AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Here’s a lowlight. An all-too American lowlight.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot by Confederate loyalist John Wilkes Booth as the president sat in a box at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC. Lincoln and his wife Mary were attending a performance of the play, Our American Cousin, written by Englishman Tom Taylor.

Only a few short weeks before, the president had been inaugurated to his second term. The Civil War had, for all intents and purposes, come to an end just five days prior to the shooting.

Technically, the war ended a year and half later, on August 20, 1866, when President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation saying, “[[the] insurrection is at an end and… peace, order, tranquillity, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.”

The seceding states, eleven of them, formed the Confederate States of America, a would-be nation that never attained recognition from the United States (naturally) nor any other country in the world. Think of how odd it is that a rebellious territory in any country should declare independence and not, then, be supported by anybody else on earth. Of course, when your wannabe nation is based primarily on the idea of slavery, and you proudly say so, people (and countries) are going to tend to shy away from you.

The eleven, after hostilities ended, were put on probation before they could be fully readmitted to the Union. A majority of each seceding state’s population had to swear out loyalty oaths before their state governments could be reorganized. All their leaders had to swear allegiance to the United States. Each state had to rewrite its constitution, largely to repudiate antebellum thinking and specifically to outlaw slavery. Confederate military leaders were barred from holding public office. The Confederate states, too, had to cancel all their war debts, meaning anybody who financed the southern cause was out of luck. The whole process lasted until 1870 when the last of the seceding states’ representatives were readmitted to the US Congress.

Although, as Heather Cox Richardson and others argue, many in the southern states continue to fight for the ideas of the Confederacy to this day.

A scene from the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Lincoln, born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and, as an adult, a lawyer and politican in Illinois, couldn’t even enjoy a full week of peace in the nation he led. He was rendered unconscious by Booth’s bullet that struck him behind the left ear. He was carried to a home across the street from Ford’s and laid diagonally (he was exceptionally tall) on a bed there. No one who examined Lincoln thought he could survive. He didn’t. He died the next morning at 7:20.

Lincoln was the first United States President to be assassinated. He wouldn’t be the last. In fact, within the next 35 years, two more presidents, James A. Garfield and William McKinley, would be killed by assassins’ bullets. The man who replaced McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, himself was shot when he tried to run again for president in 1912. JohnF. Kennedy was gunned down in 1963, making it four presidents killed in office.

As mentioned here previously, a gunman attempted to shoot at Andrew Jackson but his pistols misfired. A man holding a pistol and waiting for the official procession to pass him during President William Howard Taft’s summit meeting with Mexican Presdient Porfiro Diaz at El Paso, Texas in 1909 was disarmed. Anarchists plotted to kill President Herbert Hoover during his visit to Arentina in 1928. In 1933, a man shot at newly-inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami. He missed but struck and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who died of his wound. Zionist militia men in 1947 mailed letter bombs to the White House in hopes one of them might kill Truman. Three years later, Puerto Rican independence activists stormed Harry Truman’s residence (the White house being renovated at the time) in an attempt to kill the president.

JFK, for that matter, survived a couple of assassination plots before Lee Harvey Oswald succeeded in killing him. A rabid anti-Catholic man planned to ram Kennedy’s limousine with his dynamite-laden car a few week’s before the inauguration but he changed his mind when he saw Kennedy’s wife and daughter kiss him goodbye the morning of December 11, 1960. As if that isn’t bad enough, just a few days before Kennedy was killed, another man, a right wing extremist and John Birch Society member, planned to kill Kennedy during a presidential visit to Chicago but his landlady caught wind of his plans and notified the Secret Service.

In 1972 and ’74, two men tried to kill President Richard Nixon. The first hoped to shoot him during a motorcade in Canada but Nixon’s car drove by too fast for him to take good aim. The second planned to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the White House but he was shot and killed at the airport outside Baltimore. By the way, that first man was named Arthur Bremer and he’d go on to shoot and paralyze presidential candidate George C. Wallace in Laurel, Maryland in 1972.

Two women, one of them a Manson Family member, attempted to fire guns at President Gerald R. Ford within two and a half weeks of each other in September 1975. A gang of 14 Kuwaiti and Iraqi men plotted to kill President George H.W. Bush’s by car bomb while he was in Kuwait City in 1993. They were thwarted.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme in Custody.

And then…, oh for Chrissakes! I haven’t got the room or the desire to list all the assassination attempts and plots against Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. A quick count shows at least 41 such shots (literally and figuratively) against those five presidents alone.

All this is to say it’s become more likely that an American president will be shot at, bombed, rammed, or otherwise assaulted than not these days. This country’s history is rife with attempts to off the Chief Executive but now it’s become almost epidemic.

We’re a violent bunch.