What might have been: President Andrew Johnson signs executive order undermining the emancipation of slaves

Comparing abolition and abortion

“Two weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden on Friday signed an executive order aimed at protecting access to abortion nationwide despite efforts by some states to outlaw or severely restrict it.”—MSN

When I saw the reports of President Biden’s official response to the restoration of states’ powers to restrict or outlaw violent abortions, I confess that I was horrified. For those generations of liberal Democrats who have righteously proclaimed that decisions of the United States Supreme Court are “the supreme law of the land,” it is remarkable that their position was abandoned the moment an unwelcome decision was handed down.

Now the Court is a political pariah, deserving of the utmost disrespect as its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center was leaked prematurely, the addresses of conservative Justices were revealed, mobs showed up at their homes, violent attacks were made on pro-life churches and pregnancy centers, and now our President has openly defied the decision to the extent of his executive power.

Mindful of the fact that the right to life is the first and most fundamental of all human rights and that our Constitution and laws are intended to protect it, those of us who support that right for unborn children (and the elderly and handicapped, by the way) as well as everyone else, regard the widespread, and utterly vile, societal and governmental contempt for it as deserving of our utmost contempt. To drive that point home, I think it entirely fair to provide an historical analogy to demonstrate the genuine evil being aided and abetted.

The American Civil War was started by southern attacks on a U.S. fort in South Carolina, borne of the South’s determination to defend slavery at all costs. While President Abraham Lincoln promised to leave slavery alone where it existed, a combination of the war’s dynamics and the Commander-In-Chief’s convictions brought an end to slavery. It began with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the war that freed slaves in rebel territory and culminated in the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed slavery in all the states.

To America’s great misfortune, Lincoln was assassinated early in his second term and was succeeded by a loyal southern Democrat who was far less enthusiastic about granting full fights to former slaves, now citizens. While he did resist the Reconstruction Congress’s measures to ameliorate blacks’ condition, he never issued an executive order to retard or reverse the end of slavery. But had he been an outright opponent, openly expressing contempt for blacks’ freedom as President Biden has for unborn children, I can provide a scenario of what he might well have done to undermine Congress’s intentions.

Congress sent the proposed 13th Amendment to the states at the end of January, 1865, while Lincoln was still alive. But not until December did three-fourths of the states ratify it, and Lincoln was killed in April. So, President Johnson would have had the opportunity to push back. How could he justify that?

First, he could declare that the Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure, the full force and effect of which ended with the South’s surrender at Appomattox. Of course, the freed slaves had long since left the plantations for the most part, so this would be problematic, to say the least. But that leads to the next justification.

Thousands of plantations were deprived of the labor needed to harvest cotton, rice and indigo crops. The end of slavery placed severe burdens on Americans who had for generations been providing these valuable crops, not to mention food and shelter for their slaves--unlike northern factories which provided only employment and a wage, but not food and shelter.

Next, very, very few of the slaves were educated or even trained in other lines of work besides agriculture, so they had become homeless and destitute. The Freedmen’s Bureau was not up to the task of transitioning these millions of men and women to freedom.

Finally, these uneducated former slaves were unfit to participate in the nation’s political life, not as voters and certainly not as office holders. Publicly saying this would certainly embolden violent racists and Democrats to take matters into their own hands, as indeed they did, making a dead letter of the 15th Amendment intended to secure voting rights for all men.

President Johnson never took the actions or espoused the viewpoints here summarized, but all it took was his hostility to Republicans’ determination to secure the freedom, citizenship, equal protection of the laws and the voting franchise for those formerly held in slavery to encourage the enemies of black freedom to commit their crimes and ultimately make emancipation less than complete for another 100 years.

President Biden stopped short of what many of abortion’s partisan wanted him to do, but his executive order is enough to give the green light to the likes of Jane’s Revenge to continue its violent opposition to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, that gave us 49 years of protected baby killing.

Had President Johnson been as blatant as President Biden, he might have appealed to a recent (1857) Supreme Court decision that declared the Constitution to be for white men only, viz. Dred Scott v. Sanford.

Biden blatant, you say? Well, he has encouraged residents of abortion-restricting states to cross state lines to where it is legal, or to use any federal facilities they choose to secure an otherwise illegal abortion.

I conclude that Biden is worse than Johnson, which means that we have every reason to expect that the lawless pro-abortion mobs will make life a living hell for those who oppose them. They wanted abortion to be unquestioned, uncriticized and unopposed forever and this defeat stirs them to defiance just as much as the end of slavery enraged slavery diehards. The President is their main cheerleader.