Before January 6, Our Ancestors Witnessed These Confederates Get Off, Too

statue of robert e lee
Zain Murdock
January 14, 2025

After the fourth anniversary of January 6, Donald Trump anticipates starting his second term by pardoning everyone jailed for rioting in his name and punishing those who investigated his role in the insurrection.  This isn’t an aberration in U.S. history. It’s a callback.

On Christmas in 1868, President Andrew Johnson pardoned all Confederate soldiers to “renew…fraternal feeling” and “attachment to the national government” for “the general good.” However, a re-United States didn’t extinguish the Confederate legacy. The infamous KKK emerged. The United Daughters of the Confederacy shaped U.S. education with its “Lost Cause” myth that Confederates were heroes who didn’t secede because of the “happily” enslaved, and only lost because they were outnumbered and under-resourced.

Today, MAGA’s “lost cause” is the 2020 election. Cultish worship of Robert E. Lee precedes “America’s last best hope,” Donald Trump. Conserving “law and order” and dehumanizing institutions remains, contradictions be damned.

White vigilantes are the real law-breakers: criminals, traitors, rioters, and terrorists. But these categories, though weaponized against us, have been historically meaningless.

From Confederate treason to settlers stealing Indigenous land, this country has no precedent of legality, morality, or justice for us to reason from. White supremacist violence is the foundation of the United States. We can’t accept January 6 being memorialized and accepted as just another chapter of U.S. history, too.

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