What is conservative and what is radical? 1860 and 2016

Hello and welcome to post seven in our series examining the serious and striking comparisons between the U.S. in the months (and years) before the 1860 presidential campaign and the 2016 presidential campaign. Today we extrapolate a parallel between Trump and Abraham Lincoln.

Again, our point of comparison between the 1860 and the 2016 presidential campaigns is sectionalism. In 1860, slavery drove sectional division north and south. In 2016, as we say in our first post,

Today’s sectionalism, then, represents a divide between liberals and conservatives that seems as strong as the divide between North and South ever did. Liberals and conservatives are found in every geographic region of the country, which means there is no region that serves as a safe haven for either…

Sub out “slavery” for “gun control”, “immigration”, or “religious freedom”, and you find that the language used in the 1860 campaign is strangely similar to the language used so far in the 2016 campaign.

Speaking of slavery, a New York Times editorial from October 1861 focuses on whether or not newly nominated Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln really intends to end slavery as southerners insist. Despite the fact that Lincoln represented a party founded in large part to stop the spread of slavery, and that Lincoln had, over the previous four years (since his debates with Stephen Douglas) been more and more clear that he found slavery morally wrong and dangerous to the political Union and American democracy, and that most Republican voters expected Lincoln to “teach the South a lesson” after having its way in Washington for four score and seven years, the author of the editorial is sure that Lincoln will do nothing to stop slavery:

After Mr. Lincoln shall be elected we think he will very promptly take steps to dispel the fogs that have been thrown around his political position – and that he will present himself to the country as a Conservative, devoted to the Union, considerate equally of every section and of every State, and resolved faithfully and with firmness to maintain the Constitution in all its parts. We have no doubt that he will proclaim himself opposed to the extension or increase of Slavery, and equally opposed to any interference of Congress, or of the North, with Slavery in the Southern States. He has repeatedly declared himself in favor of an efficient Fugitive Slave Law, and opposed to negro suffrage and the political equality of the negro race. We regard these as eminently conservative views, and if his Administration adheres to them with firmness and fidelity, we believe it will contribute largely to the restoration of the public peace, and fortify the Constitution and the Union still more thoroughly in the affection and confidence of the American people…

In this short paragraph we have a wealth of contradictions:

—The idea that Lincoln’s plans as a Republican president were unclear, shrouded in “fog” by outsiders, is an amazing example of wishful thinking. Very few people in the U.S. in the election year of 1860 felt unclear about what Lincoln would do regarding slavery. Northerners assumed he would stop it from spreading and eventually end it in the South; Southerners assumed he would immediately abolish it throughout the Union. This is because of Lincoln’s many statements about hating slavery and wishing to help it along to oblivion, and because of his party’s antislavery basis.

—The statement about a conservative being equally devoted to every section and state is also pretty astounding. The 1860 election was the first in which no presidential candidate represented the entire country. The Republicans were Northern, the Southern Democrats were Southern, the Democrats were primarily Southern, and the Constitutional Union party was created to attract loners who did not take a side—of whom there were vanishingly few. That was the whole point of the 1860 election: the country had irretrievably divided over slavery. There was no going back, and certainly not with a candidate like Lincoln who was antislavery. He did not represent the South.

—The characteristics of “eminently conservative views” given here are shocking, as they are three examples of radical race hatred against black Americans and, in the case of the FSL, a violation of the Constitution (state antislavery laws were overruled by federal law insisting that slavery must be acknowledged in those states while slave states were not forced to acknowledge abolition). This is what passes for normal in a country driven to extremes of sectionalism: maintaining the horrible, anti-democratic status quo is “conservative” while attempting to restore democracy is “radical”.

—How is it possible to confidently claim that if Lincoln does continue to maintain the proslavery status quo it will restore the Union and public peace, and fortify the Constitution? The Constitution is already violated, and it’s the status quo of appeasing slaveholders itself that has led the Union to the brink of rupture and destroyed the public peace.

If we look to the present 2016 presidential race, we see unsettling similarities between this article and how Trump is often described by his admirers. He may seem like a dangerous radical, but that’s just a “fog” of misinformation spread by his detractors, all of whom are themselves dangerously biased. Trump is devoted to the United States and its Constitution, and will treat all Americans with the same love and respect, no matter how much he targets certain populations for his hatred. His deeply racist, sexist, and anti-democratic views are actually “eminently conservative”, representative of the established status quo and traditional American values.

At the same time, the editorial writer’s willful blindness to the reality that the nation has changed and is on a very dangerous course toward civil war is seen today in writers and speakers and average Americans on both the Democratic and Republican sides. Pretending that the 2016 election is business as usual is as crazy as pretending that the 1860 election was. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that you live in dangerous times, and that the status quo is being fundamentally challenged. Presenting radical hate as common sense, threats of nuclear war as protecting national security, and an unstable character as “honest” is as much an attempt to say that nothing is changed when everything has changed as anything written in 1860.

Next time: the end of our journey

Delegates forced to vote for Trump, not forced to vote for Douglas

Entry six in our series examining the serious and striking comparisons between the U.S. in the months (and years) before the 1860 presidential campaign and the 2016 presidential campaign focuses on a detail of the second 1860 Democratic convention in Baltimore that hews closely to a detail of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland.

Again, our point of comparison between the 1860 and the 2016 presidential campaigns is sectionalism. In 1860, slavery drove sectional division north and south. In 2016, as we say in our first post,

Today’s sectionalism, then, represents a divide between liberals and conservatives that seems as strong as the divide between North and South ever did. Liberals and conservatives are found in every geographic region of the country, which means there is no region that serves as a safe haven for either…

You’ll remember that in post five on the 2016 Republican national convention, we described how the 1860 Democratic national convention fell apart after proslavery fire-eaters walked out rather than support slavery moderate Stephen Douglas as their candidate. The Democrats decided to try again six weeks later in Baltimore. When we wrote post five, we noted that it was uncertain whether the 2016 Republican national convention would suffer the same division as moderate delegates tried to rescind their promised votes for Trump. The answer is yes and no.

In Baltimore in 1860, the Democrats had to decide whether to let the southern proslavery delegates who had walked out of the Charleston convention six weeks earlier to participate in the new convention. Eventually the committee charged with the decision said the party should re-admit all of the renegade delegates except those from Louisiana and Alabama. Those states would have to provide new delegates. They did so, and the new delegates joined the convention, but as they did almost all of the other southern delegates walked out again, and this time they took some northern and western delegates with them.

When Douglas was nominated by well over a 2/3 margin of the remaining delegates, the official Democratic party had its presidential candidate. But the delegates who walked out regrouped in another location in Baltimore and elected their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, in the name of their new party, the Southern Democratic party.

The Democrats were officially split, and this helped guarantee a win for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, in the presidential election.

In the New York Times‘ initial coverage of the reconvening of the Democratic convention, before the walkout, there is an interesting note:

The most significant step taken was the action upon a resolution offered …that all the delegates admitted to seats in the Convention should be deemed bound in honor to support its nominees. Nothing could be intrinsically more just than such a rule. Conventions become a mere farce when they cease to carry any obligation—and if one portion of their members are held bound by their action, while another portion is entirely free, they become insurgents of oppression. But the Southern Delegates refused utterly to assent to any such restriction of their liberty. They declared their determination to secede en masse in advance of any action, if such a rule should be adopted.

This is almost identical to what happened in Cleveland this year: the Republican convention began with some delegates attempting to force through a resolution to change the rules of the convention to allow them to rescind their promised votes for Trump. They were not successful, and basically the above argument was made against them that “Conventions become a mere farce when they cease to carry any obligation—and if one portion of their members are held bound by their action, while another portion is entirely free, they become insurgents of oppression.”

The present-day Republican delegates did not “utterly refuse to assent to this restriction of their liberty”, they did not walk out, and the convention did not split. But the eerie similarities between 1860 and 2016 continue in this moment from both conventions.

Next time: political spin, 1860 and 2016

The Republican National Convention, Cleveland 2016 (and Charleston 1860)

As we write this, our fifth entry in our series on the serious and striking comparisons between the U.S. in the months (and years) before the 1860 presidential campaign and the 2016 presidential campaign, the Republican National Convention is just beginning in Cleveland. And so we turn to May 1860, and the Democratic National Convention that fell apart in Charleston, SC that month over sectionalism.

Again, our point of comparison between the 1860 and the 2016 presidential campaigns is sectionalism. In 1860, slavery drove sectional division north and south. In 2016, as we say in our first post,

Today’s sectionalism, then, represents a divide between liberals and conservatives that seems as strong as the divide between North and South ever did. Liberals and conservatives are found in every geographic region of the country, which means there is no region that serves as a safe haven for either…

The 2016 Republican convention has just begun, so we cannot compare it fully to the 1860 Democratic convention, but the anticipation that there will be some measure of delegate revolt against Donald Trump at the Republican convention this week, and perhaps a real fight to ensure his official nomination as many Republicans skip the convention, and some delegates lobby for the right to set aside the commitment they made during the primaries to vote for Trump, and others predict that a last-minute alternative candidate will be presented during the convention all lead us to think of the collapse of the 1860 Democratic convention.

It could be that none of the things we describe will happen this week, and the Trump nomination will be seamless. But let’s take a look at what can happen when a convention is torn apart by sectionalism.

In 1860, the Democratic party was perilously divided between proslaveryites and antislaveryites. The Whig party had already dissolved over the issue, as slavery divided its members and made compromise on that or any other issue impossible. Now the Democratic party faced the same threat: could it unite behind a candidate to run against the new Republican party? Stephen Douglas, the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that destroyed the Compromise of 1850 by allowing people in any territory, regardless of geography, to vote on whether they would enter the Union as a free or a slave state, was the presumptive nominee going into Charleston.

But Southern proslaveryites were not satisfied with Douglas, because to get re-elected in free Illinois in 1858, Douglas had had to backtrack on the KNA that free Illinoisans hated by coming out against the Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court stated that not only were black Americans not U.S. citizens, but they never could be, and slavery could never be abolished by the U.S. judicial or legislative systems.

At the Charleston convention, U.S. Rep. William Yancey of Alabama, a violent proslaveryite, led a protest of the Douglas candidacy by representatives of seven deep-South states who formed a caucus within the party that re-wrote the Democratic presidential platform to be aggressively pro-slavery. They knew Douglas could not accept the nomination on those terms.

The rest of the delegates went on with the nomination process, but they could not reach the necessary two-thirds majority for Douglas, in part because the party chairman Caleb Cushing insisted that the proslavery caucus that had withdrawn from the convention had to be counted. Without those delegates, Douglas could not get a two-thirds majority of all delegates. On May 3, the convention was dissolved, and rescheduled to try again in Baltimore, MD, six weeks later.

In the end, the Democratic party could not recover from the divide driven into it by slavery. 110 proslavery delegates walked out of Baltimore. The remaining moderates nominated Douglas, while the fire-eaters who left created their own “Southern Democratic” party and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. (Adding to the chaos was one more candidate: former Whigs created the Constitutional Union party and nominated John Bell; their only platform was to keep the Union together in the face of civil war over slavery.)

On May 4, the day after the Charleston convention folded, the New York Times featured a bitter editorial:

The Charleston Convention has abandoned the attempt to nominate a Democratic candidate for the presidency. …The contest between the two sections of the Union has at last penetrated the Democratic party and rendered it impossible for the two wings to agree upon a declaration of principles. When the majority adopted its platform the minority seceded. Thereupon the delegates who remained, and constituted the rightful Convention, resolved that a vote of two thirds, not of the actual body, but of the whole original number, should be essential to a nomination. In other words, the seceders were still to be counted, and to have all their original weight as members of the Convention! Upon what ground of reason or of common sense the majority, and especially the delegates from this State, thus put themselves bound hand and foot into the power of the seceding minority, it is not easy to conjecture. The result was to give the South the victory. They have controlled the Convention, and prevented the nomination of any candidate. Whether on reassembling at Baltimore they will harmonize their differences remains to be seen.

The disruption itself is a fact of very marked importance, not only in the history of political parties but in of the country itself. It seems to sever the last link of nationality in the political affairs of the Union. When all other organizations have been gradually giving way, one after another, to the pressure of sectionalism, timid and conservative men have fallen back upon the national position of the Democratic Party, and felt that so long as this was maintained the Union would be secure. The first effect of this Charleston split will be to alarm this class by the dread of immediate dissolution.

Some of the Republican journals refer to this incident as only another proof of the “irrepressible conflict” between Freedom and Slavery—and as showing that the contest must go on until one or the other is extirpated. If we believed this to be the true view of the question, we too should despair of the Union. But we do not. We do not believe that the conflict is between Slavery and Freedom… we regard the struggle as one for political power—and Slavery as playing merely a secondary and subordinate part on either side. Unquestionably, thousands of Northern men seek the overthrow of Slavery, and thousands of Southern men seek its permanence and extension, as the aim of their political contests.But both would be disappointed. Neither class would reap the advantage which it anticipates from victory.

…The South believes sincerely that the North seeks power in order to crush Slavery. In our opinion it denounces Slavery mainly that it may acquire power.

The editorial goes on to say that power is unstoppably passing from South to North and the South needs to accept the new order since the North has no intention of abolishing slavery in the South (only in the territories). This power shift is only fair, the editorial claims, since the South has had all the power in Washington for too long, and now it’s the North’s turn. That’s the gist of the article—that the slavery issue is just a tool Northerners can use to restore an equitable balance of power in the nation.

This editorial is remarkable in many ways. Its description of Americans clinging to the hope of party unity in the face of mounting irreconcilable differences in society and politics rings true to us today, as we see desperate attempts to unify the Republican party behind a candidate who does not represent most Republican principles, and as we see Democrats desperately trying to unite the party behind Clinton after the excitement and revolutionary flavor of Sanders’ campaign. We must have party unity at all costs in our divided nation, or the last traditional political big tents will be gone, and with them the last vestiges of people with different opinions being able to find common ground and work together nationally.

The claim of the editorialist that slavery really has nothing to do with the battle between North and South is an intelligent insight that is almost correct. He is saying that people who want power will ride any bandwagon to get it, and that if slavery is the issue that you can use to gain power, people will use it even if they could not care less about slavery itself. Politicians can rise to power by taking a stand on slavery and making slavery the top issue—all while never doing anything to actually impact slavery by abolishing or expanding it. That’s what the writer means when he says stopping or extending slavery is merely “the aim of their political contests”, and that both sides would be disappointed if they won the battle, because if the battle ended there would be no way to ride to power anymore.

This is certainly true. We see politicians today taking strong stands on social issues simply because this will make them well-known and get them elected. The many instances of “family values”, “Christian values” candidates who have been found having affairs with women or with men, or being involved in corruption, or simply changing sides to join the family and Christian values vanguard when it became powerful enough to benefit them make this clear. If, for example, the right to abortion was suddenly no longer challenged, many politicians would no longer have a political identity and would have to find another divisive issue pronto on which to make their name.

But the editorialist is wrong in another sense. Slavery was really an issue and the breakup of the Democratic party was really caused by slavery and the breakup of the Union and the war that came were really about slavery. The editorialist will not admit that people actually cared about slavery because if he does, he must admit that war is coming, and he does not want to do that. The only way breaking up the 1860 convention could give the seceders power was if they knew that their constituents cared enough about slavery to support them walking out of the Charleston convention, and cared enough about slavery to split the party in an election year.

Those constituents cared about slavery as a political issue because they cared about it personally—as something within their society every day. They supported slavery, for a variety of reasons. Yes it’s true that the strong majority of Southerners did not enslave people. But that doesn’t mean they did not support slavery, as the basis of their economy, as a regional tradition, as a way to reserve political power to whites, etc. To say that slavery was just a word politicians used was wrong.

And the same is true today. Many people cling to the notion that America is not really divided, that politicians are just sowing division as a concept they can trade on. This was originally the case, when neo-conservatives began to sow that division in the late 1970s. By now, 40 years later, the division is real. It is flowering and bearing seed in every state as people who have been told for decades that the federal government is their enemy and that it should be overthrown take their chance to do so.

We can’t say what will happen this week in Cleveland. But we anticipate that the editorials written after it closes will bear close reading to see how much they echo the writer of 1860.

Next time: a tie between the 2016 Republican convention and the second 1860 Democratic convention

Trump and Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech

Welcome to part four of our series on the serious and striking comparisons between the U.S. in the months (and years) before the 1860 presidential campaign and the 2016 presidential campaign. Here we take a look at Abraham Lincoln’s speech at the Cooper Institute in New York City (now Cooper Union) on February 28, 1860 and compare one part of it with the rhetoric coming from Trump supporters in 2016.

Again, our point of comparison between the 1860 and the 2016 presidential campaigns is sectionalism. In 1860, slavery drove sectional division north and south. In 2016, as we say in our first post,

Today’s sectionalism, then, represents a divide between liberals and conservatives that seems as strong as the divide between North and South ever did. Liberals and conservatives are found in every geographic region of the country, which means there is no region that serves as a safe haven for either…

Sub out “slavery” for “gun control”, “immigration”, or “war on Christianity”and you find that the language used in the 1860 campaign is strangely similar to the language used so far in the 2016 campaign.

In the Cooper Union address, Lincoln represented the new Republican Party, in only its second presidential election season. He was in 1860 still walking the fine line of saying that while the Republican Party was dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery into the west, it would not try to abolish slavery in the south. In most of his speeches on the campaign trail, Lincoln tried to do two things at once: force southerners to accept a Republican victory, if it came, by emphasizing that winning the popular vote would mean that most Americans wanted to stop the spread of slavery and therefore southerners could not claim that the election had been hijacked by a radical minority; and convince southerners that this antislavery majority did not mean that the south would have to get on board with the rest of the nation and abolish slavery.

This is the context for the statement we’re about to quote from the Cooper Union address, in which Lincoln addresses proslaveryites and debunks their claim that they have a Constitutional right to enslave other people and, therefore, an implied right to secede from the Union if slavery is abolished or even limited to the south. Here is the candidate:

…But you will break up the Union, rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound: but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours to take slaves into the Federal Territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

Sub out “slaves” and the right to enslave for the right of anyone and everyone to buy and openly carry guns anywhere in public, even schools, or the right of self-professed Christians to deny public services to people who they feel offend Christianity, or the right of anti-choice legislatures to deny women access to health care from providers that also perform abortions, and you have a Democratic speech right out of 2016.

Many people today who self-identify as conservative in our new sectionalism of conservative v. liberal consistently claim a constitutional right to deprive others of their personal liberties. Yet the Constitution, as Lincoln points out, is “literally silent about any such right”. The Second Amendment does not protect private gun ownership for private use; it protects the right of American citizens to own guns so they can fight in local militias sanctioned and controlled by local governments. The Constitution does not mention Christianity in any way, and the Founders officially denied any Christian basis for the United States. Abortion or the rights of fetuses are not in the Constitution.

Too often an American’s right to freedom of speech, which actually is in the Constitution, is construed to protect “rights” that are not in the Constitution. Ever since the Supreme Court decided that actions could be identified as speech, this has happened. If it’s constitutional to protest outside an abortion clinic, clinics must be unconstitutional. If religious freedom is protected in the Constitution, then all of my religious beliefs must also be constitutionally protected (nope—see Gay Marriage, Religious Freedom, and the First Amendment for a rundown of the difference between religious worship and religious belief).

But conservatives who believe that all their beliefs are enshrined in the Constitution are often deaf to these arguments. As Lincoln put it, they will destroy the Government, unless they be allowed to construe the Constitution as they please, on all points in dispute between them and liberals. They will rule or ruin in all events. The eagerness of Trump’s supporters to destroy the federal government that they see as denying them their constitutional rights is a harvest sown by neoconservative Republicans for over thirty years now. This anti-government, Constitution-bending activist section may likely dispute the outcome of the presidential election if Clinton wins. And so we find ourselves, like Lincoln, facing a possible contested election over chimerical Constitutional rights. Secession seems slightly less likely today than in 1860… but it seemed unlikely to most observers in 1860.

Next time: on with the 1860 campaigns

Trump and the caning of Charles Sumner

In this our third post in our series examining the serious and striking comparisons between the U.S. in the months (and years) before the 1860 presidential campaign and the 2016 presidential campaign, we look at another event that preceded the 1860 presidential campaign but cast a long shadow over it: the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner.

As you know, Sumner was an abolitionist who gave a speech condemning the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May 1856. In his speech, Sumner excoriated the authors of the Act, which potentially allowed slavery into the North; these were Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. In his devastation of Butler, Sumner said in part,

The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.

Brooks’ nephew, Preston Brooks, was a Representative to the House at the time. Declaring his uncle insulted, Brooks fulfilled the contemporary Southern ideal of chivalrous honor by waiting until Sumner was almost alone in the Senate chamber, then going up to him supported by two friends and stating “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine,” and then began beating Sumner, who was still sitting at his desk, on the head with a heavy gold-topped cane.

Sumner fell to the floor unconscious and covered in blood as Brooks continued to beat him, while Brooks’ friends, Virginia Congressman Henry Edmundson and South Carolina Representative Laurence Keitt, held back the few men present who tried to intervene. Keitt actually took out his revolver and threatened them. Finally, two Representatives were able to stop Brooks, and Sumner was carried out of the Senate.

Sumner’s recovery was long and difficult, and he was out of office for months. Brooks resigned when a motion to remove him was raised, then voted back into office by his constituents, and continued to serve until his sudden death in 1857.

Northern public opinion was beyond outraged: that someone could attack a U.S. Senator in the Senate and get away with it was beyond belief. Southern public opinion was jubilant: abolitionists who had been “suffered to run too long without collars [had been] lashed into submission”, according to the Richmond (VA) Enquirer.

Everyone expected that this event would break the camel’s back—if it did not start a literal war over slavery, it would start a legal war on slavery led by antislavery and, hopefully, formerly neutral Congressmen who would kill it through legislation. But that did not happen. In fact, very little happened as a result of the caning. Few Northern lawmakers wanted to be responsible for starting a war. But more importantly, even fewer had any faith left in the democratic system in the U.S. It had been taken over by the Slave Power, and compromise after compromise with slavery in Congress had made it impossible for Congress to kill it.

Here is what a New York Times editorial said about the caning on May 28, 1856, when hopes were high that such a completely out-of-bounds attack would lead to action:

…malignity always overreaches itself and neutralizes its bitterness by its own folly. The assault on Senator Sumner is a notable proof in point… If [Brooks] could have foreseen, as any but a maniac must have done, that for every blow inflicted upon the head of Mr. Sumner, the cause of Slavery must lose at the least ten thousand votes, he probably would have desisted from his foul and cowardly deed. …true to their instincts, and blinded by the madness that must lead to their utter defeat, [the South] has chosen to defend the outrageous scoundrelism of their self-appointed champion…

…Mr. Brooks may congratulate himself upon having done more to add to the [antislavery] Republican Party, and to give vigor and permanency to the Anti-Slavery sentiment of the North, than all the Free Soilers have done in Congress.

Flash forward to 2016 and Donald Trump, whose bigotry, xenophobia, and misogyny have led him to make statements considered beyond the pale on a regular basis for over a year now. Each time he crosses a new line, editorials like the one above appear, predicting that now he has finally gone too far and will assuredly lose his following and the presumptive Republican presidential nomination. Democratic politicians have confidently predicted a drop in Trump’s poll numbers, with former supporters potentially moving to support Clinton instead.

Yet it has not happened. Just as Brooks went calmly on with the full support of his like-minded constituents, so goes Trump. Americans know that Congress is just as paralyzed and poisoned in 2016 as it was in 1857, often unable to address immigration, women’s reproductive rights, gun control, or the other issues that stand in for slavery today for the same reason Congress couldn’t act on slavery in the 1850s—one side would not let it. Proslaveryites (at that time almost all Democratic) had a stranglehold on Congress. That’s what people back then meant when they talked about the Slave Power. Just as the Republican majority today will not even allow a vote in the House on gun control, having imposed a gag rule on the subject, so the Democratic majority then would not allow a vote on slavery, having imposed a gag rule on that subject in 1834 (it was rescinded a decade later, but had a long-lasting effect). When Congress does address these important issues today, the conservative majority is almost assured that the vote will go their way, stripping more Americans of their civil rights.

As liberals look on with dismay and continue to await the moment when Trump actually says or does something that strips him of his popularity with conservatives, one can’t help thinking about Preston Brooks, and fearing the worst.

Next time—into the 1860 campaign

The Kansas-Nebraska Act: 1854 and 2016

Our first comparison in our series examining the serious and striking comparisons between the U.S. in the months (and years) before the 1860 presidential campaign and the 2016 presidential campaign goes back a little to an article about the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.

As you recall, the KNA overthrew the Missouri Compromise (1820) that established a line at 36°30′ north of which all states entering the Union would be free, and south of which would be slaveholding states. Stephen Douglas, the Democratic author of the KNA, wanted Nebraska to enter the Union free, but the territory was so large it extended south of the compromise (or, better put, appeasement) line and Southern Congressmen refused to let it enter as free. So Douglas split the territory in two, creating the Kansas Territory to be a potential southern state. Anticipating a howl of outrage from northern members of his party at turning part of a free territory into a slave territory, Douglas then proposed that the people of each territory be allowed to decide for themselves, in a vote, whether to enter the Union free or slave (this was called popular sovereignty).

The legacy of that decision is infamous in U.S. history. People who lived in other states went to Kansas to swing the vote, and violence between proslavery and antislavery interlopers gave the territory the name Bleeding Kansas. Abolitionist John Brown got his start in Kansas as an antislavery interloper who led a small militia that killed proslavery interlopers.

In 1854, when the KNA was passed, the nation was divided once again along sectional lines, and now we come to our comparison with 2016. As we said in our opening post,

Today’s sectionalism, then, represents a divide between liberals and conservatives that seems as strong as the divide between North and South ever did. Liberals and conservatives are found in every geographic region of the country, which means there is no region that serves as a safe haven for either…

When we read one of the many New York Times‘ editorials on the KNA, it rings eerily familiar. Substitute in “gun control” or “immigration”, or “war on Christianity” for “slavery”, or “liberal” for “Northerner” and “conservative” for “Democratic” and it could be an account of Congress in 2016:

Popular indignation at the passage of the Nebraska bill finds vent in various projects, some wise and some otherwise. …Cassius Clay [abolitionist and one of the founders of the Republican Party] proposes that every body who voted for the bill shall be treated to a social as well as a political crucifixion—and seeks to prepare the country for a dissolution of the Union. [Abolitionist William Lloyd] Garrison [seizes] the opportunity to push [a] program of dissolving the Union and breaking down the Constitution. We hear men a good deal more sensible than any of these proclaiming their hatred of all compacts [agreements] which bind us to the Slaveholding interest, and declaring they will keep no faith with them.

…The champions of the [KNA] know perfectly well that they have acted in direct opposition to the popular will. The originators of the iniquitous measure have for months been as clearly persuaded that the great sense of the country is against this outrageous breach of honor and good faith, as they are of their own existence, yet they have accomplished it through recreant Northern votes. These Northern traitors prating Democratic cant have gone deliberately against what they knew to the the mind of the North. The smallest fraction of decent regard to honor and propriety would have led them to put it over till the sense of the country could be tested by another election. They were chosen to vote on no such question. Its coming up was not dreamed of by the people at large. When it was sprung upon the country, there was but one consentaneous cry of indignation throughout all the Northern land, in which honest and honorable men of all parties joined.

…A large portion of the honest and honorable feeling of the South was against it too.The palpable indecency of driving it through under such circumstances, was doubtless as much a matter of distinct consciousness to the majority that perpetrated it, as to the minority that resisted it, as to the country that cried out against it. They did it because it was in their power to do it—they had the Might and that they knew was all the Right they had.

The clear and seemingly accepted sense of the nation being firmly divided into North and South, each with a plan for the nation that is utterly opposed to the other’s, and anyone who dreamt of bridging the gap lacerated as a villain—all these are bitterly familiar to Americans today. So is calling for a “political crucifixion” of anyone outside one’s own faction. And, increasingly, so is the threat of the nation splitting over political ideology.

The KNA truly was a terrible piece of legislation, which justified this kind of outrage and made it understandable to call those who supported it traitors without honor or propriety. The issues we face in 2016 do not match up. 1854 was about enslaving human beings and breeding them for sale. 2016 is about whether to let non-white (Latin American) and increasingly non-Christian (Muslim) immigrants into the country. 2016 is about whether every American should own and carry a gun, and whether transgender citizens possess civil rights. These seem like lesser issues that could be solved politically by drawing on our national legacy of always extending more and more civil rights to our citizens and future citizens.

But that’s what makes 2016 exactly like 1854 or 1860—there is a growing contingent of Americans who want to stop extending civil rights to all U.S. citizens and future citizens. They want to roll back civil rights in this nation and reserve them to the few: the native-born, straight, and Christian. That is a kind of slavery, and that’s why the 21st-century sectionalism of liberal v. conservative is as potent and dangerous as the 19th-century sectionalism over slavery ever was.

Next time: Trump and Brooks

Presidential campaigns, 1860 and 2016

Here we launch a series examining the serious and striking comparisons between the U.S. in the months (and years) before the 1860 presidential campaign and the 2016 presidential campaign. We’ve often noted that the growth of a new kind of sectional tension in this country runs disturbingly parallel to sectional tension in the years before the Civil War; here we explore those parallels by going back to newspaper reports on the 1860 campaign and comparing what we find there to what we see happening now.

What is sectionalism? It’s a situation in which one part of a unified group begins to feel alienated, and to separate itself from that group, on the basis of geography or interests. Those interests usually become passions. In the two decades before the Civil War, sectionalism occurred as the South (geography) began to separate itself mentally and emotionally from the North because of the South’s commitment to slavery (interest), which the North did not share. Eventually, the North reciprocated by developing its own sectionalism, which rejected union with the South over slavery (see our post Northern sectionalism before the Civil War for more on that). Each geographic region defined itself in terms of slavery, embracing or rejecting it, and insisting that slavery was the one key issue of the day and for the nation. Eventually, sectionalism led to secession, and, as Lincoln said, the war came.

Today, sectionalism still has a slight geographic component, as southern state legislatures make a stand against liberty and justice for all (through state laws demonizing illegal immigrants, gay and transgender Americans, women seeking abortions, etc.) while most northern states do not. But geography has been trumped by interests: the real divide in the U.S. is ideological, between liberals and conservatives. Neo-conservatives, as they were called in the 1980s, found a stronghold in formerly Democratic southern states in the 1960s as the Democratic party under Johnson reached a pinnacle of civil liberty and social justice, particularly for racial minorities, that racist leaders of southern states and state politics could not accept. They moved to the Republican party, which, under Nixon, welcomed them as a bloc that supported the president’s and the party’s desire to stop civil rights legislation (on the basis that the federal government was overreaching and trying to “legislate morality”).

Conservatism had a boom under Reagan that moved it out of the south and into many white, middle-class homes around the country, as their inhabitants identified with Reagan’s image of the “real” America as white, self-supporting, and Christian, as opposed to everyone else, who was not white, on welfare (and abusing it), and non-Christian. Many white Americans also vibed to Reagan’s statement that the federal government was a curse and a burden (“government isn’t the solution to the problem; government is the problem”) and that it should be dialed way back to have minimal impact on people’s daily lives (i.e., no more social legislation). (See our post Reagan’s Farewell, 1989: We the People need no government for more on that.)

Many political leaders and people in the west seemed to embrace this new conservative message, as they saw themselves in a battle to the death with the federal government over access to and development of/mining on public lands, water, and protecting endangered animals.

Over the decades from the 80s to the 2010s, the new conservatism found strongholds in every part of the nation, wherever poor and middle-class white people felt disenfranchised and/or insulted by big business, immigrants, and/or liberals. To be fair, the movement is not entirely white; there are black and Latino conservatives. But the movement began with white people “taking back” their rights from newly-empowered minorities. For the past five years or so, the new dimension of sexuality has been added in, as conservatives generally identify as straight and feel their rights threatened and curtailed by the expansion of civil rights to gay and transgender people.

Today’s sectionalism, then, represents a divide between liberals and conservatives that seems as strong as the divide between North and South ever did. Liberals and conservatives are found in every geographic region of the country, which means there is no region that serves as a safe haven for either, although the south and west (particularly the Mountain zone) skew conservative while the northeast and Pacific Coast skew liberal. The midwest seems divided.

This new sectionalism has been an issue in every political campaign since 1980, but this year it is the be-all and end-all of the entire presidential election. And this is where the comparisons become striking:

—1860 was the year that sectionalism over slavery became the main issue of a presidential election. 2016 is the year that sectionalism between liberals and conservatives is the main issue.

—In 1860 the Democratic party fractured under the stress; the party split, nominating two different candidates: a Southern Democratic proslavery candidate, and a (northern) Democratic candidate who was on the fence but unlikely to abolish slavery. Today, the Democratic party vote may be badly divided between Sanders and Clinton.

—A new party emerged to take the place of the Whig party that had already been destroyed by sectionalism: in 1860 the Republican party was a party of radical social change dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and “its eventual extinction”. Today, the Republican party is promoting radical social change by (presumably) nominating Trump as its candidate.

—In 1860, some people watching the campaigns were confident that the country would not split over it, while others tried hard to laugh off the idea, but no one denied that talk of civil war was in the air. In 2016, we laugh about people saying they’ll move to Canada if their candidate doesn’t win, and try hard to promote the idea that people whose candidate loses will put country ahead of cause and support the winner, but no one can deny that there are many voices saying they will do no such thing.

Next time we will get into the early coverage of the 1860 campaign and begin our comparisons, hoping as always to draw some useful plan of action from the exercise.

Who is—or will be—the most radical U.S. president?

…as we continue through this election year, we’re reposting from the last presidential election year: a list of U.S. presidents that could be considered radical in one way or another.

We first posted this in 2012 because of an angry complaint in the news that President Obama was “the most radical president in American history.” Today, in 2016, “radical” has morphed into a positive word for most voters: it means an outsider ready to tear up Washington and change the country, whether that’s Sanders or Trump. (Somehow a potential first woman president is no longer radical; the powers of sexism have made sure that Clinton is depicted as just another politician).

As we consider who may end up being our president next year, let’s review:

We heard someone involved in the campaign of a Republican primary candidate recently state that President Obama is “the most radical president in American history.” One is accustomed to hyperbole during an election season, but this was a particularly arresting case of myth-making. I assume this person meant “radical” as a negative, although radical change can be positive or negative. Whether well- or ill-intentioned, though, the claim that our current president is the most radical ever does not hold water. Even an extremely brief glance over presidential history brings to light many other candidates for that title:

George Washington: Radical in a good way. Encouraged a radically new form of government, one without a monarch, even when offered the post himself. Supported our new democratic system, represented it with honor and dignity to the world, and set crucially important precedents, including stepping down from office after his second four-year term. Tried to prevent political parties from forming—if he had been successful, we’d have a radically different political scene today.

Thomas Jefferson: Radical in mixed ways. It’s hard to picture Americans today admiring a president who supported a violent dictatorship and felt the U.S. should provide military support for it (as Jefferson did in France during the Reign of Terror). Jefferson also overrode the Constitution to make the Louisiana Purchase (Congress, not the president, should likely have carried out any geographic expansion).

Andrew Jackson: Radical in a bad way. Sponsored intense corruption within his Administration by appointing cronies to high political office, legislated through the veto, broke the law by dueling, put his own sense of personal honor above the law, and, most importantly and unforgivably, demanded and carried out the removal of the Native Americans of the southeast, even after the Supreme Court found in favor of the Cherokees’ remaining on their land.

Abraham Lincoln: Radical in a good way. He ended slavery in the United States by writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and refused to negotiate an end to the war by agreeing to allow slavery to continue in a restored Union. Pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. Planned to move an Amendment giving black men the right to vote through Congress as well. Went from racist to abolitionist in a few short years.

Woodrow Wilson: Radical in mixed ways. Promoted legislation to end child labor, pushed for the creation of the League of Nations and for U.S. membership. On the other hand, an entrenched racist who kept civil rights legislation at bay, helping to ensure that the 1910s extended the nadir of civil rights in this country by another decade.

Franklin Roosevelt: Radical in mixed ways. Tried to govern bascially without Congress, tried to tamper with the Supreme Court to make it his tool, pursued a series of economic policies that helped lengthen the Depression. On the other hand, he understood that the government had an obligation to protect vulnerable categories of citizen, such as the elderly, children, and the poor. Provided a reliable federal safety net to these people for the first time in U.S. history.

Lyndon Johnson: Radical in a good way. The series of civil rights acts passed not only during his Administration, but because of his untiring efforts, finally put the nation on the track Lincoln had envisioned for Reconstruction. Education reform, Medicare, urban renewal, conservation, space exploration, and a war on poverty, all pushed forward by Johnson. His failure to see through the advisors who pushed the war in Vietnam is the blot on his record.

Ronald Reagan: Radical in a bad way. Set in motion the anti-government movement amongst conservatives, made cutting taxes and running a federal deficit a battle-cry of the Republican party, was generally unmoved by opportunities to negotiate an end to the Cold War.

George W. Bush: Radical in a bad way. Pursued war with Iraq based on misinformation about Iraqi arms manufacture from advisors, trampled on civil rights in the name of homeland security, and moved aggressively to stop taxation of the wealthy, immobilize the federal government, remove the federal safety net for vulnerable citizens, and pay for the war through deficit spending.

So there’s a short list of some radical presidents. We could use a few more who are radical in good ways.

Bernie Sanders… or William Jennings Bryan?

Who’s the outsider politician who simultaneously maintains a rebel stance against business-as-usual politics while being a party mainstay? The man who takes a stand against corporate money in politics while lambasting Republican cronyism? The man who won enthusiastic support for his presidential bid despite the long odds of his winning the Democratic nomination?

Yes, it is both Sanders and Bryan. The parallels are strong, and we were thinking about it today as yet another radio news program talked about whether it was right for Sanders to continue to campaign when he can’t win a majority of Democratic delegates. We talk about Bryan, the Nebraska Senator and early Populist, in our post on his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Bryan ran for president three times, in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Here are some bullets that describe Bryan at the turn of the century that could easily be used to describe Sanders today:

—Bryan stood against big banking and big business, headquartered mostly on the East Cost, standing up for the right of small farmers and small business owners and workers to get a living wage and fair lending terms from banks

—Bryan came from a state with a small population that had no influence over national politics (Nebraska)

—He was anti-imperialist and ran twice for president on a platform to release all U.S. territories and dominions (he ended up supporting the Spanish-American War in 1898 because he incorrectly believed that if the U.S. beat Spain and kept the Philippines, those islands would then be given their independence by the U.S.)

—He said “universal peace cannot come until justice is enthroned throughout the world”

—In his 1908 campaign, he stood against corporate domination, called for all political contributions made by men running corporations to be publicly revealed (on election day), and that anyone who did not cooperate should be jailed

—His slogan was “Shall the People Rule?” (and it was not a rhetorical question)

When people today call Sanders a Populist, they are using a term invented for, by, and of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan’s entrenched hatred and suspicion of wealthy people, people from the coast, and big business blinded him to the possibility that a) not all poor people were good people; b) many of the poor white farmers who loved him were merciless promoters of segregation, Jim Crow, and the terror and torture of black Americans; c) and that a nation needs all economic segments working together to grow and be just. Bryan’s willingness to be cartoonish in attacking injustice and corruption led many Americans who were not against his basic principles to back William McKinley in 1896 and again in 1900, because McKinley’s “don’t rock the boat” conservatism came to look practical and wise when placed side-by-side with Bryan’s 6-hour speeches raging against the machine.

In 1908, Bryan ran against outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt’s chosen successor William Taft, and Bryan raged about the undemocratic nature of one president “choosing” another. This was insider politics at its worst to Bryan, and he was baffled and outraged when the American people approved it with a resounding victory for Taft.

We’re not here to promote a particular candidate here at the HP, but we are here to suggest to those Sanders supporters that a little moderation can be a wise thing if you really want change and not just rage.

Just to be fair, let’s continue our time-traveling comparisons:

Taft himself was not well-qualified to be president, and he did not really want to be president—his dream was to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (a dream he actually achieved in 1921). He made some hawkish foreign policy moves to satisfy the conservative wing of his Republican Party, while doing nothing to encourage its growing liberal wing, which he did not like but which was supported by his powerful mentor Theodore Roosevelt. The Republican Party continued to fracture under Taft until the election of 1912, when Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate, splitting the Republican vote, and Woodrow Wilson won the election.

…sound vaguely familiar, or plausible?

Alexander Hamilton was not black

Just a note from the past and future: we wrote this back in the days before the musical Hamilton, without any fortune-telling abilities to know that a story presenting Alexander Hamilton as a black man would come along and reach millions of people. So this post from us is NOT about contradicting or critiquing the premise of the musical! Enjoy.

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…it doesn’t seem likely. We’ve tackled this issue before (“Warren Harding and his ‘Negro’ Percentage”), in which an American politician who seems pretty darn white is the focus of claims that he really wasn’t.

This has a long history in the U.S. It was started by white racists as an effective way to smear someone; “accusing” someone of being part-black was foolproof because it was almost impossible for the person to disprove: no matter how they pointed to their ancestors, someone could claim there had been hushed-up sex outside marriage with a black man or woman.

One of the oddest examples of this was when rumors were spread that the popular singer Dinah Shore was half-black, despite the fact that her Jewish parents, who emigrated from Russia, did not seem like likely candidates to have had sex outside marriage with a black American. Shore’s husky voice and her childhood in Tennessee were enough for racists to spread the rumor, which was supposed to devastate her and end her career.

Luckily, by the 1950s this kind of attempted character assassination did not work as well as it had earlier in the century. The civil rights movement in this country eventually made the people “accusing” someone of having “black blood” (whatever that is) look stupid and bigoted and backward (because they were), and the tactic died away because it was no longer harmful.

But then history took a turn, as it so often does. Having a mix of races in one’s ancestry moved from being a disaster to a neutral factor to a positive. For some historians and activists, finding black ancestry in a public person’s identity became a way to reclaim history for Americans who weren’t white. That’s perfectly valid: figures in American history who had a mix of races but hid it out of fear of being attacked should be reclaimed.

It’s only when someone is chosen when it just seems very unlikely that they were anything but white that it’s problematic. Warren Harding is one. Alexander Hamilton is another. His own attempts to erase his history before he left St. Croix in the Caribbean and arrived in the New Jersey colony at age 17 have led some people to claim that he was covering up a black father when the real “shames” (at that time) in his life were: his mother’s bigamy; her living with and having two sons by a man she was not legally married to (James Hamilton); Alexander not being allowed to attend the same Church of England school as other colonial white boys because of this and having to go to a school run by a Jewish woman instead; his father abandoning the family when he found out about the bigamy; his mother’s early death and Alexander’s subsequent boot to the streets when her first husband seized all her property.

One can well imagine that an ambitious man like Hamilton did not want any of that known in his new colonial home, where he was trying to make it big.

The Caribbean in the 18th century was not a place where a white woman could easily engage in a sexual relation with a black man, nor a place where that would go unpunished. Just because his mother was a nonconformist when it came to legal marriage did not mean she would have a relationship with a black man at a time and in a place where that was not only illegal but punishable by torture and death.

Claims that Hamilton “looked black” are unsubstantiated. We don’t have a lot of drawings of him, but the ones we do have are fairly unequivocal. And all the rumors spread about Hamilton in the 13 colonies had to do with his sexual rapacity, not his race. Those who would naturally connect the two are, we hope, long gone.

So while it would be gratifying to claim a great American for black history, we’re still awaiting proof that Alexander Hamilton was black.