had been preceded by 250 years of the terrible violence of slavery.
In essence, Lincoln asked the nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of slavery. What were the requirements of justice in the face of this reality? What would be necessary to enable former slaves and their descendants to enjoy fully the pursuit of happiness? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. A century and a half later, we have yet to do so.
Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia and the author, most recently, of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.”
(Eric Foner is our leading Lincoln scholar on slavery. His work is definitive as opposed to Holzer. It is amazing that after 150 years the EP is still being parsed. Such are the significant issues that surround Lincoln scholarship. . . FLH)
Published: December 31, 2012
ONE hundred and fifty years ago, on Jan. 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln presided over the annual White House New Year’s reception. Late that afternoon, he retired to his study to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. When he took up his pen, his hand was shaking from exhaustion. Briefly, he paused — “I do not want it to appear as if I hesitated,” he remarked. Then Lincoln affixed a firm signature to the document.
.Like all great historical transformations, emancipation was a process, not a single event. It arose from many causes and was the work of many individuals. It began at the outset of the Civil War, when slaves sought refuge behind Union lines. It did not end until December 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which irrevocably abolished slavery throughout the nation.
But the Emancipation Proclamation was the crucial turning point in this story. In a sense, it embodied a double emancipation: for the slaves, since it ensured that if the Union emerged victorious, slavery would perish, and for Lincoln himself, for whom it marked the abandonment of his previous assumptions about how to abolish slavery and the role blacks would play in post-emancipation American life.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lincoln’s statement in 1864 that he had always believed slavery to be wrong. During the first two years of the Civil War, despite insisting that the conflict’s aim was preservation of the Union, he devoted considerable energy to a plan for ending slavery inherited from prewar years. Emancipation would be undertaken by state governments, with national financing. It would be gradual, owners would receive monetary compensation and emancipated slaves would be encouraged to find a homeland outside the United States — this last idea known as “colonization.”
Lincoln’s plan sought to win the cooperation of slave holders in ending slavery. As early as November 1861, he proposed it to political leaders in Delaware, one of the four border states (along with Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) that remained in the Union. Delaware had only 1,800 slaves; the institution was peripheral to the state’s economy. But Lincoln found that even there, slave holders did not wish to surrender their human property. Nonetheless, for most of 1862, he avidly promoted his plan to the border states and any Confederates who might be interested.
Lincoln also took his proposal to black Americans. In August 1862, he met with a group of black leaders from Washington. He seemed to blame the presence of blacks in America for the conflict: “but for your race among us there could not be war.” He issued a powerful indictment of slavery — “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people” — but added that, because of racism, blacks would never achieve equality in America. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated,” he said. But most blacks refused to contemplate emigration from the land of their birth.
In the summer of 1862, a combination of events propelled Lincoln in a new direction. Slavery was disintegrating in parts of the South as thousands of slaves ran away to Union lines. With the war a stalemate, more Northerners found themselves agreeing with the abolitionists, who had insisted from the outset that slavery must become a target. Enthusiasm for enlistment was waning in the North. The Army had long refused to accept black volunteers, but the reservoir of black manpower could no longer be ignored. In response, Congress moved ahead of Lincoln, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, authorizing the president to enroll blacks in the Army and freeing the slaves of pro-Confederate owners in areas under military control. Lincoln signed all these measures that summer.
The hallmark of Lincoln’s greatness was his combination of bedrock principle with open-mindedness and capacity for growth. That summer, with his preferred approach going nowhere, he moved in the direction of immediate emancipation. He first proposed this to his cabinet on July 22, but Secretary of State William H. Seward persuaded him to wait for a military victory, lest it seem an act of desperation.
Soon after the Union victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a warning to the Confederacy that if it did not lay down its arms by Jan. 1, he would declare the slaves “forever free.”
Lincoln did not immediately abandon his earlier plan. His annual message to Congress, released on Dec. 1, 1862, devoted a long passage to gradual, compensated abolition and colonization. But in the same document, without mentioning the impending proclamation, he indicated that a new approach was imperative: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he wrote. “We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.” Lincoln included himself in that “we.” On Jan. 1, he proclaimed the freedom of the vast majority of the nation’s slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion. It also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 slaves in bondage. But the remaining 3.1 million, it declared, “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
The proclamation did not end slavery in the United States on the day it was issued. Indeed, it could not even be enforced in most of the areas where it applied, which were under Confederate control. But it ensured the eventual death of slavery — assuming the Union won the war. Were the Confederacy to emerge victorious, slavery, in one form or another, would undoubtedly have lasted a long time.
A military order, whose constitutional legitimacy rested on the president’s war powers, the proclamation often disappoints those who read it. It is dull and legalistic; it contains no soaring language enunciating the rights of man. Only at the last minute, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist, did Lincoln add a conclusion declaring the proclamation an “act of justice.”
Nonetheless, the proclamation marked a dramatic transformation in the nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln’s own approach to the problem of slavery. No longer did he seek the consent of slave holders. The proclamation was immediate, not gradual, contained no mention of compensation for owners, and made no reference to colonization.
In it, Lincoln addressed blacks directly, not as property subject to the will of others but as men and women whose loyalty the Union must earn. For the first time, he welcomed black soldiers into the Union Army; over the next two years some 200,000 black men would serve in the Army and Navy, playing a critical role in achieving Union victory. And Lincoln urged freed slaves to go to work for “reasonable wages” — in the United States. He never again mentioned colonization in public.
Having made the decision, Lincoln did not look back. In 1864, with casualties mounting, there was talk of a compromise peace. Some urged Lincoln to rescind the proclamation, in which case, they believed, the South could be persuaded to return to the Union. Lincoln refused. Were he to do so, he told one visitor, “I should be damned in time and eternity.”
Wartime emancipation may have settled the fate of slavery, but it opened another vexing question: the role of former slaves in American life. Colonization had allowed its proponents to talk about abolition without having to confront this issue; after all, the black population would be gone. After Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln for the first time began to think seriously of the United States as a biracial society.
While not burdened with the visceral racism of many of his white contemporaries, Lincoln shared some of their prejudices. He had long seen blacks as an alien people who been unjustly uprooted from their homeland and were entitled to freedom, but were not an intrinsic part of American society. During his Senate campaign in Illinois, in 1858, he had insisted that blacks should enjoy the same natural rights as whites (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), but he opposed granting them legal equality or the right to vote.
By the end of his life, Lincoln’s outlook had changed dramatically. In his last public address, delivered in April 1865, he said that in reconstructing Louisiana, and by implication other Southern states, he would “prefer” that limited black suffrage be implemented. He singled out the “very intelligent” (educated free blacks) and “those who serve our cause as soldiers” as most worthy. Though hardly an unambiguous embrace of equality, this was the first time an American president had endorsed any political rights for blacks.
And then there was his magnificent second inaugural address of March 4, 1865, in which Lincoln ruminated on the deep meaning of the war. He now identified the institution of slavery — not the presence of blacks, as in 1862 — as its fundamental cause. The war, he said, might well be a divine punishment for the evil of slavery. And God might will it to continue until all the wealth the slaves had created had been destroyed, and “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.” Lincoln was reminding Americans that violence did not begin with the firing on Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861. What he called “this terrible war” had been preceded by 250 years of the terrible violence of slavery.
In essence, Lincoln asked the nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of slavery. What were the requirements of justice in the face of this reality? What would be necessary to enable former slaves and their descendants to enjoy fully the pursuit of happiness? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. A century and a half later, we have yet to do so.
Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia and the author, most recently, of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.”
Holzer on the Emancipation Proclamation
Harold Holzer is one of our leading Lincoln scholars. He is a bit too much of a cheerleader for Lincoln rather than an objective scholar in my opinion.
A Mighty Act: The 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation
by Harold Holzer
Jan 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST On Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing an estimated 500,000 slaves, changing the course of the Civil War, and revolutionizing America. Historian Harold Holzer on what happened on that fateful day—and the still raging debate over its achievements.
Like most Americans then and now, Abraham Lincoln began his New Year’s day 150 years ago by attending a party, in this case his own.
But it was no ordinary party, and certainly no ordinary New Year’s. While four million African-American slaves and thousands of white abolitionists waited anxiously for word that he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on this, its promised due date, Lincoln first hosted the annual reception for the diplomatic corps, military elite, and members of Congress. And when it was over, guards threw open the doors of the White House and admitted thousands more revelers—members of the general public eager to clutch the president’s hand and wish him a happy 1863 as well.
The delay—if it was not more than that—understandably alarmed tense freedom advocates gathered in churches across the North, many engaged in ardent prayer since midnight. It caused many pessimists to wonder whether Lincoln would in fact renege on the promise he had made when he issued his preliminary emancipation on Sept. 22: that if Confederate states did not return to the Union by Jan. 1, he would declare their slaves “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” In the hundred days since, anti-administration newspapers here and abroad had condemned Lincoln for fomenting “servile insurrection,” abandoning his “constitutional moorings,” and threatening the American social order. Disappointed, the president himself had acknowledged that his announcement had sent the stock market spiraling into decline, sped desertion from the armed forces and inhibited enlistment. “This, looked soberly in the face,” Lincoln understated at the time, “is not very satisfactory.”
In the midst of such widespread rebuke, New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong spoke for many when he wondered whether “Lincoln’s backbone” would “carry him through the work” he was “pledged … to do” on Jan. 1, ominously warning: “If he postpone or dilute his action, his name will be a byword and a hissing till the annals of the nineteenth century are forgotten.”
But the concern proved premature. As Lincoln had recently assured a delegation of Union men from his native Kentucky, “he would rather die than take back a word of the Proclamation of Freedom.” By Christmas, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was convinced that the president “would not stop the Proclamation if he could, and could not if he would.”
Besides, Lincoln had not intended to make America’s freedom community wait those tense extra hours while he attended his annual holiday reception. A typographical error made him do it. Earlier that day, the president had unrolled and meticulously proofread the official copy of the final proclamation, as painstakingly “engrossed” on a vellum scroll by a professional scribe. Unfortunately, a dismayed Lincoln spotted a tiny error within the boilerplate language at the bottom of this initial copy—the “hereunto set his hand” phrase had been mistakenly transcribed as “set his name.” Insisting that the document must be absolutely perfect because it would be so closely scrutinized, he ordered that the scribe create a new version—holiday notwithstanding. Not until mid-afternoon was the revised scroll finally ready. As soon as the annual reception ended, Lincoln quickly headed from the East Room upstairs to his private office, where he commenced patiently inspecting it. This time, he found no mistakes at all. But another delay—albeit a brief one—would now follow.
Abraham Lincoln did not often flatter himself. But the Emancipation Proclamation set his heart beating with thoughts of immortality.
‘Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America’ by Harold Holzer. 240 pp. Newmarket for It Books. $16.99.
As the three witnesses in the room watched in almost breathless silence—Secretary of State William H. Seward, his son and private secretary Frederick, and Lincoln’s own secretary John G. Nicolay—the president picked up his pen, dipped it in an inkwell, but then unexpectedly put the pen down, offering nothing by way of explanation. Then he picked up the pen again, held it over the document as before, but once more set it back on the table without comment. What did it mean? Could he in fact be uncertain after all? Was he prepared to blink?
Breaking the quiet, Lincoln finally looked up and explained: “I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning, and my right arm is almost paralyzed. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’”
Rather than risk creating a “tremulous” signature, Lincoln instead commenced massaging his giant hands together. Only when he felt the sensation in them return did he take up his pen one more time, and “slowly, firmly, write “that ‘Abraham Lincoln’ with which the whole world is now familiar,” as a contemporary testified. “Then he looked up, smiled, and proudly declared: “That will do.”
What the proclamation did—and did not do—has been a matter of debate ever since. Many still stubbornly insist that the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one—that it proved utterly and cynically toothless, applying only to a region in which Lincoln had no authority to proclaim anything. It was meant only to keep England from recognizing the Confederacy, go these arguments. Lincoln had no real compassion for slaves; only for restoration of the Union.
The truth is, some 50,000 enslaved people in Confederate territory immediately gained their freedom on Jan. 1, most along the coast of the Carolinas. In the years that followed, moreover, Union troops, armed with miniature copies of the proclamation printed for distribution to dubious Southern slave owners, liberated tens of thousands more wherever they marched. And emboldened by word of the official imprimatur, yet tens of thousands of additional slaves bravely abandoned their bondage on their own, offering their services to the Union when they reached federal lines.
Was it effective? Even the slaves Confederate president Jefferson Davis had left behind at his Mississippi plantation used it as a means of escape—soon after Ulysses S. Grant’s forces began their siege of nearby Vicksburg. What better proof of the proclamation’s impact could there be than its ability to deprive its author’s counterpart of his own enslaved property?
Most important of all, beginning on that unforgettable New Year’s Day, the proclamation forever transformed the Civil War from a struggle merely to restore the Union as it was, to a titanic battle to create a new Union altogether—in which all men, everywhere, would ultimately be free. If the proclamation did not with one stroke of the pen bring about the end of slavery, it did herald and hasten the beginning of the end of slavery. The Declaration of Independence, to which it was immediately compared, did not alone create a free United States in 1776; it required validation and enforcement on the battlefield before its promise could be kept—just as did the “second declaration of independence” four score and seven years later.
Certainly the Proclamation was variously appreciated and feared in its own day, by friends and foes alike. Southerners (and many Northerners) howled in protest at its announcement, particularly over its call for African-American enlistment in the Union armed forces. And many disappointed liberals bemoaned the document’s numbingly legalistic language, which its supremely gifted author had in fact carefully employed to ensure that no judicial body (particularly the hostile Supreme Court) could find grounds to overturn it. Lincoln determined that it was more important for his proclamation to be legally fireproof than emotionally stirring, and he paid a price among those who hoped for a more stirring declaration. While acknowledging emancipation day as “an epoch in our national history,” for example, Frederick Douglass, who had long advocated such a presidential order, could not help observing: “It was not a proclamation of ‘liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof’ such as we had hoped it would be, but was one marked by discriminations and reservations.”
Karl Marx, of all people, came much closer to the truth even while admitting that Lincoln’s leaden legalese called to mind “the trite summonses that one lawyer sends to an opposing lawyer.” As Marx marveled of Lincoln’s almost perverse habits as a writer: “He always presents the most important act in the most insignificant form possible. Others, when dealing with square feet of land, proclaim it a ‘struggle for ideas.’ Lincoln, even when he is dealing with ideas, proclaims their ‘square feet.’ Hesitant, resistant, unwilling, he sings the bravura aria of his role as though he begged pardon for the circumstances that force him ‘to be a lion.’”
What Marx failed to observe is that “the lion” soon enough provided the poetry to ennoble the proclamation’s uninspiring prose. At Gettysburg, of course, Lincoln proclaimed nothing less than a “new birth of freedom.” In his annual message to Congress, he breathed a public sigh of relief by reporting that emancipation had been “fully discussed, supported, criticized, and denounced” without threatening its legality. “Thus,” he declared, “we have the new reckoning. The crisis which threatened to divide the friends of the Union is past.” And in a message prepared for his racist neighbors back home in Springfield, Ill., he warned sternly against opposition to black recruitment. The war would ultimately be won by the forces of freedom, he confidently predicted. “And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.” Meanwhile, Union troops—black as well as white—continued to use the president’s proclamation to liberate enslaved people wherever they encountered them within the Confederacy.
Lincoln was not the only contemporary to come to the defense of his order. In its own time, Union charity organizer Mary Livermore called it “the sheet anchor of hope, the rainbow of promise, to the oppressed of every land, at home and abroad.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had galvanized Northern opposition to slavery, likened Lincoln to “Moses leading his Israel through the wilderness.” And America’s freedom poet John Greenleaf Whittier suggested that Lincoln’s document, once considered banal, had been divinely inspired: “The mighty word / He spake was not his own; / An impulse from the Highest stirred / These chiseled lips alone.”
War charities solicited and sold Lincoln’s emancipation manuscripts for enormous sums (Lincoln even won a gold watch for donating one copy to a fundraising fair in Chicago—we can see Daniel Day-Lewis toying with a replica in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln). Its uninspiring prose notwithstanding, lithographed facsimiles of the quickly flooded the marketplace. Artists and sculptors hastened to the White House to capture Lincoln’s likeness and celebrate him as a great emancipator. One anti-slavery collector awarded the pen the president had used to sign the final document breathlessly predicted his new relic would “forever be associated with the greatest event of our country and our age & with the honored name and services of the President of the United States.”
Lincoln would not have disagreed. He not only fretted over how his signature would appear on the final document (today, ironically, it has faded almost to dust). He also boasted—albeit privately—that he regarded its announcement on Jan. 1, 1863 as not only “the central act of my administration,” but “the great event of the nineteenth century.” Abraham Lincoln did not often flatter himself. But the Emancipation Proclamation set his heart beating with thoughts of immortality. Inspirational its words may not have been, but its author firmly believed it represented a “grand consummation” that inspired a “great revolution in public sentiment.”
That it launched the destruction of slavery should be beyond debate. In the end, precisely how many enslaved people the document alone actually freed remains unanswerable. By reliable estimates, the number may approach 500,000. By the spring of 1864, Lincoln began a new campaign to enact a constitutional amendment to liberate those people not covered under the terms of the proclamation—and to guarantee that those who were freed could never be sent back into bondage.
“Those who have tasted actual freedom,” he famously insisted, “can never be slaves.” When he began worrying (incorrectly as it turned out) that he might lose his 1864 bid for reelection, he summoned onetime critic Frederick Douglass to the White House and asked him to fashion a plan to spread word of the proclamation to enslaved people before a Democratic successor could abrogate it. As Douglass learned that day, Lincoln’s actions could prove even more inspiring—and more effective—than his words.
A 150 years after he signed the order that transformed America, the nation Abraham Lincoln saved boasts both an African-American Lincoln admirer for a president and an understandable obsession with Spielberg’s somewhat different take on history. Spielberg’s film, after all, asserts that the 13th amendment, not the Emancipation Proclamation, deserves pride of place in freedom history. The old questions about the proclamation’s true impact are being raised again.
The answer should be obvious: it was the most important executive order in American history. Anti-slavery Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts may have said it best at the time it was issued, when he judged the Emancipation Proclamation “a poor document, but a mighty act.” And this mighty act did nothing less than change the Civil War, change the legal status of black people, and change America—just as promised: then, thenceforward, and forever.
And if that doesn’t inspire another New Year’s Day party to mark its sesquicentennial, what can?
A Mighty Act: The 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation
by Harold Holzer
Jan 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST On Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing an estimated 500,000 slaves, changing the course of the Civil War, and revolutionizing America. Historian Harold Holzer on what happened on that fateful day—and the still raging debate over its achievements.
Like most Americans then and now, Abraham Lincoln began his New Year’s day 150 years ago by attending a party, in this case his own.
But it was no ordinary party, and certainly no ordinary New Year’s. While four million African-American slaves and thousands of white abolitionists waited anxiously for word that he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on this, its promised due date, Lincoln first hosted the annual reception for the diplomatic corps, military elite, and members of Congress. And when it was over, guards threw open the doors of the White House and admitted thousands more revelers—members of the general public eager to clutch the president’s hand and wish him a happy 1863 as well.
The delay—if it was not more than that—understandably alarmed tense freedom advocates gathered in churches across the North, many engaged in ardent prayer since midnight. It caused many pessimists to wonder whether Lincoln would in fact renege on the promise he had made when he issued his preliminary emancipation on Sept. 22: that if Confederate states did not return to the Union by Jan. 1, he would declare their slaves “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” In the hundred days since, anti-administration newspapers here and abroad had condemned Lincoln for fomenting “servile insurrection,” abandoning his “constitutional moorings,” and threatening the American social order. Disappointed, the president himself had acknowledged that his announcement had sent the stock market spiraling into decline, sped desertion from the armed forces and inhibited enlistment. “This, looked soberly in the face,” Lincoln understated at the time, “is not very satisfactory.”
In the midst of such widespread rebuke, New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong spoke for many when he wondered whether “Lincoln’s backbone” would “carry him through the work” he was “pledged … to do” on Jan. 1, ominously warning: “If he postpone or dilute his action, his name will be a byword and a hissing till the annals of the nineteenth century are forgotten.”
But the concern proved premature. As Lincoln had recently assured a delegation of Union men from his native Kentucky, “he would rather die than take back a word of the Proclamation of Freedom.” By Christmas, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was convinced that the president “would not stop the Proclamation if he could, and could not if he would.”
Besides, Lincoln had not intended to make America’s freedom community wait those tense extra hours while he attended his annual holiday reception. A typographical error made him do it. Earlier that day, the president had unrolled and meticulously proofread the official copy of the final proclamation, as painstakingly “engrossed” on a vellum scroll by a professional scribe. Unfortunately, a dismayed Lincoln spotted a tiny error within the boilerplate language at the bottom of this initial copy—the “hereunto set his hand” phrase had been mistakenly transcribed as “set his name.” Insisting that the document must be absolutely perfect because it would be so closely scrutinized, he ordered that the scribe create a new version—holiday notwithstanding. Not until mid-afternoon was the revised scroll finally ready. As soon as the annual reception ended, Lincoln quickly headed from the East Room upstairs to his private office, where he commenced patiently inspecting it. This time, he found no mistakes at all. But another delay—albeit a brief one—would now follow.
Abraham Lincoln did not often flatter himself. But the Emancipation Proclamation set his heart beating with thoughts of immortality.
‘Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America’ by Harold Holzer. 240 pp. Newmarket for It Books. $16.99.
As the three witnesses in the room watched in almost breathless silence—Secretary of State William H. Seward, his son and private secretary Frederick, and Lincoln’s own secretary John G. Nicolay—the president picked up his pen, dipped it in an inkwell, but then unexpectedly put the pen down, offering nothing by way of explanation. Then he picked up the pen again, held it over the document as before, but once more set it back on the table without comment. What did it mean? Could he in fact be uncertain after all? Was he prepared to blink?
Breaking the quiet, Lincoln finally looked up and explained: “I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning, and my right arm is almost paralyzed. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’”
Rather than risk creating a “tremulous” signature, Lincoln instead commenced massaging his giant hands together. Only when he felt the sensation in them return did he take up his pen one more time, and “slowly, firmly, write “that ‘Abraham Lincoln’ with which the whole world is now familiar,” as a contemporary testified. “Then he looked up, smiled, and proudly declared: “That will do.”
What the proclamation did—and did not do—has been a matter of debate ever since. Many still stubbornly insist that the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one—that it proved utterly and cynically toothless, applying only to a region in which Lincoln had no authority to proclaim anything. It was meant only to keep England from recognizing the Confederacy, go these arguments. Lincoln had no real compassion for slaves; only for restoration of the Union.
The truth is, some 50,000 enslaved people in Confederate territory immediately gained their freedom on Jan. 1, most along the coast of the Carolinas. In the years that followed, moreover, Union troops, armed with miniature copies of the proclamation printed for distribution to dubious Southern slave owners, liberated tens of thousands more wherever they marched. And emboldened by word of the official imprimatur, yet tens of thousands of additional slaves bravely abandoned their bondage on their own, offering their services to the Union when they reached federal lines.
Was it effective? Even the slaves Confederate president Jefferson Davis had left behind at his Mississippi plantation used it as a means of escape—soon after Ulysses S. Grant’s forces began their siege of nearby Vicksburg. What better proof of the proclamation’s impact could there be than its ability to deprive its author’s counterpart of his own enslaved property?
Most important of all, beginning on that unforgettable New Year’s Day, the proclamation forever transformed the Civil War from a struggle merely to restore the Union as it was, to a titanic battle to create a new Union altogether—in which all men, everywhere, would ultimately be free. If the proclamation did not with one stroke of the pen bring about the end of slavery, it did herald and hasten the beginning of the end of slavery. The Declaration of Independence, to which it was immediately compared, did not alone create a free United States in 1776; it required validation and enforcement on the battlefield before its promise could be kept—just as did the “second declaration of independence” four score and seven years later.
Certainly the Proclamation was variously appreciated and feared in its own day, by friends and foes alike. Southerners (and many Northerners) howled in protest at its announcement, particularly over its call for African-American enlistment in the Union armed forces. And many disappointed liberals bemoaned the document’s numbingly legalistic language, which its supremely gifted author had in fact carefully employed to ensure that no judicial body (particularly the hostile Supreme Court) could find grounds to overturn it. Lincoln determined that it was more important for his proclamation to be legally fireproof than emotionally stirring, and he paid a price among those who hoped for a more stirring declaration. While acknowledging emancipation day as “an epoch in our national history,” for example, Frederick Douglass, who had long advocated such a presidential order, could not help observing: “It was not a proclamation of ‘liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof’ such as we had hoped it would be, but was one marked by discriminations and reservations.”
Karl Marx, of all people, came much closer to the truth even while admitting that Lincoln’s leaden legalese called to mind “the trite summonses that one lawyer sends to an opposing lawyer.” As Marx marveled of Lincoln’s almost perverse habits as a writer: “He always presents the most important act in the most insignificant form possible. Others, when dealing with square feet of land, proclaim it a ‘struggle for ideas.’ Lincoln, even when he is dealing with ideas, proclaims their ‘square feet.’ Hesitant, resistant, unwilling, he sings the bravura aria of his role as though he begged pardon for the circumstances that force him ‘to be a lion.’”
What Marx failed to observe is that “the lion” soon enough provided the poetry to ennoble the proclamation’s uninspiring prose. At Gettysburg, of course, Lincoln proclaimed nothing less than a “new birth of freedom.” In his annual message to Congress, he breathed a public sigh of relief by reporting that emancipation had been “fully discussed, supported, criticized, and denounced” without threatening its legality. “Thus,” he declared, “we have the new reckoning. The crisis which threatened to divide the friends of the Union is past.” And in a message prepared for his racist neighbors back home in Springfield, Ill., he warned sternly against opposition to black recruitment. The war would ultimately be won by the forces of freedom, he confidently predicted. “And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.” Meanwhile, Union troops—black as well as white—continued to use the president’s proclamation to liberate enslaved people wherever they encountered them within the Confederacy.
Lincoln was not the only contemporary to come to the defense of his order. In its own time, Union charity organizer Mary Livermore called it “the sheet anchor of hope, the rainbow of promise, to the oppressed of every land, at home and abroad.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had galvanized Northern opposition to slavery, likened Lincoln to “Moses leading his Israel through the wilderness.” And America’s freedom poet John Greenleaf Whittier suggested that Lincoln’s document, once considered banal, had been divinely inspired: “The mighty word / He spake was not his own; / An impulse from the Highest stirred / These chiseled lips alone.”
War charities solicited and sold Lincoln’s emancipation manuscripts for enormous sums (Lincoln even won a gold watch for donating one copy to a fundraising fair in Chicago—we can see Daniel Day-Lewis toying with a replica in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln). Its uninspiring prose notwithstanding, lithographed facsimiles of the quickly flooded the marketplace. Artists and sculptors hastened to the White House to capture Lincoln’s likeness and celebrate him as a great emancipator. One anti-slavery collector awarded the pen the president had used to sign the final document breathlessly predicted his new relic would “forever be associated with the greatest event of our country and our age & with the honored name and services of the President of the United States.”
Lincoln would not have disagreed. He not only fretted over how his signature would appear on the final document (today, ironically, it has faded almost to dust). He also boasted—albeit privately—that he regarded its announcement on Jan. 1, 1863 as not only “the central act of my administration,” but “the great event of the nineteenth century.” Abraham Lincoln did not often flatter himself. But the Emancipation Proclamation set his heart beating with thoughts of immortality. Inspirational its words may not have been, but its author firmly believed it represented a “grand consummation” that inspired a “great revolution in public sentiment.”
That it launched the destruction of slavery should be beyond debate. In the end, precisely how many enslaved people the document alone actually freed remains unanswerable. By reliable estimates, the number may approach 500,000. By the spring of 1864, Lincoln began a new campaign to enact a constitutional amendment to liberate those people not covered under the terms of the proclamation—and to guarantee that those who were freed could never be sent back into bondage.
“Those who have tasted actual freedom,” he famously insisted, “can never be slaves.” When he began worrying (incorrectly as it turned out) that he might lose his 1864 bid for reelection, he summoned onetime critic Frederick Douglass to the White House and asked him to fashion a plan to spread word of the proclamation to enslaved people before a Democratic successor could abrogate it. As Douglass learned that day, Lincoln’s actions could prove even more inspiring—and more effective—than his words.
A 150 years after he signed the order that transformed America, the nation Abraham Lincoln saved boasts both an African-American Lincoln admirer for a president and an understandable obsession with Spielberg’s somewhat different take on history. Spielberg’s film, after all, asserts that the 13th amendment, not the Emancipation Proclamation, deserves pride of place in freedom history. The old questions about the proclamation’s true impact are being raised again.
The answer should be obvious: it was the most important executive order in American history. Anti-slavery Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts may have said it best at the time it was issued, when he judged the Emancipation Proclamation “a poor document, but a mighty act.” And this mighty act did nothing less than change the Civil War, change the legal status of black people, and change America—just as promised: then, thenceforward, and forever.
And if that doesn’t inspire another New Year’s Day party to mark its sesquicentennial, what can?
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