Over the weekend, I spent some time watching documentaries about the Civil War and was reminded that Memorial Day remembrances began with that conflict that took the lives of 600,000 Americans and almost took American democracy with it. It was an appropriate lesson for these days in 2025 when the fate of American democracy is again in the balance because of the authoritarian want-to-be dictator in the White House.
The program spoke of how as late as 1864, the war and America’s future hung in the balance. The war had grown unpopular with some in the North and President Lincoln was being challenged in that year’s election by General George McClellan, running as a Democrat. McClellan had been Commanding General of the United States Army from November 1861 to March 1862 until he was fired by Lincoln for not pressuring the Confederate army enough, prolonging the war.
McClellan became a severe critic of Lincoln and the war — and if he had won, the Emancipation Declaration would have been torn up and McClellan would have sought an agreement with the Southern states to end the war — allowing them to keep millions of Americans in bondage. The country would have looked much differently and it would have been the end of democracy here.
A miracle happened, however, and General Tecumseh Sherman won the battle of Atlanta, guaranteeing the end was in sight. Lincoln was re-elected in a landslide — the slaves were freed and democracy was saved. For a while at least. Reconstruction and freedom was only temporary for African-Americans and by 1877, Jim Crow and a new type of slavery had returned — which existed for another 90 years until the modern Civil Rights Movement.
This history is a reminder that democracy has to be fought for and defended. Constantly. Every generation of Americans are challenged with this task.
And it allows us to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice to save our democracy 160 years ago.
It’s never good that citizens of a country kill their fellow citizens — and it’s not good that some Americans today want to ignite a second civil war to force the nation into a past where white supremacy ruled and democracy and the Constitution were dead. America cannot allow that to happen.
We have to defend our country — and honor those who were willing to die to save our democracy. Please — I plead to our fellow citizens — don’t allow our people to have to face this choice. And it takes a day like today to honor all of those who made the choice in the past — to die to protect democracy, because in the end it is worth dying for. There’s nothing like it.
There sure is a lot of vitriol in our country today. And , I have been guilty of that myself. One way that we can honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice is to be more civil when communicating with those who have different ideologies than ourself. The truth is that throughout our history , progressives and conservatives have made that ultimate sacrifice beside one another on our battlefields. The least that we can do to honor their sacrifice is to be more civil with one another. It’s important to remember that our respective dreams only exist because of their collective sacrifice.
very very nice, and well written comment, thank you
that about says it all
JMS: There has ALWAYS been a lot of ‘vitriol’ in this country! But at this point, the really violent vitriol is coming from the MAGA and Trump as you’ll read in the latest Hartmann Report link below… Fascists
As for Memorial Day, this article was NOT the first! It was held in Charleston South Carolina in `1865 when a crowd of mostly 10,000 freed slaves gathered to honor the Union soldiers that fought to free them that were buried in a mass grave under a former Confederate Prison Camp ( a converted race track). They dug them all up, a couple hundred rotting bodies, and gave the Union soldiers proper burials in a new cemetery.
https://www.history.com/articles/memorial-day-civil-war-slavery-charleston
I doubt very much if there were any ex-slave owners or Confederate soldiers there…
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And this was Trump’s Memorial Day Scum speech:
When a President Spits on Unity: The ‘Scum’ Speech That Should Warn Us All
Once you’ve labeled your opponents as subhuman, how do you work with them? How do you compromise? You don’t.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/when-a-president-spits-on-unity-the-d82
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How does it feel to be SCUM? Everybody on the OB Rag is SCUM. You all do know what the historical outcomes tend to be after being labeled like this by an extremist ruling government of men armed with weapons, right? Oh wait, it can’t happen here…as Sinclair Lewis wrote about.
sealintheSelkirks