Trump believes in the “great man” theory of history. Specifically, he believes that a great man, a man like President Andrew Jackson, could have stopped the American Civil War.
.. “Had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ ”
Setting aside the fact that Jackson died on June 8, 1845, 16 years before the first shells were fired on Fort Sumter
.. Mr. Trump once boasted that he could have done a deal to avert the Civil War.
.. the Civil War was almost inevitable even before Jackson’s presidency.
“Both Read the Same Bible”
Mark Noll explains that his goal is not primarily to shed light on the causes or course of the war but rather “to show how and why the cultural conflict that led to such a crisis for the nation also constituted a crisis for theology.” That crisis centered on two questions: what the Bible had to say about slavery, and what the conflict seemed to suggest about God’s providential design for the country. Although “both read the same Bible,” as Lincoln famously observed in his second inaugural, Protestants North and South discovered that “the Bible they had relied on for building up America’s republican civilization was not nearly … as inherently unifying for an overwhelmingly Christian people as they once had thought.”
.. American Protestants were typically suspicious of religious authority and skeptical of intellectual élites, and they thought of the Bible as a “plain book” readily comprehensible to “anyone who simply opened the cover and read.” Many viewed God’s ongoing work in the affairs of men as just as easily apprehended;
Syria’s Paradox: Why the War Only Ever Seems to Get Worse
Experts on civil wars say there are several reasons Syria is “a really, really tough case” that defies historical parallels.
The average such conflict now lasts about a decade, twice as long as Syria’s so far. But there are a handful of factors that can make them longer, more violent and harder to stop. Virtually all are present in Syria.
Many stem from foreign interventions that were intended to end the war but have instead entrenched it in a stalemate where violence is self-reinforcing and the normal avenues for peace are all closed. The fact that the underlying battle is multiparty rather than two-sided also works against resolution.
.. Each side is backed by foreign powers — including the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and now Turkey — whose interventions have made Syria an ecosystem with no entropy. In other words, the forces that would normally impede the conflict’s inertia are absent, allowing it to continue far longer than it otherwise would.
Government and rebel forces are supplied from abroad, which means their arms never run out.
.. They introduce self-reinforcing mechanisms for ever-intensifying stalemate.
Whenever one side loses ground its foreign backers increase their involvement, sending supplies or air support to prevent their favored player’s defeat. Then that side begins winning, which tends to prompt the other’s foreign backers to up their ante as well.
.. In most civil wars, the fighting forces depend on popular support to succeed. This “human terrain,” as counterinsurgency experts call it, provides all sides with an incentive to protect civilians and minimize atrocities, and has often proved decisive.
Wars like Syria’s, in which the government and opposition rely heavily on foreign support, encourage the precise opposite behavior
.. Pro-government forces have conducted by far the most attacks against civilians, but opposition fighters have led some as well.
.. “It’s more important to stop the other side from winning than it is to win yourself.”
.. There is reason to believe that Russia, for example, would like President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step down, or at least make some concessions for peace. But Russia can’t force him to act, nor can it simply quit Syria without abandoning its interests there. Mr. Assad, meanwhile, might want a fuller Russian intervention that brings him victory, something Moscow is unwilling to provide.
.. The only certain way to break the logjam is for one side to surge beyond what the other can match. Because Syria has sucked in two of the world’s leading military powers, Russia and the United States, that bar could likely only be cleared by a full-scale invasion.
In the best case, this would require something akin to the yearslong American occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan. In the worst, invading a war zone where so many foreign adversaries are active could ignite a major regional war.
.. in the best case, one side would slowly grind out a far-off victory that would merely downgrade the war into “a somewhat lower-level insurgency, terrorist attacks, and so on.”
.. “Outright military victory in a civil war often comes at the price of horrific (even genocidal) levels of violence against the defeated, including their civilian populations.”
Where the Confederacy Is Rising Again
When the review finally takes place, likely in the few months right before the November elections, Texas lawmakers will find themselves in a tough spot: They will be forced to either deny historical truths about the Confederacy, or potentially face the wrath of a devoted, active and organized subset of conservative Texans.
.. Throughout this tempest, the Texas chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an aging army of deeply religious, federal government distrusting, neo-Confederate true believers, has emerged as a steadfast defender of Confederate iconography. The Texas SCV only claims about 5,000 members, but their ideology carries significant weight in the state.
.. Levin pointed to the words of Confederates themselves, particularly Texas’ Ordinance of Secession. The document, which officially separated Texas from the Union in 1861, declared that African-Americans were “rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race.” It says that Texas seceded because non-slave-holding states “demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the Confederacy.” The document does not mention tariffs or any state right other than the right to own black people.
.. “They were fighting for states’ rights, not slavery.” According to Toungate, before secession, the federal government mistreated Southern states by issuing unfair tariffs. “Thirty thousand blacks fought for the Confederacy because they loved their masters,” Toungate argued, offering the fact as proof that “slavery could not have caused the war.”
.. Levin pointed to the words of Confederates themselves, particularly Texas’ Ordinance of Secession. The document, which officially separated Texas from the Union in 1861, declared that African-Americans were “rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race.” It says that Texas seceded because non-slave-holding states “demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the Confederacy.” The document does not mention tariffs or any state right other than the right to own black people.
Toungate waved off the document when I showed it to him later. “People have a distorted view of the Confederacy because liberal Northern historians wrote the history books,” he insisted. But these are primary sources, I noted, the words of the Confederates themselves. Toungate went silent for a beat, and then changed the subject. “I’m sick of the federal government wasting money,” he said, and “people living off welfare.”
.. “A lot of these people have ancestors that fought for the Confederacy and that personal connection, of course, colors how they view the event,” he said. Slavery, after all, was abhorrent. Who wants to admit that their family members fought to preserve it?
.. The SCV’s rejection of unequivocal historical fact, can, in part, be attributed to what psychologists call “motivated reasoning,” says Sander van der Linden, a Princeton University psychologist and director of the school’s Social and Environmental Decision-Making Lab. When people are emotionally invested in a belief, says van der Linden, they are inclined to accept information that confirms pre-existing beliefs and to dismiss conflicting evidence.
.. Neo-Confederate adamancy is as much about reactionary politics and identity as it is about history. It’s a declaration of values, a way of seeing the world, and its prevalence divides along political lines. Polls show that Democrats tend to view Confederate symbols, such as the battle flag, as emblems of racism, while Republicans more often see them as representations of Southern heritage.
And in Texas—the epicenter of anti-government angst, the home of the last two Republicans elected president
.. One book published by McGraw-Hill Education, features a section titled, “The South Secedes,” which states that “the majority of Southerners viewed secession as … a necessary course of action to uphold people’s rights.” The section does not list specific rights.
.. a member of the state board of education said that the standards listed slavery third because it was a “side issue to the Civil War.”
The Texas Education Knowledge and Skills guidelines for teaching the Civil War offer a crystal-clear example of how the state curriculum politicizes history
.. In his book, Race and Reunion, Yale historian David Blight argues that after the Civil War, Southern whites coped with crushing defeat by justifying why they had seceded. Reluctant to admit the Civil War was fought over slavery—a moral anachronism in much of the world at the time—many Southerners framed the war as a fight for states’ rights. Blight argues that Southern whites worked, through memorials and monuments, to etch the false narrative in the nation’s collective memory.
.. With 13 large Greek columns and 26–32 Confederate flags, it will be the largest Confederate monument built in a century, according to the SCV.
.. It is impossible to miss: an 8-foot statue of Jefferson Davis atop a 23-foot-tall granite base with four 7-foot bronze Confederate soldiers standing at his feet. The inscription etched into the memorial’s base dedicates the sculpture to Confederate soldiers who “Died for state rights guaranteed under the Constitution.” “The people of the South animated by the spirit of 1776,” it continues, “to preserve their rights, withdrew from the federal compact in 1861. The North resorted to coercion.”
.. The July 2015 letter in which Democratic lawmakers asked for a review of the Capitol’s pro-Confederate monuments calls out that plaque’s statement as an “outright falsehood.” In an email to me, state Sen. Rodney Ellis, one of the letter’s signatories, said that it is undeniable that the memorials are “part of an effort to rewrite history.”
“The Texas Capitol — the face of our state government,” said Ellis, “ought not to celebrate individuals whose notoriety stems from their service in defense of human slavery.”
.. But Toungate and the other Texas SCV members I spoke with vow that removing or altering the memorials would mean surrendering to politically correct, liberal distortion.
“You’ve been listening to Northerners who have moved down here and are raising Cain about Texas being racist,” Toungate said. “Confederate men were good Christians, and they don’t deserve to be treated like dirt.”