Defending champion Cameron Smith misses the cut at the Fortinet Australian PGA Championship by nine shots, leaving him close to tears.

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Many students who think they’re protesting against Israeli policy are actually engaging in anti-Semitism, spewing hatred in a way that will change them as people and alter their lives.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump isn’t merely unhinged. America is getting lonelier and more indoorsy. That’s not a coincidence. Why is America afraid of Black history

Moral Rot

Many of America’s college campuses are enduring a wave of anti-Semitism. Campus anti-Semitism is not new; this most recent round was spurred by the outbreak of war after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. But this new eruption of hatred in educational institutions is especially alarming. The students engaging in it are not only poisoning their campuses; they are embracing a moral stain that they will find, in later life, they can never expunge.

I have taught many college students, in multiple institutions and in a variety of settings, over the almost 40 years of my academic career. I know from experience how much they want to be involved in the Big Issues of the Day, a natural extension of living in an environment percolating with ideas and opinions and where they are immersed in learning new things. But I will admit that I never thought much of campus demonstrations, despite having seen many as both a student and a professor; I am by nature distrustful of the emotion that sweeps over mass events, and though I think public actions are essential to democracy, I believe they should be rare, targeted, and powerful. (I worry that campus protests, in particular, invert the relationship between the students and the university, encouraging students to be inexperienced teachers instead of learners. But that’s a subject for another day.)

After so many years on campuses, I am not shocked by protests against Israel. I have seen many; most of the students protesting now are too young to remember the lionizing of Yasser Arafat and demonstrations supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization in an earlier era, for example. The protests in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, however, seem different to me. Many of them are sharply defined by a juvenile viciousness, a paradoxical mixture of childish exuberance and evident—and growing—menace.

The Boston Globe in an editorial last week compiled a list of anti-Semitic incidents at Northeastern University, Cooper Union, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Tulane, and other campuses across the United States have been subjected to venomous attacks. At the University of Maryland, for example, someone chalked “Holocaust 2.0” on the pavement during a rally organized by the pro-Hamas Students for Justice in Palestine. When confronted by local reporters, one of the organizing members of the University of Maryland’s SJP, who of course wished to remain anonymous, said the “Holocaust 2.0” writing “was likely taken out of context.” “‘It’s referring to what is happening in Gaza,’ he said, adding that it’s not the most accurate parallel and that SJP members came over to cross it out after the picture had been taken,” the local-news report notes.

Not the most accurate parallel. That student has a bright future in public relations.

To understand the kind of rhetoric overtaking some American campuses, this was how the National SJP almost immediately described the October 7 attack.

Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. Catching the enemy completely by surprise, the Palestinian resistance has captured over a dozen settlements surrounding Gaza along with many occupation soldiers and military vehicles. This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.

Other universities have had their concerns about SJP, and understandably so. In the past few weeks, Brandeis has kicked the group off campus and Columbia has suspended it along with another group, Jewish Voice for Peace, but SJP has chapters all across North America.

Meanwhile, at George Washington University, activists projected pro-Hamas slogans on the sides of buildings, including “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a call for the eradication of Israel. Spare me the sophistry—most recently plumped by Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—that “From the river to the sea” is merely an anodyne call for freedom and equal rights, or that it somehow can be detached from Hamas’s genocidal meaning. As the University of Illinois international-relations professor Nicholas Grossman wisely observed last week, it’s difficult to square “years of left-wing arguments that society should be hunting for any possible racist implication of words and symbols, even if unintended today, with the claim that ‘from the river to the sea’ must be judged only by what the speaker says is in their heart.”

Good for Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, for denouncing this slogan (despite immediate campus backlash for doing so); better late than never. Some protesters insist—and many with undeniable honesty—that they are objecting only to Israeli policy. But even the sincerest among them often resort to the backbreaking mental gymnastics required to dismiss the obvious anti-Semitism that is woven into so many of these protests.

The emergence of so much racist, bullying trollery shows how deeply the thrill of self-actualization has tempted young people into a decadent waltz with an ancient and hideous hatred. This behavior is all the more appalling because it comes disproportionately from a privileged class of young men and women who are rationalizing their moral destitution for the sake of a transitory sense of self-satisfaction.

In the short term, I am concerned for the safety of students. (And I mean all students, because there have also been Islamophobic assaults on campuses; these are intolerable racist attacks, even if fewer in number and less organized.) Some students will claim that their behavior is protected by freedom of speech. I agree: I would object to any agency of the United States government stopping these students from speaking their minds, and I defend the right of any American to speak without being subjected to threats of violence from bullies and brutes. But speech, and how we express ourselves, carries deep social (and, one day, professional) consequences. In the long term, I am concerned that students who think they are merely engaging in an energizing campus protest do not realize the damage they are doing to their community—and the moral tumor they are implanting into their developing character.

Anti-Semitism is not a cause that can be dismissed as a youthful indiscretion. It is not some innocent blemish that can be backspaced out of a résumé. Chanting “From the river to the sea” after a terrorist onslaught isn’t something that can be rinsed away later merely by adding “But I meant it in the good way.” Ripping down posters of missing children is a hateful and cowardly act, not some gallant moment of defiance (and not a life lesson any of us should want to impart to our own children). It is no defense to support a terrorist organization that calls for the eradication of the State of Israel while adding that you mean only the state itself, with no harm intended for the Jews who actually live there.

Anti-Semitism, even if adopted stupidly or indirectly, is a moral rot that today’s students will one day have to either recant or endure. Many of them, I wager, will eventually feel shame about what they thought were righteous actions. And I worry that they (like many of today’s extreme right-wing voters and activists in America) will find themselves so far up the tree of rationalizations that they will never be able to climb back down. After enough time serving the insidious impulse to defend the indefensible, they will find themselves changed people.

For years, I waved away student protests mostly as a rite of passage, like the first flunk or the first night in a dorm. Not this time. Students are young adults. They need to know that some actions will damage them forever—even when committed behind the comfortable walls of a college campus.

Related:

Students for pogroms in Israel When anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic

Today’s News

Israeli tanks have taken position at the gates of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where thousands are sheltering. The head of the World Health Organization stated yesterday that the hospital is struggling to provide health care after three days without electricity or water. Los Angeles faces a transportation emergency after a large fire resulted in the indefinite closure of a major freeway over the weekend. Yesterday, the U.S. retaliated against attacks on its bases with precision air strikes on Iran-backed facilities in Syria, the third round of such strikes since October 26.

Evening Read

Diana Ejaita

This Ghost of Slavery

An original play by Anna Deavere Smith

For her work as an actor and a playwright, Anna Deavere Smith has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a two-time Tony Award nominee, a MacArthur-genius-grant honoree, and a recipient of the 2012 National Humanities Medal. She is known for her performances on popular TV series such as The West Wing and Black-ish, in movies such as Philadelphia and The Human Stain, and in stage plays and one-woman shows, on and off Broadway.

In the 1990s, Smith was credited with advancing a distinctive form of theater: She reports her story out, conducting scores of interviews, and then transforms the transcripts into dramatic art. For her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, about the Rodney King riots, she interviewed more than 300 people, composing the script entirely out of material from those conversations.

With This Ghost of Slavery, Smith once again deploys her signature use of contemporary interviews, including with people who have been absorbed into the criminal-justice system, many of whom she has interviewed for her Pipeline Girls Project, which examines how proximity to the carceral system affects young women. She has also interviewed activists and social-justice workers, many of them associated with a nonprofit organization called Chicago CRED, which seeks to reduce gun violence and help young people ensnared in gangs or the juvenile-justice system. But this time she has also supplemented these interviews with primary-source historical materials. She has mined 19th-century archives, transcripts, and diaries, and woven dialogue from these sources into the play.

Read the full play.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Rosalind O'Connor / NBC

Read. The Stanford historian Jennifer Burns’s intriguing biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, reflects on when the famous economist ran the show.

Watch. Timothée Chalamet’s post-strike SNL-hosting gig (streaming on Peacock) was a celebration that doubled as a return to business as usual for the show.

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With apologies to a certain newspaper’s slogan, many of Donald Trump’s most dangerous statements hide in the plain light of day.

The problem is not that they don’t get reported on—they do—but even so, they are easy to tune out, perhaps because he’s been saying outlandish things for so long that people simply can’t bring themselves to parse the new ones; or perhaps because they’ve become accustomed, or at least numb, to his utterances; or perhaps because they don’t want to let him occupy their headspace; or perhaps because he got kicked off Twitter (now X) and they had no interest in joining Truth Social. Or maybe it’s because the more sinister material gets mixed up with his strange elocutions (“We’re gonna have a great country—it’s gonna be called the United States of America”), contrarian hot takes (“You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart”), and gibberish (“All of these indictments that you see—I was never indicted. Practically never heard the word. It wasn’t a word that registered”).

[From the November 2023 issue: How we got ‘democracy dies in darkness’]

Whatever the case may be, Trump has continued to make plainly dangerous and stunning remarks. Notwithstanding his rival Governor Ron DeSantis’s recent claim that Trump has “lost the zip on his fastball,” the former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.

They are the sorts of ideas that would have been shocking to hear from any mainstream politician just a decade ago. And yet, today, Trump—arguably the single most influential figure in the United States—says these things, and they hardly register. Consider the following examples, all from just the past few months:

1. Promised to destroy the federal government as we know it.

Trump has been promising in speeches to “demolish the deep state.” What he means by that is to end the federal government as it exists today, eliminating the civil-service jobs that have been in place since the late 19th century. This is clear because former Trump aides who are designing the effort, part of a sort of shadow government housed at conservative think tanks, are open about what they have in mind, as my colleague Russell Berman reports: a federal workforce that can be fired by the president at will and must follow his personal whims. That would be a major departure from the current system, where employees are permanent professionals who work for administrations of both parties and are meant to focus on effective implementation, rather than political hacks chosen for their loyalty.

2. Argued that a presidential candidate should be immune from prosecution.

While attempting to dodge the 91 criminal indictments against him, Trump argued in a July 10 court filing that he shouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of a federal trial, because running for president “requires a tremendous amount of time and energy.” This goes directly against the idea that no U.S. citizen is above the law.

3. Insulted and attempted to intimidate judges, prosecutors, witnesses, and others.

Trump hasn’t just made arguments in court related to the criminal and civil cases against him; he has also produced a steady stream of invective directed at anyone involved in the cases, to the point of seeking to intimidate witnesses, court staff, and even prosecutors’ family members. Subjects of his threats include the federal judge Tanya Chutkan; New York Justice Arthur Engoron; Engoron’s law clerk (for which Trump was slapped with a gag order); New York Attorney General Letitia James, including his inscrutable and maybe racist nickname for her; Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff and a possible witness; Special Counsel Jack Smith; and even Smith’s wife, a documentary filmmaker. Smith’s team successfully convinced Chutkan that some of these infractions could threaten the likelihood of a fair trial, and she ordered Trump to stop, though she permitted him to attack her and President Joe Biden, among others, and to call his prosecution political. Trump appealed the order but lost, then promptly attacked another potential witness, former Attorney General Bill Barr. (An appeals court has now paused the order once more.)

4. Continued to claim that the election was stolen.

Trump continues to insist, despite presenting no real evidence and losing every relevant court case, that he actually won the 2020 election. “I don’t consider us to have much of a democracy right now,” he said on Meet the Press on September 17. Perversely, Trump now has some incentive to keep lying about the election rather than acknowledge that he lost: Part of Smith’s case is premised on the idea that Trump knew he had been defeated. A functioning democracy depends on the consent of the losers; throughout U.S. history, losers of elections have sometimes grumbled fiercely and other times taken losses gracefully, but none has ever tried to stay in office and then continued to claim he was the rightful winner in the manner Trump has.

[Read: Democracy depends on the consent of losers]

5. Excused the January 6 riot.

On Meet the Press and elsewhere, Trump has continued to excuse the riot on January 6, 2021, and to argue that people charged in the riots are political prisoners. He told the Meet the Press moderator, Kristen Welker, that he might pardon people convicted of federal crimes for their involvement in the assault on the seat of U.S. government: “Well, I’m going to look at them, and I certainly might if I think it’s appropriate. No, it’s a very, very sad thing. And it’s—they’re dividing the country so badly, and it’s very dangerous.” He has since referred to these people as “hostages,” a description that makes sense only if you find the very idea of policing the insurrection illegitimate.

6. Entertained pardoning himself.

Trump also continues to flirt with the idea of granting himself a pardon, typically saying he doesn’t see any need for it but refusing to rule it out. Most mainstream scholars say a self-pardon is probably not constitutional and certainly not something the framers intended.

7. Menaced American Jews for not voting for him.

During Rosh Hashanah, on September 17, Trump shared a meme that read, “Just a reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices going forward!” As my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote, Trump has often made such offensive remarks about the loyalties—perceived or desired—of American Jews, but this was “particularly ugly in the way it deliberately singled out a specific constituency during that constituency’s holiest season.”

8. Suggested executing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Apparently outraged by the Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile of General Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump on September 22 accused Milley of treason and suggested that he deserved the death penalty. “This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Trump wrote. Trump’s loose and sloppy treason accusations have always undermined the Constitution, and many past comments like this have precipitated threats and even attacks from Trump supporters.

9. Accused NBC of treason and threatened to pull it off the air.

Trump has never had any interest in upholding the First Amendment, but his remarks on September 24 were unusually sharp. Trump wrote that NBC News, and especially MSNBC, “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason.’ Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” This sort of demonization of the press is dangerous per se—as demonstrated by attacks on journalists—as are Trump’s casual accusations of treason, but this one carries a clear threat to try to use the power of the federal government to punish a news organization for reporting he doesn’t like. This contradicts even the most limited, basic understanding of the importance of a free press, as protected by the First Amendment. (Set aside the dissonance of saying this shortly after granting an in-depth interview to NBC News!)

10. Promised to lock up political opponents.

During a September 28 interview, Trump said he would imprison his political adversaries if he is reelected. Glenn Beck asked Trump, “You said in 2016, you know, ‘Lock her up.’ And then when you became president, you said, ‘We don’t do that in America.’ That’s just not the right thing to do. That’s what they’re doing. Do you regret not locking her up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?” Trump replied, “Uh, the answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.” Because Trump believes, or claims to believe, that he is being prosecuted for purely political reasons, he’s vowing to go after his political opponents for the crime of being his political opponents—a violation of both free-speech and due-process protections.

11. Recommended extrajudicial executions.

At a rally two days later, on September 30, Trump once again advocated going around the criminal-justice system to administer vigilante punishment. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he told the California Republican Party, adding: “Shot!” (The Associated Press, either too nonchalantly or with dry understatement, described it this way: “Trump animates California Republicans with calls to shoot people who rob stores.”) This, too, violates the basic concept of due process for accused criminals.

12. Called for a judge overseeing his case to be prosecuted.

Among Trump’s many fulminations against Justice Engoron, Trump told reporters on October 2 not only that the judge should be removed from the bench, but that he should face prosecution—for no apparent crime other than being assigned to Trump’s case and ruling against Trump. “This is a judge that should be disbarred,” he said. “This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he’s doing. He’s interfering with an election.”

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump is any defense attorney’s nightmare]

13. Told voters not to bother voting.

During an October 23 rally in New Hampshire, Trump told attendees, “You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting, we got plenty of votes, you gotta watch.” As is sometimes the case with Trump, it’s hard to tell whether this is intended as a joke; or a statement that if all votes were counted, he would win; or as some sort of intimation of stealing the election himself. In any case, discouraging civic participation contradicts the basic principle of a government by, for, and of the people.

14. Celebrated the antidemocratic strongman Viktor Orbán.

At the same rally, Trump talked about his love for one of the most repressive leaders in Europe: “There’s a man, Viktor Orbán, did anyone ever hear of him? He’s probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey,” Trump said, adding that he had a “front” on Russia. In fact, Orbán is the leader of Hungary (Trump later corrected himself), and neither country shares a border with Russia. More to the point, Orbán—who proudly describes himself as “illiberal”—is an authoritarian who has become a darling of the Trumpist right, as my colleague Anne Applebaum has explained.

15. Promised to indict Joe Biden.

The biggest headlines out of Trump’s October 29 rally in Sioux City, Iowa, came from his confusing the city with Sioux Falls, South Dakota—the sort of slipup that undermines his attacks on Biden as senile. But the more substantively disturbing thing Trump said at the rally was that his own indictments would give him permission to politically prosecute his predecessor. “They brought our country to a new level, and, but that allows—think of this—that allows us to do it to Biden, when he gets out,” Trump said. “And that would be very easy.”

In a Univision interview that aired November 9, he added: “They have done something that allows the next party—I mean, if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business, they’d be out of the election.” This goes beyond Trump’s suggestion of going after his opponents in a general way. Few things could be more directly counter to the idea of a democratic republic, and more redolent of a failed state, than a pretextual prosecution of one’s predecessor.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

Harpers Ferry seemed almost a part of the neighborhood when I was growing up. Granted, it was across the state line, in West Virginia, and slightly more than a half-hour drive away from our Virginia farm. But it took us almost that long to get to the nearest supermarket. And I felt connected by more than roads. The placid, slow-moving Shenandoah River, which flowed past our bottom pasture, becomes raging white water by the time it joins the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, 35 miles downstream.

Nature itself seems to have designed Harpers Ferry to be a violent place. Cliffs border the confluence of the two rivers, and the raw power generated by their angry convergence made the site ideal for the national armory established there around 1800. It manufactured some 600,000 firearms before Union troops burned it down in 1861 to keep it out of Confederate hands. Five battles took place at Harpers Ferry, and the town changed hands 12 times.

But none of this is what Harpers Ferry is primarily remembered for. It is known instead for an event referred to at the time as an “insurrection,” a “rebellion,” or a “crusade,” but today most often called just a “raid.” On October 16, 1859, a year and a half before the attack on Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, the white abolitionist John Brown set out to seize the federal arsenal and distribute arms to enable the enslaved to claim their freedom. His effort ended quickly and ignominiously. Badly wounded, he was carted off to jail in nearby Charles Town to be tried and executed, as were a number of his followers. In a sense, though, his insurrection was never put down.

Brown, a brilliant publicist, made himself a martyr. He used the six weeks between his capture and his execution to define and defend his actions. He grounded them in a moral imperative to free the enslaved, invoked the nation’s revolutionary legacies, and warned of the conflagration to come. The “crimes of this guilty land,” he scrawled in a note he pressed on a guard shortly before his hanging, “will never be purged away; but with Blood.”

Within just a few years, Americans would look back at Brown across the gulf of the Civil War and identify him as a sign of what was ahead, imbuing his sacrifice with almost supernatural meaning. Showers of meteors had filled the skies in the weeks between Brown’s capture and his execution, reinforcing perceptions that his life and death had been a singular, numinous occurrence. In the words of a song improvised by a battalion of Union soldiers as they headed south to war not two years after his death, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.” Even the attendees at his hanging seemed in retrospect to prefigure the future: Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee was present as the commander of the U.S. troops who had captured Brown. Thomas J. (not yet “Stonewall”) Jackson led a unit of Virginia Military Institute cadets. John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln’s future assassin, hurried from Richmond to Charles Town in a borrowed uniform to join a militia troop sent to police the hanging. He hated Brown’s cause but admired his audacity.

Many upstanding northern citizens—as well as much of the press—condemned Brown’s lawlessness. But others, Black and white, hailed his attack on slavery and mourned his death. On the day of his execution, 3,000 people gathered in Worcester, Massachusetts, to honor Brown; 1,400 attended a service in Cleveland. A gathering of Black Americans in Detroit honored the “martyr” who had “freely delivered up his life for the liberty of our race in this country.” The celebration of John Brown by Black Americans rested in the hope, and later the conviction, that his actions had set an irreversible course toward freedom—a second founding, its birth in violence as legitimate as the first one had been.

When does war start? When does violence become justified? When does it shift from prohibited to permitted and even necessary? Those questions hang in the air at Harpers Ferry, compelling us to ask: When did the Civil War actually begin—and end?

Brown drew the admiring attention of almost every prominent American writer—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Longfellow, Whittier. But some among the nation’s northern elite did more than praise and defend Brown. Thinking back in his autobiography to events half a century earlier, and relying on a diary he kept in the 1850s, the abolitionist and writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson reflected on what a duty to morality demands when “law and order” stand on “the wrong side” of right and justice.

For him, this was not a theoretical question. He was thinking about the role he’d played long before armies massed on battlefields. He was thinking about the process by which “honest American men” had evolved into “conscientious law-breakers,” until “good citizenship” became a “sin” and bad citizenship a “duty.” Higginson was one among a small group of prominent white men who had known about the Harpers Ferry raid in advance and provided the financial support that enabled Brown to buy weapons and equipment. They came to be known as the Secret Six.

During the 1850s, a succession of legislative and judicial measures had tightened slavery’s grip on the nation. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled the North to become complicit in returning those who had escaped slavery to southern bondage. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise of a generation earlier, which had restricted the expansion of slavery into the northern territories. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, in 1857, established that no Black person could be considered a citizen or hold any “rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The perpetuation of slavery and racial injustice appeared to have become enshrined as an enduring national commitment, with the federal government assuming the role of active enforcer. Faced with such developments, the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass found himself losing hope of ending slavery through moral suasion or political action; he came to see violence as necessary if emancipation was ever to be accomplished. Slavery itself, he believed, represented an act of war. The justification for violence already existed; whether—and how—to use it became more a pragmatic decision than a moral one.

White abolitionists, too, became radicalized by the developments of the 1850s. The group that became the Secret Six included five Boston Brahmins and a lone New Yorker, all highly respectable citizens, well educated, of good families and heritage; all men of means and in several cases very substantial means. The path that the Six took toward violence began with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The prospect and, soon, the reality of Black people being apprehended on the streets of Boston or New York and summarily shipped to the South brought the cruelty and arbitrariness of slavery directly before northerners’ eyes. Three men who would later be part of the Six were early members of the Boston Vigilance Committee, established to prevent the enforcement of fugitive-slave legislation.

Samuel Gridley Howe was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Medical School. He claimed descent from a participant in the Boston Tea Party, and had demonstrated his commitment to republican government by serving as a surgeon in the Greek Revolution in the 1820s.

Theodore Parker was a powerful preacher and Transcendentalist whose radicalism so marginalized him within Unitarianism that he established his own independent congregation of some 2,000 members. His oratory attracted legions of followers, who shared his reformist and antislavery views.

Higginson, descended from one of the original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School and held a pulpit with a fervently antislavery Worcester congregation. He suffered his first battle wound in the unsuccessful effort to free Anthony Burns, who had fled enslavement in Virginia and was seized in Boston in 1854 under the provisions of the new act. With the encouragement of the Boston Vigilance Committee, the city erupted. Parker incited a crowd with a fiery speech at Faneuil Hall, and Higginson distributed axes to those assembled outside the courthouse where Burns was being held. He himself led an assault on the building with a battering ram. In the ensuing melee, a courthouse guard was killed and Higginson suffered a saber wound on his chin, leaving a scar he proudly displayed for the rest of his life. Higginson viewed the effort to free Burns as the beginning of a “revolution”—the shift from words to action he had sought. The killing of the guard, he later reflected, was “proof that war had really begun.” Violence had become both necessary and legitimate. (Burns was captured and returned to Virginia, but his freedom was eventually purchased by northern abolitionists. He attended Oberlin and became a minister.)

Higginson, Parker, and Howe soon turned their attention to Kansas, where a battle was escalating over whether the territory should become a slave state or a free state. In the spring of 1856, proslavery forces attacked a town founded by antislavery settlers from Massachusetts. John Brown, a longtime opponent of slavery who had joined his sons in Kansas with the intention of preventing its permanent establishment there, sought retribution; he and his allies killed five proslavery men in front of their families in a place called Pottawatomie. This murderous act hovered over Brown’s reputation—and later his legacy—instilling doubts in some potential supporters and leading others simply to deny that Brown had played a role in the killings, a stance that was aided by Brown’s own misrepresentations.

But to many, Brown’s extremism was a source of attraction, not revulsion. The newly created Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee channeled outside support. Higginson sent crates of rifles, revolvers, knives, and ammunition, as well as a cannon, to Kansas. He celebrated Kansas as the equivalent of Bunker Hill—a “rehearsal,” he later called it, for the more extensive violence to come.

It was because of Kansas that the six men who would conspire to support the Harpers Ferry raid found one another and identified Brown as the instrument of what they had come to regard as necessary violence. Like Parker, Higginson, and Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and George Luther Stearns had become active supporters of the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. A Harvard graduate who was a schoolteacher in Concord, Sanborn had been deeply influenced by Parker’s preaching while he was in college. Sanborn’s Transcendentalist ideas, with their skepticism about existing social structures and institutions, were further reinforced by his Concord neighbors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Stearns was a wealthy manufacturer whose ancestors included some of the original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as an officer in the American Revolution. Long active in abolition, he had established a station of the Underground Railroad near his Medford home and drew on his considerable fortune to send weapons to Kansas free-state settlers.

The last of the Six was Gerrit Smith, said to be the wealthiest man in New York State. Smith, like Stearns, would supply significant financial support to Brown. He had long been active in politics, seeking the destruction of slavery through political means, but by 1856 he had come to believe that it was time, as he put it, to move beyond ballots and start “looking to bayonets.” Parker, too, was preaching more forceful measures. “I used to think this terrible question of freedom or slavery in America would be settled without bloodshed,” he wrote to Higginson. “I believe it no longer.”

The attempted arrest, in April 1860, of the Secret Six member Franklin Benjamin Sanborn by federal authorities—which the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, prevented. A contemporaneous etching from Harper’s Weekly. (Wikimedia)

By the end of 1856, under the leadership of a commanding new territorial governor, violence in Kansas had begun to subside, and a free-state electoral victory seemed all but assured. The following year, Brown began traveling throughout New England and New York to raise money for a fresh attack on human bondage—his new plan as yet unspecified. In Boston, he presented Sanborn with a letter of introduction from Smith. Sanborn in turn arranged for Stearns, Howe, and Parker to meet Brown. Uncertain what Brown intended, Higginson at first kept his distance, even though Sanborn pressed him, insisting that Brown could do “more to split the Union than any man alive.” The ideals of the once noble American experiment could be sustained only by separating from slavery or by destroying it.

In February 1858, Brown revealed his plan for the Harpers Ferry attack to Smith and Sanborn. Not long after, all of the Massachusetts conspirators met with Brown in his Boston hotel room and formally constituted themselves as the Secret Committee of Six to support Brown in planning and financing the raid. Stearns was to be the official chair, Sanborn the secretary. They would keep careful records, with an elaborate ledger and a dues schedule. It was as if a clandestine organization of accountants had set to planning an uprising.

The raid’s actual occurrence surprised them—with both its timing and its swift and disastrous outcome. On October 16, 1859, Brown and a party of 21 seized the federal arsenal, eventually taking several dozen hostages. The uprising of the enslaved that Brown expected never materialized, and local militia soon cut off the bridges that were the only escape route. Brown and his men blockaded themselves in the armory’s fire-engine house, where they exchanged intermittent gunfire with the troops surrounding them. On October 18, Colonel Lee and a regiment of U.S. Marines broke down the engine-house door. Wounded by a saber cut, Brown was taken prisoner and transported to the nearby Charles Town jail. Ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons, were killed; seven, including Brown, were captured and later executed. Four civilians were killed, as was one Marine. To the great dismay of the Secret Six, Brown’s papers and correspondence were found at the farm where Brown had been living in Maryland.

The Six were stunned. In the press and in government offices, accusations flew. Many suspected that Frederick Douglass must have played a role. More than a decade before the raid, Douglass had met Brown and been moved by their conversations to question his own belief in the possibility of a peaceful end to slavery. “My utterances,” he later wrote, “became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.” When Brown took up arms in Kansas, Douglass’s appreciation for his boldness and conviction was only enhanced. Yet Douglass proved unwilling to join Brown when he revealed his Harpers Ferry plans. The scheme struck him as dangerously impractical and risky—“a steel-trap.”

In the aftermath of the raid, Douglass seemed almost embarrassed that he had not offered Brown more support, that he had permitted realism to trump daring. He could not conceal his admiration for the would-be liberator’s courage, but concerns for his own survival won the day. Douglass fled north to Canada and then to England, where he remained for nearly half a year.

Although Douglass was all too aware of his vulnerability, the Six, protected by their social position, had been defying authority with seeming impunity for years. Their recognition of personal peril came as a shock. The Six had embraced violence out of both entitlement and desperation. In public and private communications, they frequently invoked their revolutionary heritage, their biological connections to the country’s Founders—to those who had pitched tea into Boston Harbor and fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill. This was a legacy—and a responsibility—that required them to act with equivalent courage and decisiveness. They believed that in some sense, they owned the nation, and their sense of privilege fueled a confident assumption of immunity from serious consequence. But with Harpers Ferry, it seemed, they might have gone a step too far.

Letters from Smith, Stearns, Howe, and Sanborn were found among Brown’s papers and featured in the press before the end of October. Five of the Six were quickly exposed and excoriated. (Parker, who had left the country before the raid in a futile search for a cure to his tuberculosis, was identified within a few months.) Smith fell into a frenzy of worry about being indicted. After becoming, according to his physician, “quite deranged, intellectually as well as morally,” he was committed in early November to the Utica Lunatic Asylum. After consulting a Boston lawyer, Sanborn, Stearns, and Howe made their way to Canada (and Howe published an article disavowing Brown). All three returned to the U.S., but Canada remained a refuge. Howe and Sanborn went back and forth twice. Higginson, both at the time and later, was contemptuous of his fellow conspirators’ cowardice. John Brown deserved better from them. “We of the Six,” he maintained years later, “were not—are not—great men.” But Brown, he believed, was.

Higginson neither hid nor fled. He busied himself raising money for Brown’s defense and endeavoring to devise a scheme to facilitate Brown’s escape. But even for Higginson, who seems never to have contemplated a battle or a risk he didn’t relish, these plans seemed too far-fetched. Instead, with admiration, Higginson watched Brown’s display of undaunted courage throughout his trial as he refused to plead insanity or back down in his commitment to ending slavery through whatever means necessary. Brown would do far more from the grave than he could have ever imagined accomplishing in life. Higginson spent the day of his sentencing with Brown’s wife and the remaining members of his family on their bleak and remote upstate–New York farm.

The congressional committee appointed in December to investigate the origins and supporters of Brown’s raid proved only a feeble threat to the six conspirators. Higginson, to his disappointment, was never called to testify at all. Howe and Stearns dodged, equivocated, and at times outright lied. Smith was judged too unwell to attend. Parker died in Italy in May 1860 without ever returning to the United States. Sanborn’s fears were at last realized when the U.S. Marshals he had eluded for so long arrived at his house in Concord to compel his testimony. Citizens of the town rose up to prevent his removal while a judge sympathetic to Sanborn was located to issue a writ of habeas corpus. In the end, the congressional hearings were a tepid affair, likely because southern representatives came to recognize that the less attention given to abolitionist voices, the better.

The next battle in the war that Brown had begun would not be long in coming. While he bided his time, Higginson published in February 1860 the first of a series of articles in The Atlantic that he referred to as his “Insurrection Papers.” After writing essays on “The Maroons of Jamaica” and “The Maroons of Surinam”—Black groups who had escaped enslavement to establish their own independent societies on the fringes of white settlement—he proceeded to publish admiring essays on Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Gabriel, men who had embraced violence in their efforts to overturn American slavery. In addition to his writing, Higginson devoted the 16 months between Brown’s execution and the firing on Fort Sumter to reading about military strategy and drills, and to practicing shooting and swordplay. In 1862, this man of words returned to the world of action. He would fulfill “the dream of a lifetime” as the colonel commanding the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of the formerly enslaved. This commission embodied what he had believed in for so long: the mobilization of force in the cause of Black freedom, as well as the arming of Black men in their own liberation.

Both during and after the war, the careers of the Secret Six fell along a spectrum. Stearns never went to war himself but recruited thousands of Black troops into what he referred to as “John Brown regiments”; when the war was over, he helped found the Freedmen’s Bureau, which provided land and other assistance to newly freed African Americans. Howe worked with the Sanitary Commission, a relief agency founded to support sick and wounded soldiers, and, like Stearns, was involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war. Smith emerged from the Utica asylum fragile and aversive to any conversation about Harpers Ferry. He gave a significant amount of money to Stearns’s Black regiments. And yet, in 1867, he was also among those who paid the bond that freed Jefferson Davis from prison. Sanborn appointed himself the custodian of Brown’s legacy, publishing four books and some 75 articles about him. (Many of the articles appeared in this magazine.) Sanborn cultivated the memory of a kinder, gentler Brown, downplaying the violence he had perpetrated. He did not know until the 1870s that Brown had lied to him about his central and murderous role at Pottawatomie.

Higginson was unapologetic. In 1879, when he remarried after the death of his first wife, Higginson chose Harpers Ferry as the site for their honeymoon, introducing his bride to prominent landmarks from the raid, the trial, and the hanging. Higginson never forgave himself for not doing more to support Brown and for failing to persuade him to adopt a plan that was more likely to succeed. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the raid, in 1909, Higginson joined Sanborn, the only other surviving member of the Secret Six, and Howe’s widow, Julia, in Concord, where they were interviewed by a journalist. (Julia Ward Howe had in 1862 published on the cover of The Atlantic different lyrics for the tune of “John Brown’s Body”: the immortal words of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”) As a writer and an activist, Higginson had remained deeply engaged in public life, notably on behalf of women’s rights; his views on race and Black suffrage tended to shift with time and circumstance, and he was far from the radical of the prewar years. But in the Concord interview, he expressed no second thoughts about his commitment to violence on behalf of abolition—either at Harpers Ferry or within the legitimating framework of the Civil War.

I learned the story of John Brown at an early age. It might have been that my father told my siblings and me about the history of Harpers Ferry as we drove along Route 340, peering down the cliffsides at the town and the rushing water below. Or Brown might have been one of those historical personages whose names we just knew, inhaled from the Virginia air around us. People like Stonewall Jackson and John Mosby and Turner Ashby, who had all likely ridden across the very fields surrounding our house. When I was growing up, I was always proud to live in a place associated with so many famous forebears. It was many years before I thought to question what their fame and vaunted heroism had been in service of.

[From the August 2019 issue: Drew Gilpin Faust on race, history, and memories of a Virginia girlhood]

But I knew from the outset that Brown’s renown was different. He was, I was told, a madman, undertaking a scheme that was doomed to fail—a suicide mission. When I wrote about Brown for my first term paper in high school, that was the story I told.

From 1859 onward, many observers, reporters, and, later, historians adopted the view that Brown was insane, and by the mid-20th century, when I was in school, it had become a widely held assumption among white Americans. Rather than a “meteor” anticipating or inaugurating the larger war that would end slavery, Brown became no more than an aberration. Violence was reduced to a mental-health problem. The interpretation reassuringly diminished the moral force of Brown’s actions and suggested that only madness could lead to dreams of overthrowing white dominance and Black subordination. This message was intended to emphasize the strength and immutability of the racial hierarchies that remained in place well after slavery’s end, surviving Reconstruction and enshrined in Jim Crow. It minimized the threat Brown posed and by implication all but removed him—and his insistence on the moral evil of slavery—from any place in explanations of the Civil War’s origins. The Lost Cause portrait of a conflict fought by two honorable opponents who differed primarily on constitutional views about states’ rights could remain intact and unchallenged.

Even in the days just after the raid, though, there were those who insisted on acknowledging the historic import of Harpers Ferry as well as the sanity and determination of John Brown. Governor Henry Wise of Virginia came to Harpers Ferry to interview Brown after his capture and rejected the idea that Brown was a lunatic: “They are mistaken who take him to be a madman,” he said. He left with an impression of him as “a man of clear head … cool, collected, and indomitable.” A sane Brown was far more dangerous. If his actions were rational, then the South must regard them as proof that the North was plotting the violent overthrow of slavery. The South, Wise insisted, needed to take active measures to defend itself and its way of life. One South Carolina politician described the raid as “fact coming to the aid of logic”: the South’s worst fears made real. Harpers Ferry was the moment that changed everything. The rabidly proslavery Wise and the radical abolitionist Higginson agreed on little else, but this they regarded as self-evident.

To accept slavery as the cause of the Civil War dictates setting the conflict within a longer trajectory of violence, one that starts at least with John Brown rather than Fort Sumter. Higginson would perhaps have us date the war from his saber cut in 1854. Douglass might well argue that it began in 1619. And when did the Civil War end? Historians studying the era after Appomattox have in recent years emphasized the persistence of violence through and beyond Reconstruction, as intransigent former Confederates turned from organized military force to beatings, burnings, whippings, shootings, and lynchings in the effort to suppress newly gained Black freedom. The war, the historians argue, simply continued in other forms. It is as difficult and complicated to say when the Civil War ended as to determine when it began.

In the years since 1859, John Brown and his raid have become a touchstone in America’s struggle to reconcile—or at least represent—the complex connections between force and freedom. The United States was founded in violent resistance and then guaranteed its survival as a nation eight decades later in a bloody Civil War. Violence is at the heart of our national mythology. The Secret Six drew explicitly on that mythology in their writing. It is central to our national creed. But violence has also, as Frederick Douglass reminds us, rested at the core of the social and legal order that mandated and sustained the oppression of millions of Americans from the early 17th century into our own time. Violence could enslave and violence could free. The purpose mattered. As Douglass declared, looking back on the Civil War in a Decoration Day speech honoring the Union dead in 1883, “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”

The Black community did not forget that Brown had fought for liberty. After the war, his raid and his death continued to be commemorated across the North. In a stirring address at Storer College, founded in Harpers Ferry in 1867 to educate African Americans, Douglass insisted that Brown had not failed, but had begun the “war that ended slavery.” W. E. B. Du Bois held Brown in similarly high esteem. In 1906, the second gathering of the Niagara Movement, the predecessor of the NAACP, was held at Harpers Ferry in acknowledgment of Brown’s contributions to Black rights. Delegates from the NAACP met there in 1932 intending to dedicate a plaque in Brown’s honor. In a speech at that meeting titled “The Use of Force in Reform,” Du Bois expressed few compunctions about the use of violence: Brown, he said, “took human lives … He took them in Kansas and he took them here. He meant to take them. He meant to use force to wipe out an evil he could no longer endure.”

Langston Hughes used poetry rather than oratory to address African American readers as he invoked the lingering memory of John Brown. Hughes, whose grandmother had been married to one of the Black conspirators killed in the raid, celebrated “John Brown / Who took his gun, / Took twenty-one companions / White and black, / Went to shoot your way to freedom.” Hughes recalled that his grandmother had preserved her husband’s bullet-ridden shawl. As a small boy, he was sometimes wrapped in it. “You will remember / John Brown,” Hughes insisted.

But, fittingly, given his defining commitment to nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr. remained silent on Brown. Even as the keynote speaker at a centennial observance of Brown’s raid, King did not mention the man once. The place of violence in the centuries of struggle for Black freedom has been long contested, and by the mid-1960s, King faced growing demands from Black activists urging forceful resistance to white threats and assaults instead of the Gandhian passivity that underpinned his philosophy. Malcolm X regarded Brown as “the only good white the country’s ever had.” The Black Power movement that challenged King’s vision of a Beloved Community could claim deep roots.

Barack Obama reflected the long tradition of Black appreciation for Brown in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. Brown’s “willingness to spill blood,” Obama said, demonstrated that “deliberation alone” would not suffice to end slavery. “Pragmatism,” he concluded, “can sometimes be moral cowardice.”

As a nation, we are unable to get over John Brown. And as a nation, we have not figured out what violence we will condemn and what we will celebrate. I found myself unspeakably moved as I stood before Nat Turner’s Bible in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. At the same time, I am horrified by the violence of the January 6 rioters and by what I regard as widespread threats to the rule of law. We pride ourselves on being a country with a written Constitution that sets peaceful parameters for government. Yet the Supreme Court established by that Constitution has issued rulings providing that the citizenry may be armed not just for recreational hunting, but with weapons, including assault rifles, that are frequently purchased with an eye toward resisting that very government. Lawmakers walk the floors of the Capitol with pins shaped like AR-15s in their lapels. The rule of law seems historically and inextricably enmeshed in the tolerance—even the encouragement—of violence.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, antislavery Americans like the Secret Six turned to what Higginson—with a keen awareness of the oxymoron—called conscientious lawbreaking. Douglass came to embrace the legitimacy of violence, but recognized it as justified “only when all other means of progress and enlightenment have failed”—and only when there is a “thing worse than” violence that makes it necessary.

The existence and endurance of our nation has depended on that careful discernment, on that conscientiousness, in deciding when we truly face a “thing worse than.” It is not merely a historical question. A deep-seated ambivalence about violence defines us still.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Men Who Started the Civil War.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

John F. Kennedy took George Plimpton by surprise after a dinner party one evening when he pulled his friend aside for a word in the Oval Office. The president had Reconstruction on his mind—really, though, he wanted to discuss Plimpton’s grandmother.

Plimpton was lanky and lordly, famous for his patrician accent and his forays into professional sports. The Paris Review founder did everything and knew everyone. He might edit literary criticism one day and try his hand at football or boxing the next. Plimpton had known Jackie Kennedy for years, and he had been friends with Robert F. Kennedy since their Harvard days.

He also had another, and very different, Kennedy connection. Plimpton’s great-grandfather Adelbert Ames, a New Englander, had been a Civil War general and Mississippi governor during Reconstruction. He was an ardent supporter of Black suffrage. Kennedy had soiled Ames’s reputation in his best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, which had won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year. The book ushered the junior senator from Massachusetts onto the national stage, effectively launching his bid for the presidency.

Kennedy’s book presented a pantheon of past U.S. senators as models of courageous compromise and political pragmatism. One such man, Kennedy claimed, was Ames’s racist Democratic rival, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II. A slaveholder, drafter of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, and Confederate colonel, Lamar later became the first ex-Confederate appointed to the Supreme Court after the Civil War.

Lamar and Ames were the preeminent politicians of Mississippi Reconstruction. They hated each other. (At one point, Lamar threatened to lynch Ames.) Profiles in Courage had relied heavily on the work of influential Dunning School historians—disciples of the Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who scorned Black suffrage and promoted the mythology of the Lost Cause. Kennedy may have been genuinely misled by these historians, but he also aspired to higher office and needed to appeal to white southern voters. His book denounced Reconstruction, casting Ames as a corrupt, carpetbagging villain and Lamar as a heroic southern statesman.

[From the June 2021 issue: Why Confederate lies live on]

Ames’s daughter Blanche—Plimpton’s grandmother—was incensed. She sent meticulously researched letters to Kennedy, demanding that he correct his book. Some of the letters had footnotes. Some had appendixes. Blanche would not let up, chasing Kennedy from the Senate to the presidency.

In Plimpton’s telling, as Kennedy took his guests on an informal tour of the White House that evening, he motioned to Plimpton for a word. “George,” he said, as Plimpton would recall, “I’d like to talk to you about your grandmother.” Kennedy begged him to persuade Blanche Ames to stop writing, complaining that her correspondence “was cutting into the work of government.”

Plimpton promised to try, but he knew it would be no use. “My grandmother was a Massachusetts woman,” he later explained, and when Kennedy refused to amend Profiles, Blanche “did what any sensible Massachusetts woman would do: she sat down and wrote her own book.”

Blanche Ames was born in Massachusetts in 1878, the year after Reconstruction ended in a political deal that awarded Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, the disputed presidential election in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. Blanche had the Civil War in her blood. Benjamin F. Butler, a Union general, was her maternal grandfather; he had commanded Fort Monroe, in Virginia, and had designated fugitive slaves as “contraband of war,” using a legal loophole that allowed refugees to seek protection behind Union lines. He later became governor of Massachusetts. Adelbert Ames, her father, won the Medal of Honor at First Bull Run and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. After serving as the military governor of Mississippi, Ames became the state’s senator and then its civilian governor. He was a champion of racial rights, embracing a personal “Mission with a large M ” to support Black citizens.

Blanche, too, was a principled fighter, willing to risk her social privilege for the causes that she championed. Adelbert encouraged his daughters to attend college. Blanche went to Smith, where she became class president. At commencement, she delivered a forceful address promoting women’s suffrage, with President William McKinley in the audience. Blanche helped spearhead the Massachusetts women’s-suffrage movement, working as a political cartoonist for Woman’s Journal. She founded the Massachusetts Birth Control League. Once, Blanche sauntered onto Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue carrying a hand-carved wooden penis to demonstrate proper condom use; she was arrested, but police released her after realizing she was the daughter of one governor and the granddaughter of another. “If she was a man,” one historian has observed, “there would be five books” about her already.

Blanche Ames Ames acquired her distinctive, double-barreled name upon marrying the prominent Harvard botanist Oakes Ames, who came from an unrelated dynastic strand of Ameses. A talented painter, Blanche illustrated some of Oakes’s books about orchids. The Ames mansion at Borderland, their 1,200-acre estate outside Boston, was built entirely of stone to ensure that the library—the filming location for the 2019 movie Knives Out—would be fireproof. Adelbert Ames’s and Benjamin Butler’s Civil War–era swords can still be seen in the foyer. George Plimpton once used one to cut a cake at an anniversary party.

Profiles in Courage roused Blanche from her Borderland retirement. Eight decades had elapsed since the end of Reconstruction. The modern civil-rights movement was gaining momentum, with its promise of a second Reconstruction. Kennedy was not only taking the wrong side, but he was doing so by maligning Blanche’s father:

No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor … [admitted] that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets … Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government.

Lamar, meanwhile, was cast as a “statesman” for whom “no partisan, personal or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth”—a selfless patriot who had helped reconcile the nation.

The truth of the matter was very different. Reconstruction-era Mississippi under Ames’s leadership arguably held more political promise for newly enfranchised Black people than any other southern state. Before the Civil War, Mississippi had contained some of the richest counties in the nation, but most Mississippians—some 55 percent—were enslaved. After the war, Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union. But the new state constitution worked to overturn the Black Codes—laws designed to limit the rights of newly freed African Americans—and Mississippi’s Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce became the country’s first Black senators. Ames himself shared his gubernatorial ticket with three Black candidates.

Democrats swept the 1874 national midterm elections in what the historian Eric Foner has called a “repudiation of Reconstruction.” Mississippi Democrats saw an opportunity: By seizing control of the legislature in upcoming state elections, they could pass measures that would essentially end Black suffrage. The year 1875 became a struggle between Ames, the elected governor, and Lamar, who was then in Congress. Ames’s administration had the support of Black voters. Lamar, meanwhile, embraced the so-called Mississippi Plan, which aimed to disrupt a legitimate election, by force if necessary. Lamar insisted that the Democrats had to win control of the state legislature to ensure the “supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.” On Election Day, paramilitary terrorists called White Liners obstructed polling places, destroyed ballot boxes, and threatened to kill Black citizens who voted, as the journalist Nicholas Lemann has written in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Counties that were once overwhelmingly Republican saw the Republican vote drop to single digits. “A revolution has taken place,” Ames wrote to his wife, prophesying a bleak future for Mississippi. “A race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to … an era of second slavery.”

[From the December 2023 issue: Eric Foner on Confederate general James Longstreet]

Democrats, elected by terrorism and led by Lamar, now threatened Ames with impeachment. They accused him of financial impropriety—including the high taxes that Profiles decried—despite his administration’s relative frugality. To avoid impeachment, Ames resigned and fled the state. A U.S. Senate committee investigated the Mississippi elections and produced a 2,000-page document known as the “Boutwell Report.” It concluded that Ames was blameless and that his resignation had been forced “by measures unauthorized by law.” No matter: Ames’s reputation lay in tatters.

The following year, during the presidential deadlock, Lamar helped broker the Compromise of 1877, which gave Hayes the presidency over Samuel Tilden in exchange for the return of “home rule”—rule by white-supremacist Democrats—to the South, effectively destroying national Reconstruction.

Profiles in Courage evades easy categorization. It is a historical work, written by a political team, heavily assisted by historians, and published for political gain. The book features eight senators, strategically distributed across time, space, and party. Five of the profiles focus on questions of slavery, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, and none of the featured senators took a progressive approach to Black rights. Three, including Lamar, were slaveholders. Questions about authorship arose early: Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was rumored to be the true author. (He did, in fact, write most of the book.) Archival drafts reveal that the Georgetown University history professor Jules Davids helped overhaul the Mississippi chapter. The book’s historical vision, though, came from Kennedy.

Historians in recent years have acknowledged that the real problem with Profiles is not authorship but substance. As a critic, Blanche Ames got there first. Her personal copy of the book, a first edition, overflows with annotations. She drew arrows and corkscrew question marks around the paragraph about her father, her anger visible on the page. When Kennedy insisted that Lamar had written Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession only after losing hope that “the South could obtain justice in the Federal Union,” Blanche thundered in the margins: “Lamar had sown the seed in 1861. He was sowing it again in 1874.”

In June 1956, Blanche sent a nine-page letter to Senator Kennedy, introducing herself as his friend Plimpton’s grandmother and urging “corrections of errata for your own sake as well as mine.” She recognized diplomatically that, “in a work as ambitious as ‘Profiles in Courage’ … there are bound to be some viewpoints to arouse controversy.” Nevertheless, she argued, ambition did not excuse historical inaccuracy.

Kennedy replied the next month. He was cordial, admitting that Reconstruction was “one of the most difficult sections” to write, not because of lack of material, but because of an abundance of “emotion-packed and strongly partisan” readings. It was a politician’s apology, suffused with qualifiers. He insisted that he had relied on “reputable authorities,” but granted that “it is possible, of course, that in so doing a particular individual or incident is slighted or inadequately or inaccurately described.” He added, “If such is the case in connection with my mention of your father … I am indeed sorry.” He assured Blanche that her message “succeeded in stimulating me to further research,” but warned that he did not expect Profiles to be reprinted, so there would be no correction.

Kennedy did, in fact, do further research. According to Plimpton, during that Oval Office conversation after the dinner party, Kennedy asked Plimpton what he knew about his great-grandfather, apparently eager to demonstrate his own knowledge. He reenacted how Ames would inspect his Civil War soldiers and shout “For God’s sake, draw up your bowels!,” causing White House personnel to burst in, worried by the uproar. The president had found this obscure detail in an equally obscure book, The Twentieth Maine, which was published a year after Profiles.

But between 1956 and 1963, Profiles was reprinted more than 30 times. Kennedy did not change his account of Adelbert Ames and L. Q. C. Lamar.

Kennedy’s intransigence only fueled Blanche’s campaign. She forwarded her letters to Harper & Brothers, giving the publisher “the first opportunity” to rectify where Profiles in Courage “falls short of the Code of Historians.” The publisher declined, claiming that too much time had elapsed for readers to be able to understand any corrections. Blanche combed through Kennedy’s acknowledgments and wrote to the professors who assisted with drafting or editing Profiles, hoping that the historians might put pressure on him.

They did not. There is no evidence that Davids, architect of the Lamar chapter, ever bothered to reply. Allan Nevins, at Columbia, backpedaled, claiming that the introduction he had written for Profiles “carried no endorsement of all details … I am sure the Senator will make correction where correction is proper.” Arthur Holcombe, at Harvard, patronizingly suggested that Blanche had “misunderstood Senator Kennedy’s meaning.” Some of these academic historians may simply not have taken Blanche seriously: She was old, she was a woman, and she lacked scholarly credentials.

Blanche contacted a second circle of scholars, seeking a historian “free from bias” who might serve as an impartial biographer of Adelbert Ames. She steeped herself in the historiography of Reconstruction, coming to understand how closely Profiles followed the neo-Confederate historians Wirt Armistead Cate and Edward Mayes. “Cate copies Mayes and Kennedy copies Cate,” she wrote to the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. “Now, unless corrected, modern and future historians may copy Kennedy! This method of writing history leads around in circles of quotations of half-truths. It is a false method.”

Morison suggested a few military scholars as potential Ames biographers, but mainly recommended “Negro historians” such as John Hope Franklin, Rayford Logan, and Alrutheus Ambush Taylor. “Adelbert Ames’ career as Governor was, I believe, more important than his military career,” Morison reasoned, “and he was the champion of the Negroes.” Blanche contacted a host of prominent academics, including C. Vann Woodward, whose books had criticized the Dunning School and challenged the myth that Reconstruction governments with Black elected officials were simply incompetent or ignorant. The Profiles team had paid no attention to this scholarship. Despite her efforts, no historian would commit to the project. So Blanche resolved to write a biography of Adelbert Ames herself.

Borderland became Blanche’s archive and fortress while she spent six years—1957 to 1963—researching and writing. When her granddaughter Olivia Hoblitzelle visited Borderland, she marveled at the piles of Civil War maps and books in the library. On one trip, Hoblitzelle recalled, her father asked, “How long is it now?” “Five hundred pages,” Blanche replied. When Hoblitzelle’s father asked, “Isn’t that enough?,” Blanche “looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Well, if Tolstoy could do it, so can I.’ ” When she finished, she was 86 years old.

Blanche’s research drew significantly on the work of Black historians, who had been publishing trenchant studies of Reconstruction for decades. White historians had largely ignored this work, dismissing it as second-class scholarship. Blanche thought otherwise. Her bibliography cited W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Franklin’s The Militant South, John Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction, Merl Eppse’s The Negro, Too, in American History, and George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America. Kennedy, meanwhile, had not cited a single Black author on Mississippi Reconstruction.

[From the March 1901 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois on the Freedmen’s Bureau]

The stakes, Blanche believed, included not only her father’s reputation but the very meaning of Reconstruction. Her final chapter, “Integrity and History,” is a scathing condemnation of the traditional Reconstruction historiography Kennedy had parroted. Throughout the book, she linked Adelbert Ames’s promotion of racial rights in the 1870s with the modern civil-rights movement—the second Reconstruction:

In this fateful year of 1963, our Congress has a unique opportunity with its overwhelming Democratic majorities … Congress seems to hold the practical power to do away with the disgraceful suppression of Negro suffrage rights … A hundred years has been too long to wait for application of these long-standing laws of equity.

Blanche Ames’s book was published at the worst possible moment. In September 1963, she finished correcting page proofs for Adelbert Ames, 1835–1933: General, Senator, Governor. The book was lovingly bound in Sundour cloth and stamped in gold. It sold for $12.50, about $120 today—an old-fashioned, costly volume. Kennedy’s mass-produced paperback, meanwhile, sold for less than a dollar. On November 22, 1963, as Blanche’s book was going to press, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy in Dallas.

With the president’s tragic death, Profiles in Courage got a second life, landing back on the New York Times best-seller list. As Americans evaluated Kennedy’s legacy, his prizewinning book seemed a natural place to start. A televised adaptation of Profiles had been in production at NBC before Kennedy’s death. At that time, Blanche had urged Kennedy to use television as an opportunity to “bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.” After the assassination, the network pressed ahead, framing the series as “one of the finest living memorials to President Kennedy.” But Blanche may have gotten through to Kennedy’s team in the end, at least as far as the television series: When it premiered, a year after Kennedy’s death, the planned segment on Lamar had been quietly dropped. It was the only original profile not to be featured on television.

But there was still the book. Blanche wrote to Sorensen in early 1964, trying to strike a tone of mutual interest: “Must we not find a way of correcting these obvious misstatements inadvertently restated by President Kennedy? Otherwise they will be perpetuated with greater force than ever, and I do not believe that he would have wished this. Do you?” There is no record that Sorensen replied.

Blanche lived to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Born a year after the end of the first Reconstruction, she was able to witness the start of the second. But when she died at Borderland, in 1969, a belittling New York Times headline read: “MRS. OAKES AMES, BOTANIST’S WIDOW; Illustrator of Her Husband’s Works on Orchids Dies.” Despite Blanche’s best efforts, her book sold only a few thousand copies.

In 2010, a few years before efforts to remove Confederate monuments gained traction across the country, a life-size statue of Lamar was erected outside his former home in Oxford, Mississippi. The L. Q. C. Lamar House Museum’s public-outreach efforts generally commemorate Lamar not as a white supremacist or an architect of the Mississippi Plan, but as the embodiment of Kennedy’s redemptive arc: “Southern secessionist to American statesman,” as the museum describes it. Ames is not mentioned at all; Profiles is highlighted throughout the museum.

In 1980, George Plimpton donated a copy of Blanche’s book to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. “President Kennedy would know,” he said, “that a Massachusetts woman will eventually have her way.” But Blanche Ames Ames has not had her way quite yet. At the library’s gift shop, visitors can buy a 50th-anniversary edition of Profiles in Courage, published in 2006, with an introduction by Caroline Kennedy. The book has never been corrected.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “Kennedy and the Lost Cause.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

“Reconstruction,” by Frederick Douglass, appeared in the December 1866 issue of this magazine. It was the most important article that The Atlantic published in the immediate postwar era. It was also, for its time, unusually concise, coming in at a mere 2,703 words. By contrast, The Atlantic’s 1860 endorsement of Abraham Lincoln, written by James Russell Lowell, had run to 7,331 words, and Lincoln himself was not mentioned until the 1,747th word. (The editorial did succeed, of course. And yes, I’m taking credit on behalf of The Atlantic for Lincoln’s presidency.)

Douglass published his call for a radical reimagining of the American idea at an ambiguous but promising moment. Already, the infant project of Reconstruction—­of the South, of the lives of newly liberated Black Americans, of the Constitution itself—was stimulating opposition that would, by 1877, prove shattering to the cause of equality. And yet Doug­lass was correct, as his biographer David W. Blight writes in this issue, in understanding that “the United States had been reinvented by war and by new egalitarian impulses rooted in emancipation.” Douglass’s essay, which Blight brilliantly annotates for us, is “full of radical brimstone, cautious hope, and a thoroughly new vision of constitutional authority.”

The Reconstruction period has been a topic for The Atlantic across the centuries. This special issue, edited by our senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, working alongside our editor-at-large, Cullen Murphy, and our managing editor John Swansburg, is meant to examine the enduring consequences of Reconstruction’s tragic fall at a moment—­yet another moment—when the cause of racial progress faces sustained pressure. The idea for this issue emerged from a conversation I had not long ago with Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bunch is, among other things, a stupendous builder, a conscientious American patriot, and an impresario of memory. He is also a scholar of the Freedmen’s Bureau archives, and the author of a moving article about the bureau’s work.

Our conversation at first focused on the need to complete the exploration and digitization of the imperishably important archives, but then it ranged more widely. Both of us felt that, in this period of political and social reaction, revisiting the centrality of Reconstruction, and of promises made and broken, would be an apt subject for this magazine. Bunch writes in his article:

Librarians around the nation feel the chilling effects of book bans. Some individuals who seek to occupy the highest office in the land fear the effects of an Advanced Placement class that explores African American history—a history that, as education officials in Florida have maintained, “lacks educational value”; a history that does not deserve to be remembered.

As Newkirk, who has written a fascinating article about the Fisk University choir, noted to me, “If the last seven years in this country have proven anything, it is to show just how un­finished, and fragile, the project of Reconstruction actually is.”

In the interest of memory, we asked our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum, a historian by trade, to examine The Atlantic’s mixed record on questions of Reconstruction. I would prefer to tell you that Frederick Douglass spoke singularly for this magazine on the subject, but there is also the matter of Woodrow Wilson, a frequent contributor to The Atlantic in the years before he became president. Wilson was a prime contributor to a 1901 series in this magazine focused on Reconstruction. The series, which also featured W. E. B. Du Bois (thank goodness), has too much of a “good people on both sides” air about it. As Appelbaum notes, Wilson’s critique of Reconstruction was appalling. “The negroes were exalted; the states were misgoverned and looted in their name,” Wilson wrote. This went on, he continued, until “the whites who were real citizens got control again.”

Illumination is the point of this issue. We have great scholars, including Peniel E. Joseph, whose article, “The Revolution Never Ended,” focuses on the Black Americans who continued the work of Reconstruction even after federal troops withdrew from the South, and Drew Gilpin Faust, a former president of Harvard and a noted Civil War scholar, who writes about the Secret Six, the men exposed after the war for having funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Eric Foner, in many ways the dean of Reconstruction scholarship, writes on James Longstreet, the Confederate general who accepted the Union’s victory and took up the cause of rebuilding the nation.

At the center of this issue, spread across 32 pages, you will find something surprising and glorious: an original play by Anna Deavere Smith, a contributing writer at The Atlantic as well as a playwright, a performer, and an actual genius. I don’t doubt that you will one day see the play, This Ghost of Slavery, on Broadway. When I first started talking with Smith about writing for this issue, she had predictably brilliant ideas for a long exploration of juvenile justice and its roots in the slave system, but we soon realized that an essay couldn’t contain all that she was trying to achieve. So I suggested that she write a play. We recruited our national editor, Scott Stossel, to serve as her dramaturge. Spend time with this play. It will move you. Spend time with this whole issue, in fact: It asks, and answers, the questions that most need to be asked.

This editor’s note appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Questions That Most Need Asking.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

In all my years doing research at the National Archives, I had never cried. That day in fall 2012, I had simply planned to examine documentary material that might help determine how the yet-to-be-built National Museum of African American History and Culture would explore and present the complicated history of American slavery and freedom.

As I read through the papers of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it’s usually called—I decided to see if I could find records from Wake County, North Carolina, where I knew some of my own enslaved ancestors had lived. I had few expectations because I knew so little about my family’s history. From a surviving wedding certificate for my paternal great-grandparents, I’d gotten the name of my earliest-known family member, an enslaved woman named Candis Bunch, my great-great-grandmother. But scrolling through rolls of microfilmed documents from the Raleigh office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, I realized the chances were remote that I would find my ancestor.

But when I turned my attention to a series of labor contracts—designed to give the newly freed some legal protections as they negotiated working relationships with their former enslavers—I found a single page documenting a contract between Fabius H. Perry, who owned the plantation next to the one where my ancestors had been enslaved, and Candis Bunch. That page not only filled a void in my knowledge of my family’s history, but also enriched my understanding of myself.

I was amazed at what a single piece of paper could reveal. For two days of farm work in 1866, Candis received $1, and for 44 days of work in 1867, she received $11. The contract also revealed that her daughter Dolly was paid $3 for housework. As I read further, the contract delineated what Candis owed Perry for the purchase of cotton and soap.

What reduced me to tears was the fact that, out of her meager earnings, Candis had spent 60 cents on two “baker tins,” more than the payment she received for an entire day’s work. I remembered how my paternal grandmother, Leanna Bunch, who resided in Belleville, New Jersey, and died two weeks before my fifth birthday, used to bake cookies in the shape of hearts and crescent moons to cajole me into napping. Did she use the very same tins that Candis had labored to buy? Had that been the beginning of a family tradition: No matter how difficult times may be, always help the children find some joy?

With this personal discovery came the realization that documents like these from the Freedmen’s Bureau—well over a million pages, created out of bureaucratic necessity—could help African Americans today better understand themselves and their enslaved ancestors. These records, if made more accessible, could help all of us grasp the challenges, the pain, the losses, the courage, and the resiliency of a people who had both powered and endured the transition from slavery to freedom. They could bring the grand narrative of Reconstruction to a more human scale.

The people we encounter in the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau call out to be remembered. Their lives, their sacrifices, are stories to be revealed and lauded. Stories such as these also provoke discomfort—and, in some quarters, resistance. Politicians have been elected by sowing fear about “divisive” history. Is it divisive to point out that African Americans believed in, and struggled toward, an aspirational America, an America that had made promises but had not yet delivered?

The hope that freedom would transform a people and a nation was captured in a cartoon by Thomas Nast that appeared in Harper’s Weekly on January 24, 1863. Nast’s drawing celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln a few weeks earlier. The left side of the image depicts the horrific impact of slavery: slave auctions and the destruction of families; backbreaking labor in the cotton fields; a woman being whipped. On the right, the benefits of freedom: a country at peace, with formerly enslaved children attending school; a Black worker drawing fair wages; Black and white figures showing mutual respect toward each other. The centerpiece is an image of a Black family that has achieved middle-class status, with well-clothed children and elders sitting by the hearth. Nast’s cartoon looked forward to a future where fairness and freedom were the norm. That was the hope of Reconstruction, and the engine of that hope was the Freedmen’s Bureau.

On March 3, 1865, after nearly two years of debate, Congress passed “an Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees.” Lincoln signed it into law the same day. The bureau, embedded in the War Department, was one of the first federal forays into social engineering, in some ways anticipating the more activist government policies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Simply put, its charge was to protect the basic rights and help provide for the basic needs of the 4 million people who had been, until recently, enslaved.

The value and impact of the Freedmen’s Bureau, from its inception until it was defunded, in 1872, cannot be overstated. At its peak, more than 900 bureau agents were located throughout the former Confederacy, in rural hamlets and urban centers. Among other things, these agents documented the violence that was at the core of white southern resistance to Reconstruction. They responded to and recorded the desire of the formerly enslaved to confirm their marital standing. They gave food to the poor and the indigent regardless of race. They helped establish Black educational institutions, from elementary “freedom schools” to colleges such as Shaw University, in North Carolina, and Howard University, in the nation’s capital. More than 40 “freedmen’s hospitals” served the sick, the malnourished, and those whose health had been damaged by the conditions of slavery. During a period when most in the South fought to violently overturn the changes implemented by Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau was one of the few outlets where African Americans could address their needs, obtain legal assistance, and see some evidence that change was at hand. One could argue that the bureau was, in essence, a form of reparations.

[From the March 1901 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois on the Freedmen’s Bureau]

Simply by virtue of doing its work, the Freedmen’s Bureau amassed records of the stories, hopes, and disappointments of a people on the cusp of freedom. These documents reveal the agency of the newly emancipated: Freedom was not given but was seized and created by people who “made a way out of no way.” But the documents underscore how difficult the struggle was. Although they make the efforts of individuals and families visible and concrete, the records also reflect how the promise of Reconstruction was derailed by violence, northern apathy, and the rise of Jim Crow.

The documents unlock the names and experiences of people who are often invisible or silent in the conventional telling of history. A significant portion of the Freedmen’s Bureau papers reflect the importance of family, of reconnecting with kin separated by the vagaries of slavery, of protecting children. With freedom came an unyielding desire to find oneself by finding those who’d been sold away. The Freedmen’s Bureau, people hoped, could aid in restoring the bonds of family. In the documents, a freedwoman named Sina Smith described how her mother had been sold from Virginia to Tennessee “about eighteen years past … by Colonel Marshall.” Smith hoped that her mother, Eliza Williams, whom she was now able to “support … in her old age,” could be found, and noted that she was “a member of the Baptist Church” in Nashville.

Requests for assistance contained poignant details that might help locate a family member. A freedman named Hawkins Wilson wrote from Galveston, Texas, searching for his sisters, whom he had not seen in the 24 years since he’d been “sold at Sheriff’s sale” in Virginia. “One of my sisters, Jane,” he wrote, “belonged to Peter Coleman in Caroline County.” Wilson’s letter expressed a belief that the bureau could reconnect him with his family: “I am in hopes that they are still living … and I have no other one to apply to but you.” Wilson drafted an additional letter to be given to Jane. “Your little brother Hawkins is trying to find out where you are and where his poor old mother is … I shall never forget the bag of buiscuits you made for me the last night I spent with you.” He continued by saying he had led a good life and had “learned to read, and write a little.” He said that he hoped they might see each other, but added that if they did not “meet on earth, we might indeed meet in heaven.” Given that the letter remained in the files of the Freedmen’s Bureau, it is unlikely that Wilson was ever reunited with his family.

Numerous letters and depositions describe the frequent terrorist attacks aimed at controlling, intimidating, and killing the formerly enslaved. Some of the violence was random: Jacob Carpenter, from Gaston, North Carolina, stated to an authority that “he had been hunted [through the] town,” dodging gunfire, and “that his life was not safe at any time.” Tobe Jones, of Wilkes County, Georgia, went to visit his wife. Two men assaulted him; one, he recounted, “caught me by the collar and struck me with his fist. Several blows in the face … [He] then picked up a rock and ran after me, and said he would kill me.” White vigilantes also conducted organized raids, focusing their ire on Black teachers and ministers and those bold enough to vote. In Tennessee, churches were burned. In Arkansas, “the school house for colored children at Phillips Bayou was burned down” and a teacher was “ordered to leave.” Night riders—vigilantes intent on violently enforcing white supremacy—struck at those who worked to bring change to the South: On the night of April 18, 1868, 20 mounted men attacked the home of William Fleming, of Franklin, Tennessee; a few months later, in nearby Brownsville, “a party of freedmen were assaulted on their way home … and four of their members shot.” The Freedmen’s Bureau agent stationed in Tennessee noted that “there is an organization … who style themselves Ku, Klux and they are committing depredations on Colored people, property and outrages on their persons.”

The bureau papers highlight the role of women during Reconstruction. Throughout the documents, one encounters Black women demanding fair labor contracts, insisting on respect and common courtesy, seeking and providing educational opportunities, and fighting on behalf of their families. The paperwork exposes the violence and sexual abuse that were all too common in the lives of Black women. When Harriett Kilgore, of Chickasaw County, Mississippi, worked for her former enslaver, Landon Kilgore, in 1865, she was punished for working too slowly. “I told him I had done nothing for him to whip me. He said he wanted to whip me for some time and that I thought that I was free.” In September 1866, Rhoda Ann Childs, of Henry County, Georgia, was beaten, tortured, “and ravished” by an ex-Confederate soldier, in part because her husband had served in “the God damned Yankee Army.” Amanda Willis was forced out of her mother’s home near Springfield, Tennessee, and taken by a white man who “brought me down into the woods and had forcible connection with me.” Women fought back. In Wilkes County, Georgia, in May 1866, Tempy Hill, a freedwoman, saw a white man strike another Black woman, her sister-in-law Lydia Hill. She left her work in the field and confronted him with the “intention of fighting him and to take up for her color.” She struck the assailant with “a chunk of wood.”

The notion of access—to education and to American history through an African American lens—was central to the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. I was its founding director. The effort to create the museum ultimately led to a project to make Freedmen’s Bureau records available to the broader public.

To begin the process of creating the museum, it was essential to understand the knowledge base of future visitors. For two years, starting in 2005, the museum conducted surveys throughout the country; reviewed an array of specialized reports on America’s understanding of its past; and organized on-the-street interviews that focused on young, diverse participants.

The data revealed that respondents had strong and conflicting views about the role, impact, and continuing resonance of slavery in American life. Almost everyone believed that slavery was an important story. Many felt that the museum should focus on how slavery shaped the African American experience and the way that slavery, “America’s original sin,” was an essential element in the founding and evolution of the United States. An equal number felt that, although it was once important, slavery had little meaning and relevance for contemporary audiences. I remember vividly the day when a Black woman, returning from church, greeted me as we passed on the street. She thanked all those involved in building the museum. But as she hugged me, she whispered, “Whatever you do, don’t talk about slavery.” To her and others, the museum had a chance “to help folks get beyond slavery”—to no longer be constrained by a past that some felt was embarrassing.

What this divide made clear to the museum staff was the need to centralize slavery and freedom as forces that helped define and continue to influence American politics, culture, and economics. But that would not be enough. The museum needed to humanize slavery, so that visitors would recognize the strength and resiliency of the enslaved.

Besides slavery, members of the public were most interested in understanding their own family history. Today, programs like Finding Your Roots, on PBS, and commercial services like Ancestry .com have made personal history accessible and engaging. But in 2005, the way forward was less clear. In due course, the museum would establish the Robert Frederick Smith Explore Your Family History Center. As we considered the center’s role, the staff realized that the biggest contribution would be to help illuminate the lives and histories of the enslaved. The obstacles to families trying to recover the stories of enslaved ancestors were immense. For one thing, African Americans were not enumerated by name prior to the 1870 census.

The best way to get beyond this barrier lay in the Freedmen’s Bureau documents. Generations of scholars, including Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, and Eric Foner, had researched the wealth of information that these papers contained and published scholarly monographs for academic audiences. But access to this trove was too important to be left in the hands of professional historians, or made possible only for those who could travel to the National Archives, in Washington, D.C., which owns and houses the original records.

This understanding led to the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau Project, whose aim was to create a digital portal that would make the bureau documents searchable by name and subject. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of personal histories would be available not only to scholars but also to families in search of their ancestors and, by extension, in search of themselves: helping people find not embarrassment but strength and inspiration in their enslaved ancestors.

That portal could not have been built without an effective collaboration involving the museum, the National Archives, and a pioneering genealogical resource, FamilySearch—an organization dedicated to helping all people discover their family history. One major challenge was the need to review and transcribe upwards of a million pages of documents. Transcription was essential, because the records—written in 19th-century cursive by many different hands—are difficult for contemporary audiences to read. For this portal to have the desired reach, the documents needed to be transcribed by hundreds if not thousands of individuals—an army of trained volunteers whose energy had the additional benefit of helping generate support and enthusiasm for the museum itself in the years before its opening.

Much of the success of this ongoing transcription effort can be credited to FamilySearch and the community that it nurtured. Steeped in the traditions of the Mormon Church, FamilySearch had developed technology and processes that proved essential. Quality control was built in. Following its lead, Freedmen’s Bureau transcriptions are subject to a two-step review—first by a volunteer, then by a member of the Smithsonian staff. If additional edits are required at the final stage of review, the process begins again. Today, people accessing the Freedmen’s Bureau Digital Collection can see the original document as well as the transcription.

One can tell a great deal about a country by what it chooses to remember: by what graces the walls of its museums, by what monuments are venerated, and by what parts of its history are embraced. One can tell even more by what a nation chooses to forget: what memories are erased and what aspects of its past are feared. This unwillingness to understand, accept, and embrace an accurate history, shaped by scholarship, reflects an unease with ambiguity and nuance—and with truth. One frequent casualty of such discomfort is any real appreciation of the importance of African American history and culture for all Americans.

Why should anyone fear a history that asks a country to live up to its highest ideals—to “make good to us the promises in your Constitution,” as Frederick Douglass put it? But too often, we are indeed fearful. State legislatures have passed laws restricting the teaching of critical race theory, preventing educators from discussing a history that “might make our children feel guilty” about the actions and attitudes of their ancestors. Librarians around the nation feel the chilling effects of book bans. Some individuals who seek to occupy the highest office in the land fear the effects of an Advanced Placement class that explores African American history—a history that, as education officials in Florida have maintained, “lacks educational value”; a history that does not deserve to be remembered.

There is no reason to fear a history that, while illuminating the dark corners of America’s past, also displays values and expectations that are central to America’s identity: resiliency, family, education, fairness. The voices within the Freedmen’s Bureau papers demonstrate how the African American fight for access to education, economic opportunity, and basic human rights created paths that benefited all Americans.

Rather than running from this history, we should find in it sustenance, understanding, and hope. In the end, we can’t escape the past anyway. What Joe Louis said of an opponent applies to the legacy of history: You can run, but you can’t hide.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Archive of Emancipation.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.

In all, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. He’s also dealing with a civil suit in New York that could force drastic changes to his business empire, including closing down its operations in his home state. Meanwhile, he is the leading Republican candidate in the race to become the next president—though lawsuits in several states seek to have him disqualified from the presidency. If the criminal and civil cases unfold with any reasonable timeliness, he could be in the heat of the campaign trail at the same time that his legal fate is being decided.

[David A. Graham: The end of Trump Inc.]

Here’s a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, including key dates, an assessment of the gravity of the charges, and expectations about how they could turn out. This guide will be updated regularly as the cases proceed.

New York State: Fraud

In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.

When?
A judge ruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them. (He also sanctioned Trump’s lawyers for making repeated frivolous arguments.) A trial to determine the amount of damages Trump must pay is ongoing in Manhattan, and could stretch for weeks or even months. Justice Arthur Engoron, the presiding judge, has already fined Trump a combined $15,000 for violating a gag order in the case.

How grave is the allegation?
Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is pretty pedestrian. The case is civil rather than criminal, and though it could end with Trump’s famed company barred from business in New York, the loss of several key properties, and millions of dollars in fines, the stakes are lower, both for Trump and for the nation, than in the other cases against him.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud. The outstanding questions are what damages he might have to pay and what exactly Engoron’s ruling means for Trump’s business and properties in New York.

Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault

Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump is also involved in an ongoing defamation case with the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.

When?
In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation claim remains under consideration.

How grave is the allegation?
Although this case doesn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, it is a serious matter, and a judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has been underappreciated.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Trump has already been found liable for defamation and sexual assault, and a further finding of defamation is possible and perhaps likely.

Manhattan: Hush Money

In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they had had sexual relationships with Trump.

When?
The case is set to go to trial on March 25, 2024. In September, the judge overseeing the case signaled that he is open to changing that date, given the various other court cases that Trump is juggling, but he also said he didn’t think it was worth discussing until February.

How grave is the allegation?
Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad. But many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. That this case alleges behavior that didn’t undermine democracy or put national secrets at risk makes it feel more minor—though those other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Bragg’s case faces hurdles including the statute of limitations, a questionable key witness in the former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and some untested legal theories. In short, the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest criminal case. Some Trump critics were dismayed that Bragg was the first to bring criminal charges against the former president.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Jack Smith, a special counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, has charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office. The charges include willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centers on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

When?
Smith filed charges in June 2023. Judge Aileen Cannon has set a trial date of May 20, 2024. Smith faces a de facto deadline of January 20, 2025, at which point Trump or any Republican president would likely shut down a case.

How grave is the allegation?
These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless quite serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide them, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
This may be the most open-and-shut case, and the facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith is believed to have drawn a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who has sometimes ruled favorably for Trump on procedural matters.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.

When?
Willis obtained the indictment in August. The number of defendants makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. In late September, one defendant who breached election equipment struck a plea deal. Three more, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in late October. No date has been set for the other defendants’ trial, but it likely won’t come until 2024.

How grave is the allegation?
More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Expert views differ. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path. But getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge.

Department of Justice: Election Subversion

Special Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C.

When?
A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1. A trial is scheduled for March 4, 2024. As with the other DOJ case, Smith will need to move quickly, before Trump or any other Republican president could shut down a case upon taking office in January 2025. But even before the trial begins, heated legal skirmishes are under way: In October, following verbal attacks by Trump on witnesses and Smith’s wife, Judge Tanya Chutkan issued an order limiting what Trump can say about the case.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead serious attack on American democracy]

How grave is the allegation?
This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting the attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
It’s very hard to say. Smith avoided some of the more unconventional potential charges, including aiding insurrection, and everyone watched much of the alleged crime unfold in public in real time, but no precedent exists for a case like this, with a defendant like this.

Additionally …

In about 20 states, cases are pending over whether Trump should be thrown off the 2024 ballot under a novel legal theory about the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents, including J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic, argue that the former president is ineligible to serve again under a clause that disqualifies anyone who took an oath defending the Constitution and then subsequently participated in a rebellion or an insurrection. They say that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incitement of the January 6 riot meet the criteria.

The three most active cases right now are the following:

Colorado: A state-court trial in Denver began on October 30 in a suit filed by Colorado residents and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, to kick Trump off the Centennial State ballot.

Minnesota: A similar case, filed by residents and the liberal group Free Speech for People, seeks to keep Trump off the ballot in Minnesota. Oral arguments before the state supreme court begin November 2.

Michigan: When yet another similar case tried to force Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to disqualify Trump, she stated that she did not have the authority to decide whether Trump was eligible, and that only a court could decide. But on October 30, Trump’s campaign asked for a court ruling affirming that Benson has no such power.

When?
Cases are in various stages of progress, and the Colorado and Minnesota trials should wrap soon. But time is tight in all of these matters: Ballots for primary elections in early states must be printed soon in order to reach overseas and military voters. Any decisions are expected to be appealed, perhaps as high as the U.S. Supreme Court.

How grave is the allegation?
In a sense, the claim made here is even graver than the criminal election-subversion cases filed against Trump by the U.S. Department of Justice and in Fulton County, Georgia, because neither of those cases alleges insurrection or rebellion. But the stakes are also much different—rather than criminal conviction, they concern the ability to serve as president.

How plausible is a disqualification?
No one knows. The clause has seldom been used, and not for some time, and never for a plausible presidential candidate. Courts might hesitate to disqualify Trump under a somewhat novel theory and without either a criminal conviction or an impeachment conviction, though proponents insist that neither is required. Given different judges and state procedures, one plausible outcome is that Trump might be tossed off the ballot in some states but not in others—which could matter a lot or not at all to the outcome of the 2024 election, depending on the state’s partisan lean. More likely, however, a Supreme Court ruling would resolve the issue to avoid a patchwork.