The Great Reclamation Has Begun

Our Worse Angels Are Having a Moment But What Comes Next?

Our first Republican President Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, as the country was on the verge of war. States were seceding and the future of the Union was in doubt. Mr. Lincoln’s first inaugural was parsed for words that would inflame the tensions, but instead he tried to calm them.

“We are not enemies, but friends,” President Lincoln said. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” He believed that the Union could be preserved when hearts were touched again “by the better angels of our nature.”

To call out the “better angels of our nature” means there must be worse angels. And history from the years after Mr. Lincoln’s address confirms those worse angels had market power. In fact, the Civil War is evidence that -- not just the worse, but -- the worst angels of our nature sometimes rule the day.

America has always been in the midst of a contest between our better and worse angels. The founding documents contain the conflict. The founders rebelled against tyranny while protecting slavery (without using the word). The document refers to “free” persons and therefore, if some are free, then others are not.

While the history of the country is pockmarked with the physical manifestations of the spiritual struggle, the better angels have had a good run for the last few decades. We abolished Jim Crow segregation, gave women increasingly more rights, including bodily autonomy, protected seniors with social security, made marriage equality the law of the land and acted on the world stage as a partner to freedom lovers more than to tyrants (but not always).

Living through the first months of the Trump Administration, the worse angels appear to be having another moment.

They want it all back.

They want back all the progress and policy that made America greater. They want back the steps toward a more perfect union that includes people of many faiths, perspectives and ethnicities. They want back the moral suasion of the bully pulpit in international affairs, to replace it with the raw power of the Billy club.

To crib Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic Convention speech, the truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that this is how they told us it would be.

Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024, summoned those worse angels – the ones that call us to division, bullying, brutality, avarice, exploitation and ignorance.

Democrats weren’t just wrong in Trump’s view; they were disloyal.

One speaker compared Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage.” That got some attention.

But it was now-Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick who laid it out plainly. “When was America great?” he asked.

“1900,” he answered himself. “One hundred and twenty-five years ago. We had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs…and we had so much money that we had the greatest businessmen of America get together to try to figure out how to spend it!”

For most of America, the turn of the 20^th century wasn’t that great.

Women couldn’t vote.

Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic fervor was growing. Irish weren’t popular and neither were the two million Italians who showed up at Ellis Island in the first decade of the 20^th century.

And nowhere were America’s worse angels left to work their dark magic more than in the shadows of the Old Confederacy after Reconstruction, during what the south generously called Redemption. They aimed to “redeem” their society from the ravages of “Northern aggression” and the full participation of…ahem…Negroes…ahem.

And they did.

By the 1890s white supremacy had been restored in the south by law, tradition, rope and torchlight.

On April 11, 1899, Sam Hose, a twenty-two-year-old Black day laborer in Coweta County, Georgia, had an altercation with his employer who threatened him with a gun. Hose ended the argument by hitting his employer in the head with an ax.

Three hundred white men roamed Georgia’s back roads looking for the 22-year-old Hose for eleven days. They rounded up other Negro men; turned homes upside down. They started in Coweta County and spread as far as Jasper and Putnam County.

Eatonton is the seat of Putnam County, Georgia and was home to 16-year-old Charlie and his family. As a group of white men approached the house one night, Charlie’s father Lee grabbed a shotgun and met the men outside. Lee had been enslaved in Eatonton until he was 15-years-old and surely knew the danger a group of white men could bring on a dark Georgia night. He never let those men get to the front door where his teenage son watched from the window.

Then on April 23, 1899, Sam Hose was taken from police custody, mutilated, chained to a tree and burned in front of thousands of people. That was one of the 10 worst years of lynching Black people in America.

On April 27^th “a white mob in Lee County, Georgia, lynched a Black man named Mitchell Daniel for ‘talking too much’ about the brutal lynching of Sam Hose.”

Charlie saw a convoy of soldiers heading south and decided to join them. On April 29, 1899, 16-year-old Charles Frank Simmons lied to a recruiter in Macon, Georgia about his age to enlist in the U.S. Army. He also listed an older brother as his next of kin in Jacksonville, Florida. He didn’t have family in Eatonton anymore. According to the 1900 Census, Lee and Patsie Simmons left Putnam County for Madison, Georgia about 25 miles away. The documents read like the family was on the run.

Charlie was assigned to the 10^th Cavalry, Troop K, a unit of Buffalo Soldiers, and sent to Santiago, Cuba in the occupation of that island following the Spanish-American War. My great-grandfather never returned to Georgia.

That was America at the turn of the 20^th century.

It could be brutal.

It was xenophobic.

Too often, might made right.

Today, MAGA acolytes in government and the Supreme Court are erasing history, forbidding efforts to include people of color, rounding up suspected law breakers because of their physical characteristics, and removing bodily autonomy from women.

They want it all back and calling it Redemption this time would imbue it with too much virtue.

This is the Great Reclamation -- the attempt to snatch us back into a time before non-political civil service, impartial policing, birthright citizenship, and any overt efforts to include non-white people in the American story.

The last time wealthy businessmen tried to make decisions about the country on their own, they overreached. What came next was a burst of forward momentum.

The presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, the Trust Buster, reined in some power of the monopolists.

The NAACP was founded in 1909 out of the Niagara Movement to fight for Black rights that led to desegregation and vast racial progress.

The 16^th Amendment, ratified in 1913 made a progressive income tax constitutional.

The 17^th Amendment, also ratified in 1913, took power from political insiders and mandated popular election of U.S. Senators.

The Federal Trade Commission was created in 1914 to regulate unfair business practices.

The 19^th Amendment was ratified in 1920 giving women the right to vote.

The Great Reclamation is afoot, but so is the law of unintended consequences.

The worse angels are loose but so still are the better ones. If history is a guide, what comes next could be truly what makes America greater again.