Gongol.com Archives: June 2025
June 12, 2025
As a rationale for entrusting the President with the power of the executive pardon, Federalist Paper No. 74 argues that a swift and decisive pardon may be the best available tool for ending an insurrection. In the word of "Publius" (Alexander Hamilton), "[I]n seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall. The dilatory process of convening the legislature, or one of its branches, for the purpose of obtaining its sanction to the measure, would frequently be the occasion of letting slip the golden opportunity. The loss of a week, a day, an hour, may sometimes be fatal." ■ The utility of this power depends upon its exigency: It is not a power of reconciliation or healing, merely one that can usefully help to end an armed rebellion faster than other tools. It isn't a power to be used tomorrow; it's a power to be used when the alternative is that there may not be a tomorrow without it. ■ Robert E. Lee applied unsuccessfully for a pardon after the Civil War. He was one of a tiny handful of individuals not to be pardoned. He was, however, paroled and signed an oath reinstating his allegiance to the Constitution. The logic is plain: It was safer for a fragile nation to bring a tactically skilled military leader back into the fold of loyalty to the Constitution than to have him available for hire on the outside. ■ But it was a practical act, not a principled one. Lee not only took up arms against the country of his birth, he did so with the skills taught to him at West Point and cultivated in his long career with the US Army. It wasn't just rebellion; it was betrayal of the people alongside of whom he had learned his profession. ■ So, too, of the other officers who rebelled beside him. And to the extent they were recipients of a blanket pardon by Andrew Johnson, we should only see that today as a necessary act in a fragile moment. It should not absolve them of their betrayal of country and Constitution. ■ They are all dead now. It no longer serves any useful purpose to forgive them. That was for the generation who lived through the Civil War, not for those who see it in retrospect today. Forgiving -- or, worse, celebrating -- those who betrayed their country would be an act of madness.
