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1865: An assassination, a racist, a political fracture
Ron Chernow is the author of Grant.
On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. After four years of gruesome warfare, Grant laid down generous terms, issuing rations to famished Confederate soldiers and allowing them to take home their horses and mules to plant crops. For a fleeting and improbable instant, it seemed as if the war might conclude in fairy-tale fashion, with the Confederacy chastened and even repentant after the rebellion. Violence would give way to sanity.
Then, five days later, came the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. “Here was the rebellion put down in the field,” Grant later observed, “and starting up in the gutters.” The Great Emancipator and head of the Republican Party was succeeded by Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and an unapologetic racist, throwing American politics into turmoil. The Ku Klux Klan loomed just over the horizon. The events at Appomattox Court House had briefly promised regional harmony, but the radical change in leadership at the White House hinted that the deep fracture between North and South would harden into a permanent feature of our national life, a source of lunacy that bedevils us to the present day.
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1919: Riots, racial violence, an absent president
Adriane Lentz-Smith is a professor of history at Duke University.
Nineteen-nineteen should have been a good year. The armistice ending World War I promised a return to calm, a restoration of civil liberties, and an ebb to the nativist hysteria that had made targets of German-Americans. But the war’s end brought violence, not peace, to the American homefront. Riots roiled across the nation, in towns from Charleston to Washington, D.C., to Chicago. Not contemporary riots but Old World-style pogroms in which white mobs targeted black bodies, businesses and homes as a reminder that the “War for Democracy” abroad would not bring democracy back home. Although poet and former diplomat James Weldon Johnson labeled it the “Red Summer,” the firestorm lasted the entire year, with large-scale riots in 10 cities, smaller conflicts in scores more, and nearly 100 lynchings of African-Americans (at least 13 of whom were veterans of the war). In September in Elaine, Arkansas, the revanchism of the Red Summer met the anti-radicalism of the Red Scare as white landowners led a mob of nearly 1,000 men in a massacre of black sharecroppers who had met to form a union.