While it is not over quite yet, we just saw Marine-1 leave the White House lawn with the President and First Lady aboard. He has the nuclear release codes with him. That package will go inactive at noon or so, and the ones given to to President Biden will give him the keys to Hell. And so we will go on.

This has been a hell of time in the Seventy Days. First the astonishing election. We appear to have settled on the story that the count was clean, and everything is normal. Since there is no objective truth anymore, I am prepared to accept it. Not as legit, of course. There was the usual fraud, dead people voting, ghost voters and all that. Busines as usual in the big cities. But in the end it was pretty simple, and I don’t need the existing reams of testimony to support it. Pennsylvania certified the results of an election with 200,000 more votes counted than registered voters to cast them.

Not having any choice in the matter, I will live with it. In fact, it is possible that Google will swoop in to correct my statement, with a flag that says it is something else. “Disputed” is one term. Another is “Dangerous.”

I assume they will get to the point they will just delete the accounts of those who disagree. They did it to the sitting President, so I have no view that they will not start imposing emergency censorship as they see fit, in the interest of some emergency or something.

There is a bit of breath-holding still this morning as I write. Mr. Trump will be on the ground in Florida by the time the Inauguration takes place. Airborne, in act, as they ramp up for the event. In the waning minutes of his term, there is the possibility that he could cause trouble. I don’t see it at the moment, but it is hard to see trouble from the country. Instead, we have to think of the last time a sitting POTUS did not attend the swearing in of his successor. It was not unprecedented, at the time, since three Chief Executives had ducked the ceremony.

In 1869, the last time, it was a little different. President Andrew John had been elected Vice President for Abraham Lincoln’s second term. There were a variety of reasons for that, and of course they revolved around the matter of the armed conflict between the states. Lincoln had been elected as top of the ticket in the tumultuous 1860 contest. His Vice President was a popular former Democrat named Hannibal Hamlin from the great state of Maine. In the 1864 campaign, it was clear that something needed to be done to prepare for a re-unified United States. Hamlin brought nothing to what would become Reconstruction. A man from Tennessee did.

Vice President Andrew Johnson was from the Volunteer State, and his selection was intended to put the face of unification on Lincoln’s second term. It was intended to appeal to the defeated South. Instead, the last military act of Richmond was Lincoln’s assassination. And rather than the human face of re-union, a man from the Upper South suddenly had the challenge to unify a nation that had presided on the orchestrated death of nearly a million men in uniform, north and south.

You can imagine the challenges of that, and the desire of the radical Republicans to have a man they could trust in charge. The answer was the commanding General of the Federal force- U.S. Grant.

This is all worth a lengthier treatment, but the simple account is that the relation between the two men sequentially elected president was simple. They hated each other. The shorter story was that Grant did not want to ride in the same carriage to the ceremony with Johnson.

For his part, Johnson not only didn’t attend Grant’s inauguration, he held a final cabinet meeting while Grant raised his right hand.

Trump’s decision to not attend Biden’s inauguration actually has a lot of similarities with Grant’s decision about Johnson. Mr. Grant served two terms as POTUS, though his reputation has been through the mill. Some consider him a drunk, for example, or a cartoon character supported by a few hundred thousand armed men.

This all came about in parallel with Johnson’s moderate views. Which is to say, things really have an eerie similarity to our world today. Within weeks, Johnson announced opposition to political rights for freed slaves and called for a lenient reconstruction policy, including pardoning former Confederate leaders. Johnson opposed the Radical Republic agenda and had no interest in compromise. Final ties with the party that elected him were broken over a thing called “The Freedman’s Bureau Bill” in February of 1866. Johnson’s opposition sparked passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and the start of the chaotic American legal struggle over the civil rights of citizens who had been slaves.

President Grant did a better job of it in his two terms, but finding a successor was a bit of ugly business that also echoes those of today. Rutherford B. Hayes is the only president to hold office by decision of an extraordinary commission of congressmen and Supreme Court justices appointed to rule on contested electoral ballots. Sound vaguely familiar? The compromise that enabled him to be President brought Reconstruction to an end, and which enabled his attempt to establish new standards of official integrity after Grant’s two terms. His time in office brought about the steady establishment of the Jim Crow system in the former Confederacy.

So here we are, more than 150 years later, with a President who was impeached, refused to attend his successor’s inauguration, and that successor favored his abrupt removal from office.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The new Administration will have some priorities that reflect what has gone before, and some others about where we are going to go. We will see how that goes.

Plus ca change, n’est pas?

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com