Letters from an American - April 9, 2025

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

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April 9th, 2025. On April 9th, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Courthouse 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 1200 could vote, he said, But we 1200 never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the 16,800 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 9th reassured Americans that they had in fact saved the last best hope of earth, democracy. Writing from Washington DC poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the US military and the return to peace its victory heralded. Nor earth nor sky

ever knew such spectacles of surperber 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 side arms 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 19th and 20th 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 fascism 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 US 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. Rowley's 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 school children 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 and 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 wrote 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. 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 9th, 1865. What General Lee's feelings were, I do not know, Grant wrote. My 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 was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts.

Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. Thanks for watching!