Insurrection and Treason: What Did the Words of the 14th Amendment Mean in the 1860s?

Are these dozens of Capitol policemen lying dead or wounded
in the aftermath of the January 6th "insurrection",
or is it a scene from a Victor Fleming film?

The way the January 6 protests at the Capitol have been described by the usual Drama Queens, you would think that you are in Georgia when Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are galloping through the flames devouring Atlanta and that, in the aftermath, dozens of Capitol policemen are lying dead or wounded like in the harrowing outdoors hospital scene of Gone with the Wind. 

As The Hill cites Article 3 of the 14th Amendment to urge Congress to block Donald Trump from returning to the White Hose (as reported by Yael Halon on Fox News), a central question (beyond double standards) arises: What did insurrection and treason mean to the authors of the 1868 Amendment as well as to the rest of the population, i.e., in the 1860s? 

Related: • The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism
Insurrection and treason meant raising armies, equipping them with uniforms, firearms, and artillery, and going to war and to the battlefield — resulting in a number of American deaths in four short years in the middle of the 19th century greater than that of all America's wars of the 20th Century (including World Wars I and II) combined. (This is a major update of a post that appeared almost one year ago, to wit on on January 6, 2024.)

Are these a mob of violent MAGA nuts, deranged Tea Partiers, and other
treacherous  "insurrectionists" on January 6, or are they extras in a Hollywood movie?

During the administration of James Buchanan (the 15th president preceding Abraham Lincoln), his secretary of war stealthily gathered large stores of government arms and sent them to federal arsenals in the South, effectively anticipating the outbreak of civil war.

After the conflict of 1861-1865, Ulysses S Grant wrote in his memoirs that John B Floyd, the Secretary of War, 

scattered the army so that much of it could be captured when hostilities should commence, and distributed the cannon and small arms from Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.

The name of John Floyd's predecessor as Secretary of War was Jefferson Davis, and when first seven, then 11, states attempted to secede over the winter of 1860-1861 (related: During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder?), he would duly become president of the newly-formed Confederate States of America

So there you have it: To the people in the 1860s, to the writers of the 14th Amendment, insurrection and treason meant months and years of preparations, hoarding weapons, both light and heavy, raising armies, and engaging in warfare against the central government, the mother nation, and the Stars and Stripes, leading not to thousands upon thousands of deaths, but to hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Who in their right mind — besides the usual gang of Drama Queens, that is — could in any way reasonably compare January 6 to the Civil War or, for that matter, to 9-11 or to Pearl Harbor?

Indeed, only one words fits that comparison.

That word is: Preposterous.

CAPTION: Clark (Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn) Gable to Vivian Leigh,
sounding like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden: "With them
[the retreating USA-hating CSA rebel soldiers] goes the last semblance of law and order"

Related (Civil War era): • What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

To end this post, let us quote, approvingly, from (believe it or not) the New York Times. After spending half his column considering a counterfactual in The Antidemocratic Quest to Save Democracy From Trump, Ross Douthat gets to the main point:

Had [Hillary] Clinton explicitly tried to induce Congress to overturn the result of the 2016 race and had a left-wing protest on her behalf turned into a certification-disrupting riot, almost none of the people currently insisting that we need to take the challenge to Trump’s ballot access very seriously would be saying the same about a challenge to her eligibility. Instead, they would be accusing that challenge of being incipiently authoritarian, a right-wing attack on our sacred democracy.

And they would have a point. Removing an opposition candidate from the ballot, indeed, a candidate currently leading in some polling averages (pending the economic boom of 2024 that we can all hope is coming), through the exercise of judicial power is a remarkably antidemocratic act. It is more antidemocratic than impeachment, because the impeachers and convicters, representatives and senators, are themselves democratically elected and subject to swift democratic punishment. It is more antidemocratic than putting an opposition politician on trial, because the voters who regard that trial as illegitimate are still allowed to vote for an indicted or convicted politician, as almost a million Americans did for Eugene V. Debs while he languished in prison in 1920.

Sometimes the rules of a republic require doing antidemocratic things. But if the rule you claim to be invoking treats Jan. 6 as the same kind of event as the secession of the Confederacy, consider the possibility that you have taken the tropes of anti-Trump punditry too literally.

The term “insurrection,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote on Wednesday, is “a defensible shorthand for Jan. 6.” But it’s not “the most precise” term, because while “Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office,” he “was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”

This concession prompted howls of online derision from his left-wing critics, but Chait is obviously, crashingly correct. There are arguments about precedent and implementation that tell against the case for Trump’s ineligibility and prudential arguments about the wisdom of suppressing populist fervor by judicial fiat. But the most important point is that there are many things a politician can do to subvert a democratic outcome, all of them impeachable and some of them potentially illegal, that are simply not equivalent to military rebellion, even if a bunch of protesters and rioters get involved.

To insist otherwise, in the supposed service of the Constitution, is to demonstrate yet again that too many would-be saviors of our Republic would cut a great road through reason and good sense if they could only be assured of finally getting rid of Donald Trump.

Related (January 6): • The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism
• The Central Absurd Inconsistency of the Ray Epps Conundrum Described in Two Sentences
• Kabuki Theater: the "top 12 strange, stand-out moments" of the January 6th Committee's interview with Ray Epps
• Déjà Vu All Over Again in the Banana Republic of Biden: No, the Democrats did not run better campaigns in 2022; they cheated, as usual
• Isn’t it strange that in Florida, with all those strict rules against cheating, the GOP red tsunami happened as predicted? The Democrats have again fixed, rigged, and stolen an election
• Let’s dispense with the myth that liberals are really against voter fraud; Voter fraud is actually an essential part of their election strategy
• If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough
• What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost
• Democrats don't support voter fraud; they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased
• Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression
• Of the 47 countries in Europe today — the nations and the continent that the Democrats are always telling us to emulate — 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote
• Joe Biden, Why Are You Calling Denmark a White Supremacist Country? And You, Barack Obama: Why Are You Calling Africa a Racist Continent?
• 2020: an almost totalitarian effort by the national political and social media to suppress and ridicule any doubt of the accuracy of the election result
The DOJ and the FBI "have no conscience or soul": “There is a fervor to attack the J6 protesters, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them”
• "I believed a farrago of lies" Writes VIP Whose Leftist Half of the American Electorate was "Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda" Regarding the Jan. 6 (Non-)Riots
• Our élites constantly lecture everyone about "disinformation," about "big lies", etc; They're the biggest liars of all, with zero accountability
• Isn't America Being Governed by a Mafia Family Dynasty, setting things up so that there will always be Democrats in power?
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Voter Fraud: A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"
• Dennis Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored
• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State