ON THE NIGHT of April 14, 1865, the actor John Wilkes Booth famously shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln. That same night, somewhat less famously, one of Booth’s conspirators, Lewis Thornton Powell, a Confederate soldier and spy, attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, succeeding only in slashing the sleeping statesman about the face and neck. Also that night, and not famously at all, a third conspirator, an unemployed drunk named George Atzerodt, lost his nerve, failing to even
try to kill his intended target, Vice President Andrew Johnson.
All three of these collaborators paid the ultimate price for their crimes. Booth was hunted down by federal marshals and shot dead. Powell and Atzerodt were arrested along with their co-conspirators Mary Surratt and David Harold, tried, convicted, and hanged. But ultimately, their plot succeeded beyond their wildest dreams—because they managed to assassinate Lincoln, yes, but also because they failed to assassinate Johnson.
Andrew Johnson was a former Democrat, at that time the party of slaveowners. Lincoln tapped him as a running mate in 1864, half of a “National Unity” ticket he hoped would help reconcile North and South after the Civil War ended. But Johnson was window dressing. He was never supposed to play more than an ornamental role in Reconstruction. Instead, because of the assassination, he wound up leading the federal government during the crucial years right after the war. Born in Tennessee, Johnson wanted the wayward states to be re-integrated into the Union as quickly and painlessly as possible. Only the highest-ranking Confederates faced any federal consequences for their egregious treason. The same middling Dixie politicians who’d been in Congress before the war, and who happily joined the rebels during it, returned when it was over. Johnson’s bright idea was to have the seceded states
reform themselves, which is like Elmer Fudd allowing Bugs Bunny to determine his own punishment. “Not the rabbit hole! Whatever you do, don’t throw me down the rabbit hole!”
Worse, Johnson was,
as the historian Heather Cox Richardson points out, decidedly Trumpy in temperament:
Johnson was a former Democrat, and could not stand the idea of the Republican government ending systemic Black enslavement and leveling the playing field among races. He wanted to reclaim the nation for white men. Convinced he was defending America from a mob and that his supporters must retake control of the government in the midterm election of 1866 or the nation was finished, Johnson became increasingly unhinged until he began to compare himself to both the martyred Lincoln and Jesus Christ. He called his congressional opponents traitors who should be executed.
Had George Atzerodt not chickened out, Johnson would have died the same night as Lincoln. Per the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, Lafayette Sabine Foster of Connecticut,
the president pro tempore of the Senate, would have succeeded Lincoln. A moderate and a former Whig, Foster was not to be confused with a fiery abolitionist. But he was from a Union state, and unlike the unschooled Johnson, a graduate of Brown University. Perhaps President Foster would not have bent over backwards to appease the traitors from the South, as Johnson had. It’s a helluva historical “What If.”
Andrew Johnson’s failure to properly punish the traitors—and make no mistake: Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and their Confederates were all stinking traitors, the vilest in American history—has ripple effects to this day. There is a thruline from the half-assed Reconstruction to Ford pardoning Nixon, and from there to Obama not investigating Bush and Cheney for war crimes.
This is what we do in this country. We repeat the same mistake, over and over and over. We let the bad guys off the hook. The traitors. The murderers. The thieves. The confidence men. The so-called “white collar” criminals. All escape with a slap on the wrist. And if history is our guide, that’s exactly what will happen to the despotic Donald John Trump and his gaggle of venal collaborators—some of whom he has already pardoned!
We cannot—we must not—allow that to happen. The crimes are too serious, the damage to the country and
the world too great. For the soul of the nation to survive, we must recognize the crimes of the President and his co-conspirators for what they are: a coordinated attack on our democracy.
Trump’s attempt to extort the Georgia Secretary of State to steal the election is only the most recent in a long line of examples.
It’s difficult to wrap our minds around this, I’ll allow.
This level of sedition, practiced by
this many politicians, has not been seen in this country since the 1860s. We have a media that bends over backwards to “both-sides” the damage Trump and his minions have wrought, and professional propagandists with law degrees—Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood—whose sole function is to minimize, if not normalize, the crimes:
When a conspiratorial buffoon like Wood sounds off on the treason of
Mike Pence, of all people—who’s
what Trump has instead of
Major and Champ—the intention is to make meaningless words like
sedition and
treason and
traitor. This way, when the breadth and depth of the Trump crimes becomes known, the bad guys will have already lain claim to that language. This goes beyond gaslighting. This is psychological warfare on reality itself.
They want us to believe that a bunch of a$$-clowns couldn’t
possibly be so terrible. But the truth is what I wrote two-and-a-half years ago in
Dirty Rubles: Trump represents the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. Tomorrow, a group of Senators and House Representatives,
many of them mixed up with Russia, will come out against the republic. What Josh
“Flaccid Dildo” Hawley and his comrades are doing is no mere publicity stunt (although it’s also that). It’s dangerous stuff. And we need to acknowledge it, grok it, and respond accordingly.
