#founding documents

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 9, 2025 (Wednesday)

Heather Cox Richardson

Apr 10, 2025

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.

Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.

Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others.

Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”

But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.”

Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders.

With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.

In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced facism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, featuring a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied Americans to oppose fascism by emphasizing the principles that would, he said, provide “the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” He called for “the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”

The gulf between the ideals of democracy and the reality of life in the segregated U.S. during and after World War II galvanized Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans to demand equality. They successfully challenged school segregation, racial housing restrictions, state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and anti-Chinese laws based in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

As the military fought fascism in Europe, schools and churches at home emphasized that democracy depended on acceptance of racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Rallies championed diversity, and government-sponsored films warned Americans not to succumb to fascist propaganda. Posters trumpeted slogans such as “Catholics–Protestants–Jews…Working Side By Side…in War and Peace!” and reminded Americans not to “infect” their children “with racial and religious hate.” In a 1947 radio show, Superman fought a Ku Klux Klan–like gang trying to keep foreign-born players off high school sports teams, and in 1949, comic book artist Wayne Boring portrayed him on a poster urging a group of American schoolchildren to defend their classmates from “un-American” attacks on their race, religion, or ethnicity.

In the 1950s those ideas had produced a “liberal consensus,” shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike. The government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, and promote infrastructure: in other words, it should reflect democratic values. But when the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision tied the federal government not just to economic equality for white Americans, but also to civil rights, opponents of the liberal consensus resurrected the same argument former Confederates had used after the Civil War to couch their ideology in economic, rather than racial, rhetoric.

Rejecting the idea of equality, they argued that the government’s effort to protect civil rights was tantamount to socialism because it took tax dollars from hardworking white men to provide benefits for undeserving Black people who wanted a handout. This idea gained momentum after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and gradually came to include people of color and women who demanded equality. In 1980, Ronald Reagan rode the idea that the liberal consensus was simply a way to redistribute wealth to undeserving Americans of color or women—or both, like Reagan’s “welfare queen”—into the White House.

As more than $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans deflected attention from the hollowing out of the middle class by demonizing racial, religious, and gender minorities. By 2012 they were talking of “makers” and “takers,” and by 2016 they were feeding voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past.

By 2021 the idea that some people are better than others and have a right to rule—the same ideology that had driven the Confederates—created a mob determined to end American democracy. The rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election believed they were writing a new history of the United States, one that brought to life the hierarchical version of American history claimed by the Confederates before them. On that day, one of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate battle flag into the United States Capitol.

At the end of his life, General Grant recalled the events of April 9, 1865. “What General Lee's feelings were I do not know,” Grant wrote. “[M]y own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter [asking to surrender], were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Note from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, 1/15/1793. 

File Unit: January - February, 1793, 1/1/1793 - 2/28/1793. Series: Letters Received, 1789 - 1906. Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State, 1763 - 2002.

Ann Telnaes :: @AnnTelnaes :: The Supreme Court hears Trump immunity case.

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This Supreme Court has broken my heart

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

APR 29, 2024

It’s not just that so many of the court’s decisions have been manifest in finding ways to strip rights from citizens that previous courts have done their best to secure.  It’s not the ham-handed, ignorant, nakedly political way they have done it.  It’s not because two of the justices got on the court by yelling at Senators and in one case weeping as he told lies to get himself confirmed.  It’s not even that the Chief Justice has set forth purposefully to permit the court he leads to become corrupted by bribery, outside political influence, and conflicts of interest.

It’s that the court has been transformed over my adult lifetime from democratic institution you looked up to, doing work for the nation that inspired you, into a small place doing small things for small purposes more concerned with petty grievances and enrichment of a few than the needs and aspirations of the many. 

All the so-called conservatives on this court but one, Justice Thomas ironically, were appointed as part of a movement created with the sole purpose of politicizing the court in a direction that can only be described as anti-democratic.  You will not find among the decisions of this court since the Federalist Society gained traction with the most anti-democratic president in our history, Donald Trump, a love for this nation, for its political traditions and norms, for the joys of life in a democracy, or for the court itself.  What you find instead is a political movement constricted by ambition, disrespect of other courts, including past Supreme Courts and lower courts, and a disrespect of history and intellectual rigor that found its nadir in a decision written by the Chief Justice that stripped Black Americans of protections for a right to vote they had shed blood to secure.  Astonishingly, as if he were writing not a Supreme Court decision but his first essay as a 7th grader, Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  

The decision, in Shelby County v. Holder, ended certain protections of the right to vote for Black citizens in the Voting Rights Act.  Within days of the decision, states in the South that made passage of the Voting Rights Act necessary by denying their Black citizens the right to vote, went right back to “discriminating on the basis of race” in their voting laws.  

This terrible decision, and others just as bad such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, are what passes for precedent in the Roberts court.  In the Dobbs decision, Justice Samuel Alito cited abortion-banning laws dating from the 1700’s and 1800’s, finding essentially that if we didn’t have laws allowing abortions generations ago, we shouldn’t have those laws now.

It would seem to be impossible to turn both progress and history on their heads simultaneously, but this court has figured out a way to establish upside down and backwards as a controlling legal theory.

But it is the smallness of the Republican justices on the court that is truly and astonishingly depressing.  That they walk the earth on little bitty feet and manhandle the law with teeny tiny hands was established clearly last week in the hearing on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution.  The Supreme Court did not have to take the case.  The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had found Trump’s claim that he enjoys immunity from charges that he conspired to overturn the election of 2020 to be without merit in a unanimous decision by both Republican and Democratic appointed judges.  The Supreme Court could have let that decision stand by refusing to hear the Trump appeal.

Instead, they took the case, and two of the so-called conservative justices summed up the attitude of the Roberts court succinctly, which is that the facts don’t matter, only politics does.

Justice Samuel Alito told the attorney representing Special Counsel Jack Smith, “I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case.”  Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed his disinterest in the same subject this way: “Like Justice Gorsuch, I'm not concerned with the here and now of this case, I'm concerned about the future.”

Which raises the obvious question:  why did they agree to take the Trump appeal in the first place?

The answer to that question is the reason my heart is broken.  This Supreme Court has shown itself again and again to be disinterested in the facts and the law and has reached the point that it now bluntly says so.  The idea that the Constitution not only established a democracy but provided protections for it in the clear language of its text is less important to Roberts and his court than what outcomes they can fashion for the anti-democratic masters that put them there.

"Photograph of Freedom Train,” 9/6/1949  

Series: Historic Photograph File of National Archives Events and Personnel, 1935 - 1975. Record Group 64: Records of the National Archives and Records Administration, 1789 - ca. 2007.  

The Freedom Train was a seven-car train that traveled across the United States from September 1947 until January 1949. It was dedicated to the history of American democracy and contained some of the country's most priceless historical documents. The idea of the Freedom Train was to allow all Americans—from all over the country—the opportunity to view these important documents and learn more about our nation and its history. 

This 👆 👆 👆

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

We don't really know what these documents say, so I'll post the highlights here. But really, please go educate yourselves and read them yourself.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

There are many offenses listed that the King of England did. And unfortunately, the government has done/is doing many of them. "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People."

Playing out in real time

The government of Ukraine has finally understood something clearly at last. Our founders clearly saw this, those who drafted whatever document that Ukraine operates under should have seen and understood as well. A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The government is offering to give arms…