Donald Trump and maga Republicans must obey the Constitution and support Equal Protection 14th Amendment

Attack on birthright citizenship highlights Trump’s white nationalist ambitions

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Carlos de Loera

In the summer of 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified, granting birthright citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

Crafted in the aftermath of the Civil War, the landmark legislation was aimed at providing citizenship to formerly enslaved people. The amendment directly undid the ruling of the 1857, U.S. Supreme Court case of Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which stated that enslaved people were not U.S. citizens.

More than 150 years after the amendment’s ratification, Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2025, that offered a redefined interpretation of who exactly is entitled to birthright citizenship.

The proposed presidential directive suggested that citizenship should not be extended to children born within the U.S. or its territories to parents who are undocumented or have temporary visas.

The order — which would affect all children born to parents without permanent legal status in the U.S. after Feb. 19, 2025 — argued that “the Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

More than 150 years after the amendment’s ratification, Donald  Trump signed an executive order in January 2025, that offered a redefined interpretation of who exactly is entitled to birthright citizenship.

The proposed presidential directive suggested that citizenship should not be extended to children born within the U.S. or its territories to parents who are undocumented or have temporary visas.

The order — which would affect all children born to parents without permanent legal status in the U.S. after Feb. 19, 2025 — argued that “the Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

This retconning of the 14th Amendment aligns with the Trump administration’s continued crusade to demonize nonwhite citizens, which kicked off when he first ran for president in 2015.

The administration has continually placed travel bans on Muslim-majority countries; scaled back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures at the federal level; tried to craft immigration and refugee services in a way that prioritizes white people; perpetuated the “anchor baby” myth; ramped up spending for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; attempted to expedite deportations; created an increased surveillance state on undocumented people as ICE raids have besieged immigrant communities over the last year; and housed detained migrants in poorly and dangerously run detention centers.

Stephen Miller, the front man for Trump’s deportation campaign, claimed that the U.S. would essentially be a utopia if there were no immigrants.

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has openly shown contempt for judges’ rulings on deportation processes when dealing with Latino immigrants.

With the help of other cronies like Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Kash Patel, Brendan Carr, Marco Rubio and Karoline Leavitt, the Trump administration has virtually crafted the Avengers of white nationalism.

Immediately after the order’s signing, several federal judges from across the country blocked its implementation, ruling that it’s unconstitutional. However, in June the Supreme Court ruled that district courts couldn’t authorize nationwide injunctions of the executive order.

After that decision, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit — officially known as Trump vs. Barbara — to block Trump’s executive order last June in New Hampshire on behalf of all the children who would be affected by the directive. The district court judge presiding over the case granted a preliminary injunction, which prevented the order from being enforced. In December, it was announced that the Supreme Court would review the district court’s ruling.

On April 1, the Supreme Court was presented with oral arguments from both sides — though a decision on the case will not be reached until the end of the Supreme Court’s session in late June or early July.

Ahead of these presentations, the deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, Cody Wofsy, spoke with The Times about the case.

Wofsy explained that the only legally sound way for the executive order to be implemented would be through an official amendment to the Constitution, which would need to be approved by the states. He highly doubted something like that would even pass.

However, the attorney noted that a lack of legality wouldn’t necessarily stop the Trump administration from denying people citizenship.

“If there were no lawsuits, the government would be treating all these children as if they were not citizens,” Wofsy said. “What I’m saying is that’s illegal, but that the government does illegal things sometimes.”

Wofsy also further delved into the particularities of the court case, stating that the Trump administration wants to require that parents of babies born in the U.S. be “domiciled” in the country.

“That means somebody who resides here and has the intention to reside here indefinitely,” he said. “One problem for [the Trump administration] is that for most of the babies who are being targeted by the executive order, their parents are domiciled here.”

Additionally, he noted that there is currently no domicile requirement within the 14th Amendment and that there is already legal precedent for a constitutional interpretation that asserted that stance.

The 1898, Supreme Court case of United States vs. Wong Kim Ark affirmed the right to citizenship of a child born in California to two parents who were Chinese nationals. The landmark ruling set the legal groundwork for any child born within the U.S. to be considered a citizen, regardless of their parents’ residence status.

The Supreme Court brief put forth by the Trump administration mentioned that court case but argued that the ruling “does not cover children of aliens who are not ‘permitted by the United States to reside here.’”

Wofsy called out the legal move for its perversion of what political representation should be.

“Citizenship is not a policy tool to be wielded just because the people temporarily in office would rather the electorate looked different from the way it does,” he said. “[In] America, the people elect their representatives, the representatives do not pick who the people are going to be.”

A positive outcome for the Trump administration could create a permanent second‑class caste of people whose citizenship can be questioned.

“This would be the starting gun to a much broader attack on citizenship and belonging in this country more generally,” Wofsy said. “And we know who the targets of those attacks would be. It would be communities of color. It would be vulnerable populations in this country who already have their citizenship and their belonging in America questioned on a regular basis.”

In terms of enforcement, this new reality would make it so that the thousands of children born monthly since Feb. 19, 2025, would effectively be rendered undocumented immigrants, with virtually no avenue to get any type of legal status.

Wofsy said these kids would be “subject to immediate harms” and that they could be arrested, detained and deported from the U.S.

“They’re going to grow up living in fear of immigration enforcement and having their families torn apart,” he noted. “It also means they’d be denied passports, ordinary access, Social Security cards and various kinds of programs, including early life nutrition as they get older.”

The executive order’s implementation could also create a logistical nightmare for people who have nothing to do with those who are being targeted. For example, it could affect members of religious communities that may not have traditional documentation and people who’ve lost their documentation due to natural disasters.

“What if you need to prove the immigration status of your parents, maybe decades before questions are being raised about citizenship?” Wofsy said. “[It could] potentially strip citizenship from unknown numbers of people who not only should be citizens under the Constitution as it’s written, but even should be citizens under the executive order rules but maybe can’t prove it.”

Wofsy called the Trump administration the “most anti-immigrant administration that we’ve seen in at least 100 years” and pointed at the ultimate goal of all its restrictive policies.

“They want to turn the clock back to a time when the country was less free, less equal and more than anything more white,” he said. “Overall, it is a vision of America that says that nonwhite populations coming here, enjoying the fabric of America, is a bad thing. I don’t think that is what the American people believe. I don’t think that’s what they voted for and I do not think that this assault on birthright citizenship reflects American values.”

Nikki Haley certainly needs American History lessons about racism, slavery and civil rights

Echo opinion published in NOLA.com in Lousiana:

Not long after sundown on the day the United States of America honored the life of one of its greatest civil rights leaders ever, Martin Luther King Jr., an animated politician blurted out one of the most ridiculous claims in the history of this great country.

Ed Pratt: Never a racist country? Surely Nikki Haley knows better than that❗

Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley proclaimed, “We’ve (the USA) never been a racist country.”

Wait❗ Isn’t battling racism and seeking rights for Americans the reason why King is annually saluted? 

So, I guess Haley, and those like her, never got the memo. 

Or, maybe she is joining the group working hard to whitewash our country’s history.

I’ve written before about my U.S. Army veteran dad and me being confronted by a White teenager who refused to sell him two sno-balls, and she made it clear why when she said, “We don’t serve Negros.”

My brokenhearted dad was convinced that he was a victim of racism. Silly, right?

In my early days as a reporter on the old evening newspaper State-Times in Baton Rouge, a White reporter held up a magazine for me to see the headline about a popular television miniseries: “Roots best watched from end to beginning.”

Let’s be clear, most folks in this country are working hard to treat people as people and that has led to improvements in employment, education, housing and other areas. But, my goodness, Nikki, there is a contingent who are unabashed racists and another group who don’t believe they are racist.

I’ve written before about my U.S. Army veteran dad and me being confronted by a White teenager who refused to sell him two sno-balls, and she made it clear why when she said, “We don’t serve Negros.”

My brokenhearted dad was convinced that he was a victim of racism. Silly, right?

In my early days as a reporter on the old evening newspaper State-Times in Baton Rouge, a White reporter held up a magazine for me to see the headline about a popular television miniseries: “Roots best watched from end to beginning.”

Get it, Nikki? Funny, huh? But not racist, right?

Let’s talk about the biggie — slavery. I guess holding human beings just a step above captive animals was just a thing or a phase, huh, Nikki? Nikki, have you seen what the belly of the slave ships were like?

Nikki, I know you read stories about places where people who look Black like me could not sit at the front of a city bus. 

I’m thinking that if you and your family were around at that time, some folks may have said something about you sitting in those front seats, too. But asking you to move to the back would not have been racist, though, right?

Nikki, Nikki, Nikki. Did you hear about the White people in Tulsa, Oklahoma who went into a prosperous Black section of town and burned it down? After finishing the dastardly deed, no harm nor foul to the perpetrators. Your thoughts?

Now, that I’m thinking about it, I recall you saying a couple of weeks ago that slavery was not at the heart of the Civil War. 😒😟😳❓ 

Indeed, even many racists agree that keeping slaves on those cotton farms was the foundation for the Civil War.

Hey Nikki, you know several GOP-controlled legislatures around the nation are trying to make it more difficult for Black and poor people to vote. Shouldn’t voting be as accessible as possible?

You know, Nikki, I’m anxiously waiting for your comments leading up to February. You do know what that is, don’t you? 

You know, February is Black History Month. Pay attention 😅, Nikki, you may learn something about what a race of people has faced since 1619, and what they have been doing about it.

Or, given your recent outlandish comments, you may say something else to cause jaws to drop and for you to appear, well, you know.

Email Edward Pratt, a former newspaperman, at epratt1972@yahoo.com.

Presidential immunity from prosecution is "asinine"

Republican hypocrisy follies:  Echo opinion letter published in the Naples Daily News, in Florida:

Dear Editor: If gas prices keep going down, Chevron will have to lay off 270 Republicans in Congress. 

The "absolute immunity" claim by Trump's lawyers is so asinine even Rudy Giuliani is laughing. 

So, if a president sells secrets to an enemy or shoots and kills someone he can't be prosecuted. Why did Gerald Ford pardon Richard Nixon? Trump's attorneys make My Cousin Vinny look like Clarence Darrow. 😲😂❗

When asked about slavery Nikki Haley refused to mention slavery and Trump told his followers the Civil War should have been negotiated. These are the same people who pushed the Birther Hate so it's clear that to win the Republican nomination you have to pander to white grievance and promote the Great Replacement Theory. Oh, and defend Confederate symbols of slavery while, with a straight face, insisting you are the party of Lincoln.

Happy J6 days Republicans. #January 6th #insurrection #sedition #14thAmendment  #VoteBlue2024

From: Bill Linehan, Naples, Florida

Echo from Mississippi - Confederate racist statues

Take them down. Every last one of them.

James M. Thomas

Confederate Monuments and White Victimhood

Opinion echo by James M. Thomas, published in the Jackson Free Press, in Jackson Mississippi

Carved from marble, the University of Mississippi's Confederate monument measures nearly 30 feet in height. A Confederate soldier stands atop its large base, saluting with a rifle by his side. Photo by Donna Lad

JACKSON FREE PRESS- A towering monument to the Civil War Confederacy stands guard over the entrance of the University of Mississippi, where James M. Thomas has worked the past seven years. 

In fact, the monument, commissioned and funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1906, is in remembrance to "the valiant heroes of Lafayette County."

As a scholar who studies the causes and consequences of racism, I am often asked for my thoughts on our University's monument, and Confederate iconography more generally.

A recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center situates the university's Confederate monument within a larger effort across the American South "to create a more acceptable version of the region's past" (in other words, they are marble "revisionist" symbols.)

Moreover, the timing of these monuments' construction reveals their racist motives. Most were commissioned between 1900 and 1920, and then from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s. Their commissioning was concurrent with the enacting of Jim Crow legislation, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and the modern Civil Rights Movement. They reflect and amplify white southerners' racial backlash to significant political gains made by an emancipated African American population.

Carved from marble, the University of Mississippi's Confederate monument measures nearly 30 feet in height. A Confederate soldier stands atop its large base, saluting with a rifle by his side. Two cavalry swords crossing one another are etched into the base, along with a passage from Lord Byron's "The Siege of Corinth" and an elegiac couplet by the Greek poet Simonides. Translated, it reads, "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to Spartan law, we lie." The couplet is identical to that which is engraved on the monument to the Spartans who died at the Battle of Thermopylae.

The term "stranger" was a common rhetorical device within ancient Greek epitaphs for making sympathetic appeals to passers-by. In the monument's epitaph, the passerby, or "stranger," is compelled to tell all who will listen that the Confederates gave their lives to a noble cause. Their death was honorable, and their service obedient.

(revisionists!)

In 2016, then-university Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter approved the addition of a plaque to be placed in front of the monument. The original wording noted the construction of monuments located all across the South, during the post-Reconstruction period, as a response to Confederate veterans' passing from the scene in increasing numbers. It also noted the monument's significance as the rally point for segregationists in 1962, that were attempting to prevent James Meredith from integrating the campus. The original wording closed by stating the monument is a reminder of both the university's past and its present commitment to becoming a more inclusive campus.

The plaque's addition was met with mixed response. Defenders of the monument claimed the plaque diminished the sacrifice those former university students made. Others claimed its wording failed to acknowledge the preservation of slavery as the true cause of the Confederacy. Still others asserted the plaque co-opted later struggles to integrate white institutions, and minimized the university's violent resistance to its integration in 1962.

Following several weeks of protests, letters and appeals, a chancellor-appointed committee of four faculty members drafted and approved new language for the plaque. The revised wording emphasized the monument's role in promoting "Lost Cause" ideology, and the significance of slavery in the Confederacy's formation and maintenance.

Many thought the revised language was an improvement. Others argued it further diminished the former students' sacrifice. Still others maintained that the very presence of the monument served as tacit support for a violent system of racial domination.

So what does James M. Thomas think?

I think that when white Confederate sympathizers demand that we honor their dead, they ignobly play the victims twice over. First, in proclaiming as virtuous their ancestors' sacrifice to a Lost Cause. And again when demanding that we honor such shameful deeds.

I think Confederate monuments should be removed from public spaces. I think their cheap, bronze and zinc casts should be melted down, their marble bases ground into dust. I do not think monuments to soldiers who fought and died to preserve white supremacy belong in front of our community courthouses, public squares or public universities. To be sure, if a museum wishes to house them, then let those museums have them. But I doubt many do.

Some claim these monuments have public value. But their claims make it clear that these monuments' public value is dependent upon a definition of "public" so narrow as to only include aggrieved white people.

Others declare these monuments honor the brave men who defended their homes from federal invasion. Yet these declarations willfully ignore that enslaved labor and its profits built and maintained those homes, and that slavery was the principle cause for secession.

Some proclaim those who fought and died for the Confederacy had no choice, most of them were poor farmers, and few of them owned slaves. To be sure, the percentage of households that owned slaves varied—from 12 percent in Maryland, to 49 percent in Mississippi. Yet the men, women and children who lived in bondage had no choice in the matter of their enslavement. The men who fought to defend slavery had, at minimum, more choice than none at all.

Still others will accuse me of destroying history. On the contrary, I demand a clearer history. Confederate monuments simplify and obfuscate the historical record. Scholarly texts on America's Civil War are plenty. Our precious resources are better spent supporting public libraries in which those texts are housed.

There are those who believe that the men these monuments honor were just men of their time, and should be judged against the values of their era and not ours. They must also believe that the nearly four million enslaved men, women and children either had no values, or shared the values of their enslavers.

Finally, there are those moderates of whom Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about, who offer contextualization as a great educational compromise for passers-by. Yet a plaque in the place of a monument would serve the same purpose, but without the hypocrisy.

Take them down. Every last one of them.

James M. Thomas is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi. 

God Save our Statue of Liberty

June 17: On this day, the Statue of Liberty arrives in America

Echo essay published in the National Constitution Center Constitution Daily blog:

NEW YORK Harbor- It’s hard to imagine America without the Statue of Liberty, but the icon of freedom didn’t make its first full appearance in New York until June 17, 1885.

The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor, to great fanfare that day, but to the surprise of everyone not already familiar with the Statue project, its full public debut was put on hold for another year after a logistical problem cropped up: the statue’s mammoth pedestal didn’t exist.

The project had originally started in 1865 and it took a total of 21 years for the Statue of Liberty to be conceived, built in pieces, shipped to America, and hoisted on its pedestal on Bedloe’s Island (now often called Liberty Island).

Edouard de Laboulaye*, a leading French intellectual and an expert on the U.S. Constitution, dreamed that the statue would inspire the French people to follow the example of the American people, including the late President Abraham Lincoln.

Laboulaye also believed the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the U.S. in 1865, was proof that justice and liberty for all was possible.

It took 10 years for Laboulaye to come up with a plan for the Statue. He enlisted sculptor Auguste Bartholdi to design the monument and Bartholdi helped to raise 400,000 Francs in conjunction with the Franco-American Union.

Bartholdi selected Bedloe’s Island as the spot for the Statue, and the plan included American fundraisers paying for the pedestal, while the French paid for the Statue.

The arm holding the torch was completed in 1876 and shown at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition. It was then moved to Madison Square Park in New York City until 1882 to help with the fundraising.

The Statue was built in Paris and presented by the Franco American Union to the United States Ambassador, Levi Morton, on July 4, 1884. The Statue was then taken apart, and sent to the United States aboard the French Navy ship, Isère.

The Statue arrived in New York Harbor on June 17, 1885, well before the pedestal was completed. The next year, once the pedestal was finished, immigrant workers re-assembled the Statue, and on October 28, 1886, the Statue made its debut.

About 1 million New Yorkers gathered for the ceremony, as Bartholdi released a French flag that covered the Statue of Liberty's face. President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty, as a gift from France and a sign of mutual friendship.

The 151-foot-tall Statue cost $250,000, paid for by the French. The pedestal, at 154 feet, cost $270,000 paid for by American sources.

One thing missing from the Statute and pedestal was the famous plaque with a poem from Emma Lazarus. She wrote the sonnet as part of the fund raising effort, and it was added in 1903.

“‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

*In 1865, de Laboulaye proposed creating a monument for the United States. The recent Union victory in the Civil War, which reaffirmed the United States' ideals of freedom and democracy, served as a platform for de Laboulaye to argue that honoring the United States would strengthen the cause for democracy in France. As the president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, de Laboulaye believed that the passage of the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery in the U.S., 1865) was a milestone and it proved that justice and liberty for all was possible.

P.S. God Save our Statue of Liberty from right wing extremism.

Racism in America - Abraham Lincoln perspective

Published in The Atlantic and posted in the HistoryNewsNetwork, by Andrew Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. 

With the United States starkly divided and with many Americans asking what kind of nation we are, it seems a good moment to look back to November 1863 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when Abraham Lincoln tried to answer the same question. Consecrating a Civil War battlefield where thousands of young men and boys had died four months before, he spoke of a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For most Americans since, and for much of the world, those words have attained the status of scripture. We draw our sense of collective identity from them. They were, however, not strictly true, and Lincoln knew it.

Five years earlier, he had been more candid. Speaking in Chicago in the summer of 1858, Lincoln noted that when the republic was founded, “we had slavery among us,” and that “we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted” slavery to persist in those parts of the nation where it was already entrenched. “We could not secure the good we did secure,” he said, “if we grasped for more.” The United States, in other words, could not have been created if the eradication of human bondage had been a condition of its creation. Had Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the nation was con­ceived not in liberty but in compromise, the phrase would have been less memorable but more accurate.

The hard truth is that the United States was founded in an act of accommodation between two fundamentally different societies. As one Southern-born antislavery activist wrote, it was a “sad satire to call [the] States ‘United,’” because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life, while in the other it was fading or already gone. The Founding Fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.

There were many reasons why this composite nation unraveled in the mid-19th century—but one in particular exposed the idea of the “United” States as a lie. This was the fact that even before the founding, enslaved people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their mas­ters in search of freedom. The Founding Fathers knew the problem firsthand. Many of them were slaveholders themselves, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, whose own slaves periodically ran away. And so, in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which came to be known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, they tried to solve the problem. 

That clause declared that “no person held to service or labor in one state” could escape from coerced labor by fleeing from a state where slavery was legal to a state where it was illegal.

The constitutional principle was clear, but it proved to be unenforceable. Over the first half of the 19th century, as enslaved men and women ran from slavery to freedom, the federal government remained too weak to do much to stop them. By the second quarter of the century, some of the fugitives—the most famous was Frederick Douglass—were telling their stories with the help of white abolitionist editors in speeches and memoirs that ripped open the screen behind which America tried to conceal the reality that a nation (supposedly) based on the principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of Americans had virtually no rights at all. 

By awakening Northerners to this fact, and by enraging Southerners who demanded the return of their “absconded” property, they pushed the nation toward confronting the truth that America was really two nations, not one. 

Politicians of all parties pretended otherwise. From the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s, hoping to restore “tranquility to the public mind,” the House of Representatives observed what became known as the Gag Rule, which required that any petition demanding action against slavery must be tabled immediately upon receipt without debate. Yet the truth about the divided state of the union could not be squelched. As the nation expanded westward, the border between slave states and free states became longer and more porous, and slaves continued to cross it.

In 1846, with the outbreak of the Mexican War, the final reckoning was set in motion. With strong but not universal support in the South, and against strong but not universal resistance in the North, both halves of the United States joined to wage a war of conquest. By the time the fighting ended two years later, the United States had seized a huge swath of land stretching from Texas to California, nearly equal in size to one-third of our present-day nation. This immense expansion of territory under control of the federal government brought back the old question of compromise between slavery and freedom in a new form and with more urgency than ever.

Would slavery be confined to states where it already existed, or would it be allowed to spread into the new territories, which would eventually become states? A growing number of white Northerners insisted on the former. White Southerners almost universally demanded the latter. The fragile political truce that had held the United States together was coming apart.

In 1850, Congress attempted a last-ditch solution. It struck a bargain, now known as the Compromise of 1850, that belongs to the long history of compromise—beginning with the Constitution itself—by which white Americans advanced their interests at the expense of black Americans. In an intricate balancing act designed to prevent an irreparable rupture between the free states and the slave states, the compromise proposed to keep slavery out of some of the new territories while leaving its future in others to be decided by local referendum.

Congress sealed the deal by passing what became known as the Fugitive Slave Act, which was an effort to put teeth into the toothless clause of the Constitution. The new law empowered a whole class of federal officers (called “commissioners”) to return fugitives without any semblance of due process. It made it a federal crime for any citizen to aid a fugitive in flight from “service.” Meant to be a remedy and salve, it turned out to be the incendiary event that lit the fuse that led to civil war.

The leading intellectual of the North, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called the Fugitive Slave Law a “sheet of lightning at midnight.” To him and many others, it revealed that Americans had been living all along in an unholy “union between two countries, one civilized & Christian & the other barbarous.”

This was a sentiment with which Lincoln himself tacitly agreed. But he refrained from saying so on the grounds that, with time, slavery could be “put in the path of ultimate extinction.” Faced with a choice between denying the constitutional right of slave owners to recover their human property and thereby losing the union, and tolerating slavery to the extent of returning fugitives and thereby saving the union, Lincoln chose the latter. “I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down and returned to their stripes,” he said, “but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”

The quiet did not last. Vile as it was, the Fugitive Slave Law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet. It implicated Northerners in the business of slavery in a way they had never felt before. It made visible the suffering of human beings who had been hitherto invisible. It forced Northerners to choose between coming to their aid in defiance of the law or surrendering them under penalty of the law.

A few chose the former and most chose the latter, as resistance broke out in Northern cities. Blacks and whites organized to break fugitives out of jail. Most important for the fate of the union, mainstream public opinion underwent a radical change. 

In Massachusetts in 1854, after a fugitive was violently arrested and sent back to his master in Virginia, one New England industrialist whose textile mills wove slave-grown cotton into cloth remarked, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” In North Carolina, one newspaper announced, “Respect and Enforce the Fugitive Slave Law as it stands. If not, we leave you!”

The Fugitive Slave Law turned the nation upside down. Southerners who had once insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights. Northerners who had once derided the South for its theory of “nullification”—John C. Calhoun’s idea that acts of Congress require consent from each individual state before they can take effect within its borders—now became nullifiers themselves. The Fugitive Slave Law clarified just how incompatible North and South had become. It broke the national Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions. It fractured the Whig Party into “Cotton Whigs” and “Conscience Whigs.” It made the possibility of disunion, once an extremist idea, seem suddenly plausible. 

One eminent New Englander replied to the Southern secessionist threat with a shrug of disgust: “If the union be in any way dependent on an act so revolting in every regard, then it ought not to exist.”

Most important, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made clear that slavery was not a Southern phenomenon but a national phenomenon. Northerners who had once been able to pretend that slavery had nothing to do with them could no longer evade their complicity.

Considering this history may help put into perspective our contemporary anxiety that America is a hopelessly divided nation facing insoluble problems. In fact, none of the issues of our time—economic inequality, affordability of health care, future of the environment, regulation of immigration—recalcitrant as they may be to bipartisan compromise, compares even remotely to the impasse of the mid-19th century. “Humanity cries out against this vast enormity,” Herman Melville wrote a year before the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, “but not one man knows a prudent remedy.” By “prudent” he meant some way of destroying slavery without destroying the union itself.

Yet the story of the Fugitive Slave Law is also a distant mirror in which we may see a version of ourselves. It alienated many Americans from their country and compelled them to decide how to behave in the face of federal laws and actions that violated their personal convictions. Many white people in the North struggled to find a way, as one antislavery minister put it, “to obey the law while respecting themselves.” Writing with a certain voyeuristic pleasure, Nathaniel Hawthorne described one New England politician oscillating between saying yes and saying no to the Fugitive Slave Law, attempting “first to throw himself upon one side of the gulf, then on the other,” until he “finally tumbled headlong into the bottomless depth between.” In Boston, a U.S. marshal reluctantly obeyed a court order to send a fugitive back to slavery, then raised money to try to buy the same man’s freedom and after the Civil War hired him to work as an employee of the federal government.

Through most of his career, Lincoln himself tried to walk the line between compliance and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Repulsed by the Southern demand that “we must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure,” he nevertheless pledged to respect the law. Even after his election as president and well into the Civil War, he continued trying to reconcile his revulsion at slavery with his devotion to the union. Accused from the right of being an antislavery radical, he was reviled from the left for dragging his feet in the struggle against slavery for the sake of the illusory dream that the union could be preserved.

In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America’s long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some 4 million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. 

They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live.

The problem of the 1850s, was a political problem specific to a particular time and place. 

But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.