David Blight teaches Civil War and Reconstruction history at Yale University. In 2018, Blight published a biography on the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, entitled, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”

Blight tells a remarkable story. His biography deserved and did win the Pulitzer Prize in 2019.

Blight describes Douglass as a spell-binding lecturer through most of the nineteenth century, who left audiences both weeping and laughing, their emotions whipsawed by his incredible story of how he escaped from oppression and a brutal form of slavery in eastern Maryland.

Few of those who heard him speak could understand how this black man, who displayed awe-inspiring and phenomenal language skills on the lecture circuit, could have once worked as an uneducated field hand. Audiences wanted to know, “How did his transformation happen?”

Douglass was an autodidact, self-taught. It was an intense struggle, but on his own and in secret he learned to read. In slave-holding states laws on the books prevented white people from teaching black slaves how to read or write. Yet, Douglass was determined to master words.

In his lectures, Douglass often described his horrible days as a slave, drawing upon vivid details of how his owners would whip him, and that the scars across his back were proof.

On a given night on a stage somewhere in the northern states, in the 1840’s, Douglass would stand and say that he was there to spread light. “There is nothing slavery dislikes half so much as the light. It is a gigantic system of iniquity, that feeds and lives in darkness.”

He said that for down-trodden slaves the Bill of Rights was “the Bill of Wrongs,” and that self-evident truths were “self-evident lies.”

Crowds loved that part of Douglass’s lecture that Blight called “The Slaveholder’s Sermon.” In it, Douglass would mimic a Southern white preacher, who would talk down to the blacks.

“And you too, my friends, have souls of infinite value, souls that will live through endless happiness or misery in eternity. Oh, labor diligently to make your calling and election sure. Oh, receive into your souls these words of the holy apostle, ‘Servants, be obedient to your masters.’

“Oh, consider the wonderful goodness of God! Look at your hard hands, your strong muscular frames, and see how he has adapted you to the duties you are to fulfill.

“Look at your masters, who have slender frames and long delicate fingers. God has given them brilliant intellects, that they may do the thinking, while you do the working.”

While audiences laughed at his depiction of the Southern white preacher’s sermon, Douglass would recite the Golden Rule, and stare at his audience. The contrast was obvious.

Douglass would say, “In America, Bibles and slaveholders go hand in hand. The church and the slave prison stand together. While you hear the chanting of psalms in one, you hear the clanking of chains in the other.

“The man who wields the cowhide during the week, fills the pulpit on Sunday. The man who whipped me in the week used to show me the way of life on the Sabbath.”

In Douglass’s hands, “The Slaveholder’s Sermon” drew attention to the rankest form of Christian hypocrisy that existed throughout the fourteen slave-holding Southern states, a fact of life that all slaves faced every day. Yet, no slave dared to point it out, save for Douglass.

David Blight wrote, “A star had been born; a youthful, brilliant black voice of a fugitive slave had entered the fray of abolitionism.”

One hundred and twenty years before Martin Luther King, Jr. thrilled audiences with his uplifting and awe-inspiring words, Frederick Douglass did the same.

On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln freed four million slaves by the Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of a bloody Civil War. It took effect on January 1, 1863.

On May 11, 2017, the newly-elected U.S. President, Donald Trump, issued an executive order to form a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He appointed Vice-President Mike Pence as chair, and Kansas State’s Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice-chair.

For some time, Kobach had “promoted the myth of voter fraud and supported laws that restricted people from voting.” Two other members were “notorious advocates for voter suppression.” At least one member was a Democrat, Maine’s Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap.

The reason the President established the commission was because election officials had certified that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote, 65,853,514 votes to Trump’s 62,984,828 votes, although he won the electoral college, 304 votes to Clinton’s 227.

This rare event—when a candidate wins the electoral college vote but loses the popular vote—occurred four times before: in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000 when George W. Bush won.

Trump insisted that as many as “5 million votes were cast illegally in November 2016.”

A writer for the Brennan Center for Justice wrote the following:

“For years, exaggerated claims of fraud have been used to justify unwarranted restrictions on voting access. The president’s invented legions of illegal voters are the most extreme such claims in recent memory. His statements have been almost universally rejected.”

On January 3, 2018, six years ago today, President Trump disbanded the Commission. Its  members had met twice.

An article dated January 3, 2018 that appears on National Public Radio’s website presents a  list of comments from those involved or who observed the Commission’s work.

For example, White House press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders read a statement, “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Commission with basic information relevant to its inquiry.” Yet, she provided no evidence.

Officials in certain states chose to ignore the Commission’s request for “detailed voter data, including names, addresses, birthdates, partial Social Security numbers, and party affiliation.”

Kentucky’s Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes said, “I’m not going to risk sensitive information for 3.2 million Kentuckians getting in the wrong hands, into the public domain.”

Some states mired the Commission down by filing multiple lawsuits against it.

Maine’s Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said, “My ability to participate in the work of the commission was completely shut off. I was walled off from any deliberations.”

He filed a lawsuit against the Commission demanding that it turn over documents to him. In August of 2018, he said that “drafts of a commission report included a section on evidence of voter fraud that was ‘glaringly empty.’ ‘It’s calling into the darkness, looking for voter fraud.’”

“In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that the Commission, “was nothing more than a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other.”

It is sad but true that the stage was set to “perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims” later.

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, a majority of voters elected Joseph Biden President of the United States. He received 306 electoral votes and 81,283,501 popular votes to Donald Trump’s 232 electoral votes and 74,223,975 popular votes. Biden won, Trump lost, but not end of story.

Trump insisted the election was rigged. Two days later, he said, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. As everybody saw, we won by historic numbers. It’s a corrupt system.” None of that is true.

On January 6, 2021, 3 years ago this week, a mob of true believers stormed into the Capitol Building intent on halting Congress’s official duty to count and certify the electoral votes. Four people lost their lives that day. A sad day in our country’s life.

December 16 marked the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, when colonial Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships—Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver—split open 340 chests filled with tea, and dumped their contents into Boston’s harbor.

This defiant act was directed as a protest against Parliament’s insistence that the consignees of the tea in the American colonies pay an import tax, to keep afloat the struggling British East India Company, which brought the tea to the colonists.

The colonists were angry. They paid taxes to their local colonial governments, but no elected officials from the colonies represented them in Parliament to vote or make laws there. “No taxation without representation,” was their rallying cry.

In 2009, the Tea Party Movement acquired their name from that historical event. This modern-day political party insisted upon lower taxes, a decelerating national debt, and reduced government spending, noble goals that were not in direct alignment with the colonists.

The political issue in 1773 did not exactly equal that in 2009, even though the modern-day participants claimed the same name.

On occasion, words from the history textbooks will resurface as code names for what is happening today, as a way of thinking upon an issue and grabbing attention.

Edward Muir, professor of history at Northwestern, and current president of the American Historical Association, pointed out this thought in two recent and short essays he wrote for the organization’s monthly magazine, “Perspectives on History,” in November and December.

In November, he pointed out the word “refuge” and its associated word “migration.”

He writes, “Much of history consists of narratives about people migrating to find a refuge, a safe place to survive, live, and prosper, to escape slavery, starvation, persecution.”

He lists examples. “The Biblical story tells how the ancient Israelites fled slavery in Egypt and found the Promised Land.” “The Mormons escaped from the murderous mobs in Missouri and Illinois and found refuge near the Great Salt Lake.”

He points to the Pilgrims, who found refuge near Plymouth rock on December 21, 1620, to escape England’s “Anglican establishment.” Then, “the Quaker and Baptist non-conformists”  found refuge in Rhode Island some distance from Boston’s Puritans and their whips.

He mentions the Underground Railroad, a means for escaped slaves to find a refuge.

Muir then points out, “Migration and refuge are everywhere in American history.”

Yet, he cautions his readers, saying, “the narratives have blinded people about the plight of those already on the land of refuge. One group’s liberation story is another’s tale of loss.”

I liken it to a cue ball that strikes the striped and colored balls on a table causing them to scatter, or when one domino tips, the others tip also.

For example, the Cheyenne Indians’ original homeland was near the Great Lakes, in Minnesota, and Illinois, and yet once other tribes pushed from the east, they drove the Cheyennes westward, until they found a refuge on the Great Plains.

In the December issue, Muir focuses upon the word “Renaissance,” a word, he says, that “possesses a great emotive power even if most have barely a clue about its precise meaning.”

Movements, parties, and organizations appeal to that word, as a code name for a “rebirth,” something innovative and new but drawn from and discovered in the old. Its original meaning grew out of a rediscovery of the Greeks and Romans, their fascinating ideas and cultures.

I say that a re-examination and even adoption of the old is not always the best way forward, especially in the sciences, perhaps more so in philosophy, literature, and art.

Other words, sometimes overused, come to my mind: Restoration and Reconstruction.

Restoration refers to that diligent search into the past for an idea, lost long ago, and once found, brought forward into today, and claimed as a truth for all times.

Reconstruction refers to the North’s self-appointed obligation to reconfigure the former Confederate states into a new social order, one without slavery.

Tea Party, refuge and migration, Renaissance, Restoration, and Reconstruction are unique words. Handle them with care.

To my dear readers: A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your family.

Abraham Lincoln faced an absolute calamity on March 4, 1861, the day when Chief Justice Roger Taney administered the oath of office to Lincoln at his inauguration.

Already seven states from the South had seceded, or withdrawn, from the Union because voters had elected Lincoln President of the United States. Southern voters believed that Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery into western territories, like Kansas and Nebraska.

South Carolina voted to secede on December 20, 1860, forty-four days after the November 6 election, and it went into effect on Christmas Eve. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed suit after Christmas, in January of 1861, and Texas on February 1.

Lincoln understood that another eight slave states might also secede from the Union soon.

On that day in March, 1861, Lincoln placed his hand on the Bible and said, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

He then delivered his first Inaugural Address, saying, “The central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does fly to anarchy or despotism. The rule of a minority is wholly inadmissible.”

Almost three years before, on June 16, 1858, Lincoln had delivered an address at the Republican State convention, in Springfield, Illinois, and had discussed the issue of “slavery agitation.” Historians since have entitled his talk, the “House Divided” speech. In it, he said,

“In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ (That is a quote from the Gospel of Matthew.) I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Southerners read Lincoln’s speech and were convinced that he had aligned himself with Northern agitators, and that he was anxious to eradicate the South’s primary labor force.

Because they felt threatened, even fearful, certain Southern states chose to secede from the Union and create a new country, the Confederate States of America.

Delegates from the seven Southern states assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, in early February of 1861, to adopt a provisional constitution for the Confederate States, elect Jefferson Davis their president for the next six years, and adopt a flag for their new country.

Delegates from North Carolina arrived in Montgomery on February 6, “to plead in vain for conciliation,” wit the Northern states, and so they left, feeling dismayed.

On April 12, 1861, thirty-nine days after Lincoln’s inauguration, a line of canons poised at Charleston, South Carolina fired upon Fort Sumter, four miles out in Charleston’s harbor, the opening shots of the Civil War.

Inside the fort, the stars and stripes came down, and the Confederate flag was hoisted high. North and South were now locked into a bloody conflict to see whose set of ideas would win.

On April 17, Virginia seceded and joined the Confederacy. In May, Arkansas and North Carolina seceded, and on June 8, Tennessee did the same. A total of eleven states seceded.

Years before, on September 12, 1854, Lincoln gave an insightful speech at Bloomington, Illinois, about the differences between North and South. He said that,

“The Southern slaveholders were neither better, nor worse than we of the North, and that we of the North were no better than they. If we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do; and if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do.

“And we never ought to lose sight of this fact in discussing the subject.”

Steven Inskeep, author of a new book, “Differ We Must,” said that Lincoln believed that,

“Slaveholders were not bad people, but people caught up in a bad system, which they naturally acted out of self-interest to defend. Lincoln’s quarrel was not with them, but with their circumstances.”

No president before or since Lincoln has faced as bad a calamity as he did in 1861.

Throughout the year of 1864, President Abraham Lincoln believed that he would lose the election in November. He admitted in August, “I am going to be beaten, and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.” The odds were stacked against him.

Plenty of voters in the Union had reason to despise, even hate, Lincoln. The war that had begun in April 1861, at Fort Sumter, had turned into a ghastly event, full of fury, fever, horror, and madness. The human wreckage was colossal, on a scale never imagined before.

Voters blamed Lincoln because he had failed to end the war quickly, to crush the rebellion, to vanquish Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army, and to reunite the Union.

No other country had ever held an election in the middle of a civil war, and yet it was on the calendar, set for November 8, “an unprecedented democratic exercise in midst of a civil war.”

The last time that a political party had nominated an incumbent President to run a second time had occurred in 1840, and no President since Andrew Jackson had won a second term.

On August 23, Lincoln said, “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration.”

On September 1, 1864, Lincoln received some welcome news. The Union General, William Tecumseh Sherman, reported, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” This was a huge loss for the South, because Atlanta was a railroad hub, and the South’s major manufacturing center.

A reporter at the “Richmond Examiner” wrote, that the “disaster at Atlanta came in the very nick of time to save the party of Lincoln from irretrievable ruin. It will obscure the prospect of peace, late so bright. It will also diffuse gloom over the South.”

Lincoln beat the odds and won the Republican party’s nomination. Former Union General, George McClellan, whom Lincoln had fired in 1862 from his position as the Union’s lead General, won the Democratic party’s nomination.

On Tuesday, November 8, Lincoln carried all but three of the states’ electoral votes, except for Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21. Lincoln took 55% of the popular vote. Yet, some 78% of Union soldiers voted for Lincoln.

The Civil War historian James McPherson wrote, that the 1864 election “was a powerful endorsement of Lincoln’s iron-willed determination to fight on to unconditional victory.”

A British war correspondent observed “that the North was silently, calmly, but desperately in earnest, in a way the like of which the world never saw before. I am astonished the more I see and hear of the extent and depth of this determination to fight to the last.”

It was Lincoln’s willpower that drove Sherman and Grant and their soldiers forward.

On November 16, 1864, Sherman set his army on a march to the sea, to Savannah.

In Geoffrey Ward’s 1990 book “The Civil War,” he wrote, that on November 24, “Union cooks served up 120,000 turkey and chicken dinners to the men of Grant’s great army, outside of Petersburg, Virginia.

“Dug in only yards away, the Confederates had no feast, but held their fire all day out of respect for the Union holiday.”

On December 22, 1864, Sherman sent Lincoln a telegram: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition.”

Ward wrote, that “On January 31, 1865, Congress voted 119 to 56 to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, to abolish slavery, and then sent it to the states for ratification.”

On March 4, 1865, Lincoln spoke at his second inauguration, saying, “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Lincoln would live only 40 days of his second term.