Jefferson Error Plain

“When Jefferson Davis doddered into that courtroom, many of the faces he saw were Black. Among the two hundred spectators, a quarter were Black freedmen. And then the grand jury filed in. Six of its eighteen members were Black, the first Black men to serve on a federal grand jury. Fields Cook, born a slave, was a Baptist minister. John Oliver, born free, had spent much of his life in Boston. George Lewis Seaton’s mother, Lucinda, had been enslaved at Mount Vernon. Cornelius Liggan Harris, a Black shoemaker, later recalled how, when he took his seat with the grand jury and eyed the defendant, ‘he looked on me and smiled.’ Not many minutes later, Davis walked out a free man, released on bail. And not too many months after that the federal government’s case against him fell apart.” In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore with some history that’s all-too applicable to the present: What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrectionist Ex-President. “After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?”