Martin Meenagh blog

  The Civil War: Coverage and Coherence  These lecture notes have been cross-posted to my wix account.    I: The nature of History   If we begin at the beginning of things, history the writing and pursuit of history itself is the obvious starting point. By History, I mean to convey the nexus of professional, non-academic, personal, oral, social, and archaeological evidence and dispute which constitutes our understanding of the past. As a proven lawyer, I should also note that by evidence I mean the testimonial, circumstantial, forensic, and expert interpretation of the accretion of events. Counterfactual and inductive histories, which proceed from what didn’t happen, and from analogy and the perception of the observer as to what they think happened, aren’t really history, though they can be fun, and I feel duty bound to exclude them.   History is often called the Queen on the Arts. This idea, which emerged in the setting of the English traditi...

  Although crude opinion polls were reported by the Delaware and North Carolina press for the 1824 presidential election, they were essentially private ‘straw polls’, and modern ‘scientific’ polling can only be traced from the 1930s. It is therefore hard to look to direct data from the 1868 and 1872 presidential elections, as well as testimonial evidence, to gauge how US Grant was seen by contemporaries.  The fact that he carried 31 out of 37 states, won by a margin of greater than 11% over his opponent, and was mooted for a third term in 1880 does not suggest that he was widely viewed as a failure at the time. One of the youngest men to be president, Grant was vigorous in office, and both wielded executive power in the South, and made proposals both of consequence and potential from 1869 onwards. He was not marked by personal scandal, and, as his tours beyond the United States showed, was popular abroad. Grant is however often blamed for the failure of reconstruction, and f...

  Abraham Lincoln, for most of his career, was a failed politician. He was a candidate for the Illinois General Assembly in 1832. He lost. He was a candidate for a Whig nomination for the House of Representatives in 1843. He lost. He attempted to become a Commissioner of the General Land Office under President Taylor, which was a bureaucratic role, but was turned down. He was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1854 but did not take his seat, and in 1858, he lost the United States Senate seat for Illinois to Stephen A. Douglas. He was a compromise candidate for President in 1860, won a four-way election, and was promptly discounted and abused across the United States and Confederacy, as well as abroad, until having to create his own party to run for reelection in 1864, which was unexpected.  All Lincoln could really show in terms of elections between 1832 and 1860 was a single term as a member of the House of Representatives in a failing Whig party between 1846 and 1848. ...

‘Reconstruction’ is a passive indicative term referring to several things. It talks to the reconstruction of the relationship between the States which had joined the Confederacy and the Federal Government after the defeat of the Confederacy, and as such can be divided into presidential, congressional, and judicial forms. It also talks to the reconstruction of the relationship between Americans of African descent in the Southern States, white Southerners, and other Americans too. The former point is relatively easy to resolve. One cannot use President Lincoln’s policy whilst the war was ongoing to define whether it succeeded or failed. Lincoln faced two pressures; one, to reconstruct Louisianan government, and secondly, by example and policy, to undermine the Southern will to fight on. As with many Lincoln policies, his ideas on reconstruction were in a state marked by ambiguity and evolution, and he was assassinated before he could pronounce on what he wanted, though he warmly endors...

There has been diverse but shallow commentary on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. John F. Kennedy, for example, writing in his Putlitzer-winning Profiles in Courage , depicted the impeachment trial as an attempt to overturn constitutional government in the United States and to substitute legislative supremacy. This was a very Kennedyesque view, since the regime before the twentieth century, on a clear reading of the constitution and its context, must imply that the legislative branch was supreme.  For historians, as opposed to constitutional lawyers, opinion has been filtered through perspectives on Civil Rights. Since most commentators now generally assume that Johnson’s presidency was the one, controlling reason for the disastrous failure of Reconstruction, most tend to ground explanations of impeachment in explanations which justify his trial. There is thus a serious preliminary question to be asked and answered here, which is how the ‘regime’ interpreted imp...