Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's April 15 Substack entry. It describes Lincoln's last evening, when he was shot to death in Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth.
How did Americans react after Lincoln's assassination, an attack on the American government itself?
At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned hundreds of people, investigators identified ten people they believed responsible for Lincoln’s death. Booth himself had been killed on April 26 as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a military commission in May and June 1865. Four were sentenced to death by hanging; four were imprisoned.
Remind you of anything? After the January 6 attack on Congress, when 140 Capitol policemen were injured in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president -- an election in which Biden won a 7 million majority of the popular vote -- the condemnation of Trump and the rioters was pretty much universal, just like the reaction to Lincoln's death. But what happened next?
But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 28, he issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates except certain leaders and wealthy southern planters. Those he said could apply to him directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be “liberally extended.” They were. By December 1865 he had pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders.
At the same time, Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as southern state legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that worked to push Black Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, and Johnson refused to call it back into emergency session after Lincoln’s death. When it convened in December, Johnson told the congressmen that Reconstruction was over. Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected southern congressmen—some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year before—to end the unpleasantness of the war years.
As it turned out, the views of the Confederate leaders were not repudiated; rather, their treason was largely swept under the rug, supposedly in the interest of reconciliation and healing.
By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice meant that discrimination based on race could result in federal charges, former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics. Because most Black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with property. Former Confederates argued that Black voting was just a redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to Black Americans, a form of socialism.
That rhetoric appealed to northern Americans who worried about immigrants voting in cities. Increasingly, they listened as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to spread human enslavement—despite their many declarations saying exactly that—but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government.
By the 1890s, towns not only across the South but also in the North and West were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true America.
FDR's New Deal programs were universally popular in an economically devastated South. But racist ideas were kick-started back to the mainstream when Truman ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948, and were juiced further in 1954 with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.
The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern government that included everyone were promoting socialism.
In 2009, Elmer Rhodes started the "Oath Keepers," which HCR describes as "a right-wing gang." They joined the Proud boys in planning and executing the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Rhodes was convicted of seditions conspiracy; "Juries found at least a dozen other Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes."
As soon as he retook office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon to the participants in the January 6 attack who had been convicted of crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their attempt to overturn the nation’s democratic process and releasing them back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of fourteen of the leading Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, ending prison sentences that had been as long as 22 years.
Because he did not pardon those leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work their way through the appeals court. Yesterday the Department of Justice moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. “The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenerz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., wrote.
Like Andrew Johnson in 1865, Trump whitewashed the behavior of insurrectionists. (A big difference between the two: Unlike Trump, Johnson did not actually take part in the traitorous plot.)
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