My Dearest Nancy

Letter from a Unionist

Jamelle Bouie was writing about Vice President Vance, who seems to have been quietly and gradually disappearing from public life in recent months (it's pretty funny by Bouie standards), and his bizarre speech at the Claremont Institute earlier this month attacking the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship:

At one point in Vance’s speech, when he’s scolding Mamdani for ingratitude, Vance asks whether Mamdani has “ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again.” It is striking that the vice president invokes the Civil War to make his point.

The great ideological victory of that conflict was to establish the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When, at Gettysburg, Lincoln pronounced a “new birth of freedom,” consecrated by those who “gave the last full measure of devotion,” he meant the egalitarian freedom that [Chief Justice Roger] Taney and others like him sought to deny.

Because, as Bouie shows, in his arguments against birthright citizenship, Vance is aligning himself with Taney, and the Dred Scott decision, against Lincoln and the outcome of the war.

Something about that bit struck me too when I saw an excerpt of the speech. But the truly funny element for me was that Vance has almost certainly never read those letters himself, or the ones from Confederate soldiers either, though he probably imagines he has; what he's actually done is watched a generous selection of them being read aloud in voiceover on TV, in the 1990 Ken Burns documentary series, which is where the letters (brilliantly used in the film to compensate for the fact that no motion picture footage exists from the 1860s) first became a topos of popular culture, thanks to the labors of Burns's research team. Vance was only six when the show came out, but he no doubt saw it in school, and Mamdani, seven years younger, surely did too, with the assistance of the enormous wealth of teaching materials that have helped educators spread it through the land.

The other funny thing has to do with how it becomes clear that Vance's views on the Civil War, the most crucial moment of American history, are evidently shaped by the wicked, radical left PBS, the broadcaster that is so biased that the Trump administration has to defund it.

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The irony being that The Civil War is in fact so ideologically bland that it could have been written according to the Trump administration's specifications for museum exhibitions and national parks. To the point where it's a real defect, in some views—centering the white male protagonists and adopting the point of view of the novelist Shelby Foote (who gets more screen time than any other commentator, including professional historians) in which the war was a noble tragedy of failure to compromise rather than a struggle between right and wrong. As Trump's second press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, expressed it in 2020:

“I don’t know that I’m going to get into debating the Civil War, but I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War,” Sanders said. “There are a lot of historians that think that.”

That's a misinterpretation, as Burns himself would agree (he has stated clearly that slavery was the cause of the war), but it's one with a long and weird half-life, which you might have first started noticing in Trump's response to the menace and violence of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,Virginia in August 2017, over the city's Daughters of the Confederacy Robert E. Lee statue, where Trump claimed there were "very fine people on both sides", or in the writing of David Brooks a few months later, suggesting that Lincoln's second inaugural address was a plea for "mutual forgiveness", when in fact it was prefiguring the demand for unconditional surrender of the vanquished to the victors that Grant would transmit to Lee just over a month later.

Similarly, Vance told the Claremont audience in the same speech to throw out Lincoln's concept of US citizenship as grounded in the principles of the Declaration of Independence:

conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.

“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.

The ADL? (Yes, we've taken to thinking of them as an agent of the Israeli government, but they do have other activities.) Vance seems to be complaining about the League's position on how the January 6 insurrection,

fueled by extremist conspiracy theories and white supremacy[,] gripped the nation and attacked our democracy. This was a predictable act of political violence fueled by years of increasing domestic violent extremism. The forces that led to the attack on our Capitol continue to pose a threat to American security and our democracy today.

Domestic extremists may be the descendants of Confederates who fought against Lincoln's formulation of the Republic as founded on the doctrine of unalienable rights, in Vance's view, and have the same "claim" as the descendants of the Unionists who fought for the doctrine. Not that ADL is calling for them to have their citizenship taken away or cancelculturaling them or anything, but they certainly aren’t being very pleasant or respectful.

Vance seems to be suggesting that the whites of the Union and the Confederacy both won the war (I guess it must be Black folks who lost; Brooks in that column suggests that the problem was "divisions between the free and enslaved" as if those were the opposed forces), and divided up the territory accordingly, and those grubby ADL Jews and other post-1865 latecomers should keep their hands off it.

Or am I reading this wrong?