53 pages • 1 hour read
Jon MeachamThe Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Confidence of the Whole People: Visions of the Presidency, the Ideas of Progress and Prosperity, and ‘We, the People’”
Before examining Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to preserve the Union, Meacham briefly ponders the nature of the presidency itself. Even as late as the 1787 Constitutional Convention, there was widespread disagreement among the Founding Fathers concerning the parameters of presidential power. They knew this power should not be absolute like that of a king, yet the president’s precise role was still ill-defined. That the founders were content with this ambiguous arrangement, Meacham suggests, reflected their faith in the character and moral fortitude of George Washington, the first to occupy the office. Even still, the elasticity the founders baked into the presidency represented an even broader faith in the American public to elevate conscientious and dignified individuals to the role of commander-in-chief—a faith that Meacham asserts has rarely if ever been so profoundly tested as it has during the Trump administration.
That the relative elites who made up the Constitutional Convention had so much faith in everyday Americans is perhaps better understood when considering that, until Andrew Jackson, presidents were not terribly sensitive to the public will. Though a slaveholder and slaughterer of Indians, Jackson nevertheless transformed the office by envisioning the presidency, in his own words, as “the direct representative of the American people” (30). Meacham points out that while this sentiment is intuitive to modern Americans, this declaration of the president’s central role in US politics was controversial in Jackson’s time. According to Meacham, Jackson best illustrated this idea when he threatened to use military force against South Carolina after the state refused to comply with federal tariffs, thus setting a precedent for future presidents to take bold and decisive action for what they deemed the good of the country.
Thanks to the ascendancy of the anti-Jacksonian Whig Party, few presidents exercised executive power so dramatically over the following decades. That changed when Abraham Lincoln inherited a country being torn apart by the issue of slavery. To Meacham, Lincoln is an illustrative example of how great presidents negotiate their own character with the character of the people they govern. He quotes Frederick Douglass at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial to emphasize his point:
Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined (35).
According to Meacham, Lincoln’s own views on race and slavery were constantly evolving. His consistent goal—from the start of the Civil War to the Emancipation Proclamation through to the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery—was to preserve the United States as an undivided whole. Put another way, his actions were done to serve “the national interest” (39), an admittedly abstract term that the author carefully defines more concretely. Going back to the Declaration of Independence, Meacham cites scholarship to suggest that by the “pursuit of happiness,” Thomas Jefferson meant a measurable public happiness shared by all. To achieve and expand this happiness to as many as possible demands progress toward equal opportunity, a concept rooted in the Protestant Reformation, expanded upon during the Enlightenment, and supported by the rise of market economics, according to Meacham. For that reason, the work done by presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson to expand the rights of women and people of color, respectively, are by default in the national interest, even if large parts of the voting public did not support these initiatives. Meacham writes that the same is true of initiatives by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt to increase economic opportunity to poorer Americans. Finally, Meacham states that when the character of the nation is behind the character of the president on issues of equality, the most important tools of the presidency are persuasiveness, temperament, and compromise.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Long Shadow of Appomattox: The Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, and Reconstruction”
For Meacham, the battle between hope and fear in US politics began on April 9, 1865, in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. There, General Robert E. Lee surrendered on behalf of the Confederate Army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Civil War. Yet while the North won the war, the South was “determined to win the peace—and victory in the long shadow of Appomattox would be defined by the extent to which the old Confederacy could subjugate blacks” (65). In an effort spearheaded by former Confederate soldier and journalist Edward Alfred Pollard, the South sought to promulgate a Lost Cause narrative in which states’ rights rather than slavery was the most important issue driving Southern secession. Now lacking the military means to assert its sovereignty and culture, the South turned to forming a political apparatus built upon white supremacy that would foreshadow and inform American political struggles for over a hundred years. Meacham writes, “Our history and our politics even now are unintelligible without first appreciating the roots of white Southern discontent about the verdict of the Civil War” (53).
In examining the Lost Cause narrative, Meacham first disproves its most blatant fallacy: that slavery was merely incidental to the Civil War. He cites countless examples of Southern politicians and elites who, in the lead-up to secession, named the preservation of slavery as the key issue at hand. Also crucial to the Lost Cause narrative was the careful cultivation of Robert E. Lee’s reputation as a virtuous gentleman who fought not to defend slavery but to defend his countrymen. Moreover, Lee’s questionable deification as a brilliant tactician allowed the South to believe that it lost the war only because of a lack of manpower and industrial strength.
In addition to preserving white supremacy through political rhetoric, the South sought to preserve it through paramilitary means like the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized freed black Americans, particularly those who attempted to vote and run for public office. No individual group did more to undermine Reconstruction efforts in the 1860s than the Ku Klux Klan, according to Meacham.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, Radical Republicans’ efforts to preserve the rights and safety of freed black Americans in the Old Confederacy was met with continued opposition from Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency in 1865 following Lincoln’s assassination. Though he initially expressed a desire to punish the South, Johnson quickly developed an allegiance to his Southern white constituency, largely ignoring the wants and needs of the rest of the republic. For Meacham, Johnson is the antithesis to Lincoln and the other presidents profiled here who direct the politics of hope toward the national interest. Blatantly racist and eager to return the South to a white supremacist status quo, Johnson vetoed several progressive moves by Congress that favored black Southerners, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. The Reconstruction Acts created military districts controlled by the federal government that would help ensure black suffrage. Both pieces of legislation eventually passed, despite Johnson’s vetoes.
As Johnson continued to lose ground on Reconstruction, he became more divisive than ever, playing up a sense of his own victimhood and that of the South in general. He also promoted conspiracy theories around plots to assassinate him and continually expressed a great measure of self-pity in speeches. Eventually, Johnson was impeached by Congress, though he avoided removal by one vote.
In 1868 former Union General Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency. Unlike Johnson, Grant was a man who appreciated the “bigness” of the office (66), according to Meacham. Yet faced with an insolvable racial crisis and a fractured populace—made even more so by his predecessor’s divisive rhetoric—Grant struggled to achieve reconciliation between the North and South without sacrificing the progress made for black Southerners by Congress. With the South refusing to meet Grant halfway, he instead supported several critical measures to preserve black suffrage and safety. These included the 15th Amendment, which banned discrimination at the ballot box on the basis of race, and the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871. By enabling the federal government to crack down on the Ku Klux Klan, the Enforcement Acts all but obliterated the Klan until its resurgence in the early 20th century.
Yet this victory of equality and progress would be short-lived. In exchange for winning the contested presidential election in 1876 against Democrat Samuel Tilden, President Rutherford B. Hayes made a series of concessions to Southern Democrats that effectively ended Reconstruction. Meacham characterizes the presidents who served from Hayes to the turn of the 20th century as feeble and unmemorable. Without the commitment from individuals like Grant and the Radical Republicans, black Southerners found themselves without legal, political, or bodily protection. Between Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs that operated with impunity, the presidents of the next quarter-century helped restore the Old Confederacy as a bastion of white supremacy, ushering in an era of “American apartheid” (69).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Given that The Soul of America is fundamentally a portrait of race and the presidency, it makes sense that Meacham begins his narrative with Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery and preserved a post-slavery United States. First, however, he prefaces this narrative with a brief exploration of what the presidency means in America. This illustrates how much a president’s success in office depends on that person’s character and temperament. More specifically, it supports Meacham’s contention that Trump is ill-suited to the presidency from both a psychological and historical standpoint. Meacham considers Trump’s approach toward the presidency to be divisive and nihilistic; he writes that such an approach “is novel and out of sync with much of the presidential past” (26). Elsewhere, Meacham’s criticism of Trump is far more implicit, lending credence to the metatextual role Trump plays throughout the book. For example, in recalling two stirring quotes from Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, Meacham adds, “To hear such voices is to be reminded of what we have lost, but also what can one day be recaptured” (27)—a clear reference to Trump.
Yet for all the ways Trump is depicted as anomalous in his political approach, the reader cannot help but sense echoes of Trump in two presidents mentioned in these chapters, albeit in vastly different contexts: Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson. Of Jackson, Meacham writes, “No other president fulminated more passionately or threatened his foes more forcefully” (29). During the Nullification Crisis of 1832, he even spoke of “hanging his opponents” (29). And then there is Jackson’s disturbing record on slavery and Indian removal, which Meacham mentions but arguably treats as footnotes here.
To be clear, Meacham—who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography on Jackson—by no means defends the president’s sins. At the same time, he tends to admire how Jackson transformed the presidency, going so far as to say that the work of this “unrepentant slaveowner” (28) helped pave the way for Lincoln’s heroic efforts to free the slaves. In any case, Meacham’s positioning of the unambiguously racist Jackson as a forerunner of presidents who embraced racial justice—at least within the context of their era—reflects uncomfortable truths about the evolution of presidential power. Might future scholars view Trump’s uncanny ability to reach audiences and mobilize his base using social media as equally transformative?
The president discussed here whom author views as most like Trump is undoubtedly Andrew Johnson. Indeed, in the year following the publication of The Soul of America, Trump told a group of minority congresswomen to go back to “the crime-infested places from which they came.” (@realDonaldTrump. “Why Don’t They Go Back and Help...” Twitter, 14 Jul. 2019, 8:27 a.m.) In response delivered on MSNBC, Meacham said that Trump “has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history.” (Croucher, Shane. “Trump Is Most Racist President Since Andrew Johnson, Says Historian.” Newsweek. 16 Jul. 2019.) Elsewhere, a passage in The Soul of America on an 1866 speech delivered by Johnson on George Washington’s birthday is eerily prescient of Trump. Meacham writes, “Johnson delivered an angry, self-pitying speech in the capital. ‘Who, I ask, has suffered more for the Union that I have?’ Johnson said. (Lincoln, for one, comes to mind)” (63). The parallels are clear to Trump’s 2020 declaration in front of the Lincoln Monument, in which he stated, “They always said Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.” (Milibank, Dana. “‘I Believe I Am Treated Worse,’ Trump Says. As If.” The Washington Post. 5 May 2020.) And then of course there is the most obvious parallel between the two men: both were impeached but acquitted in the Senate.
Yet for all of Meacham’s antipathy toward Johnson and Trump, the election of Ulysses S. Grant proves to the author that periods of presidential dysfunction will pass. Though Meacham hardly considers Grant on the same level as Lincoln or the Roosevelts, his analysis of the 18th president is in line with recent scholarship reevaluating and rehabilitating the career of a man who for over a century was, according to The New Yorker, “known for corruption, scandal, and booze.” (Gopnik, Adam. “Pour One Out for Ulysses S. Grant.” The New Yorker. 25 Sep. 2017.) Likeminded arguments can be found in a 2017 biography by Rob Chernow—whose biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired the Hamilton musical—and a 2020 television miniseries produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. Meacham admits that Grant “struggled to govern a majority-white nation along unionist principles in a racially backward age” (65). At the same time, he gives Grant enormous credit for using federal action against the Ku Klux Klan, effectively ending its reign of terror for the next 40 years.
The question of why Grant’s legacy has been so tarnished over the late 19th and 20th centuries speaks to a topic of enormous importance to Meacham in tracing the narrative of racial justice in America: the Lost Cause. In examining the Lost Cause’s impact on Grant’s memory, UCLA scholar Joan Waugh says, “It was not enough to idolize Robert E. Lee; Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation and the meaning of his cause, the Union cause, preservation of the democratic republic, and emancipation had to be destroyed, or at least cut down to size.” (Hardzinski, Brian. “How the South Destroyed the Legacy of War Hero and ‘Essential President’ Ulysses S. Grant.” KGOU. 28 Apr. 2014.) The fact that Grant’s legacy remained tarnished well into the 21st century speaks to the Lost Cause narrative’s success in rewriting the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and later the Ku Klux Klan.
To Meacham, the feeling of resentment and humiliation that demanded such a dramatic rewriting of history is a common thread in the history of white supremacy and efforts to combat it. The Lost Cause reflects an anxiety over lost status that is palpable in the anti-immigration movements of the 1910s and ’20s, the decades of segregation and Jim Crow apartheid in the South, and the nationalist-populist movements emerging in the United States and around the world today. It is in many ways the clearest expression of the politics of fear Meacham explores throughout the book, and thus the greatest challenge posed to the politics of hope.
Finally, Meacham regrets the string of ineffectual presidents who followed Grant and wonders if any of them might have “successfully marshaled the power of the office to fight the Northern acquiescence to the South’s imposition of Jim Crow” (69). It is difficult here not to think of James Garfield, the 20th president and successor to Hayes who was assassinated in 1881 after less than a year in office. Garfield was a firm abolitionist prior to the Civil War and a strong proponent of black suffrage following it. Although he like many other Republicans gradually drifted from the so-called radical wing of the party, Garfield proposed government-funded education for black Southerners and appointed a number of black Americans to federal positions, including Frederick Douglass. His successor, Chester A. Arthur, by contrast, is perhaps best known for signing one of the most racist and anti-immigrant laws in American history, the Chinese Exclusion Act.
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