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Daily Archives: October 30th, 2022

Where Will This Political Violence Lead? Look to the 1850s.


HISTORY DEPT.

Where Will This Political Violence Lead? Look to the 1850s.

In the mid-19th century, a pro-slavery minority — encouraged by lawmakers — used violence to stifle a growing anti-slavery majority. It wasn’t long before the other side embraced force as a necessary response.

The destruction of the city of Lawrence, Kansas, and the massacre of its inhabitants by the Rebel guerrillas, August 21, 1863. Quantrill’s Raid. | Wikimedia Commons

By JOSHUA ZEITZ

10/29/2022 01:10 PM EDT

Early Friday morning, an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, on the head with a hammer.

Details are still scant, but early indications suggest that the suspect, David Depape, is an avid purveyor of anti-Semitic, QAnon and MAGA conspiracy theories. Before the attack, the assailant reportedly shouted, “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?”

This is the United States of America in 2022. A country where political violence — including the threat of political violence — has become a feature, not a bug.

Armed men wearing tactical gear and face coverings outside ballot drop boxes in Arizona. Members of Congress threatening to bring guns onto the House floor — or actually trying to do it. Prominent Republican members of Congress, and their supporters on Fox News, stoking violence against their political opponents by accusing them of being pedophiles, terrorists and groomers — of conspiring with “globalists” (read: Jews) to “replace” white people with immigrants.

And of course, January 6, and subsequent efforts by Republicans and conservative media personalities to whitewash or even celebrate it.

Pundits like to take refuge in the saccharine refrain, “this is not who we are,” but historically, this is exactly who we are. Political violence is an endemic feature of American political history. It was foundational to the overthrow of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the maintenance of Jim Crow for decades after.

But today’s events bear uncanny resemblance to an earlier decade — the 1850s, when Southern Democrats, the conservatives of their day, unleashed a torrent of violence against their opponents. It was a decade when an angry and entrenched minority used force to thwart the will of a growing majority, often with the knowing support and even participation of prominent elected officials.

That’s the familiar part of the story. The less appreciated angle is how that growing majority eventually came to accept the proposition that force was a necessary part of politics.

The 1850s were a singularly violent era in American politics. Though politicians both North and South, Whig and Democrat, tried to contain sectional differences over slavery, Southern Democrats and their Northern sympathizers increasingly pushed the envelope, employing coercion and violence to protect and spread the institution of slavery.

It began with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which stripped accused runaways of their right to trial by jury and allowed individual cases to be bumped up from state courts to special federal courts. As an extra incentive to federal commissioners adjudicating such cases, it provided a $10 fee when a defendant was remanded to slavery but only $5 for a finding rendered against the slave owner. Most obnoxious to many Northerners, the law stipulated harsh fines and prison sentences for any citizen who refused to cooperate with or aid federal authorities in the capture of accused fugitives. Southern Democrats enforced the law with brute force, to the horror of Northerners, including many who did not identify as anti-slavery.

The next provocation was the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, which effectively abrogated the Missouri Compromise and opened the western territories to slavery. It wasn’t enough that Democrats rammed through legislation allowing the citizens of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to institutionalize slavery if they voted to do so in what had long been considered free territory. They then employed coercion and violence to rig the territorial elections that followed.

Though anti-slavery residents far outnumbered pro-slavery residents in Kansas, heavily armed “Border ruffians,” led by Missouri’s Democratic senator David Atchison, stormed the Kansas territory by force, stuffing ballot boxes, assaulting and even killing Free State settlers, in a naked attempt to tilt the scales in favor of slavery. “You know how to protect your own interests,” Atchison cried. “Your rifles will free you from such neighbors. … You will go there, if necessary, with the bayonet and with blood.” He promised, “If we win, we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.”

The violence made it into Congress. When backlash against the Kansas Nebraska Act upended the political balance, driving anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs into the new, anti-slavery Republican party, pro-slavery Democrats responded with rage. In 1856, Charles Sumner, a staunch anti-slavery Republican, delivered a speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas.” In response, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina beat him nearly to death on the Senate floor with a steel-tipped cane — not entirely dissimilar from the hammer-wielding conspiracy theorist who attempted to murder Paul Pelosi Friday.

“Bleeding Sumner,” as the outrage came to be known, was not a one-off. Pro-slavery congressmen began showing up armed on the House floor. They threatened their Northern colleagues with whippings and beatings. They talked openly of civil war and rebellion.

In some ways, none of this was new. Pro-slavery forces had long been violent and anti-democratic. When abolitionists in the 1830s began sending anti-slavery literature to Southern slaveholders, the pro-slavery forces tried to ban them from using the postal service. They destroyed the printing presses of abolitionist publishers and, in 1837, famously lynched Elijah P. Lovejoy, an abolitionist clergyman — after dumping his press in the river.

But the 1850s were different — not just in the intensification of pro-slavery violence, but in the reaction it elicited.

Southerners had long assumed that their Northern antagonists would buckle and fold. Anti-slavery men and women tended to draw their faith from evangelical Protestantism, which favored moral suasion over coercion. They were pacifists by nature. They seemed unlikely, when faced with threat and violence, to fight back.

That was probably true in 1850. But by mid-decade, something changed.

It probably began with the Fugitive Slave Act, which inspired resistance — increasingly, violent resistance — on the part of Northerners. When in 1852 President Franklin Pierce sent a battery of Army and Navy servicemen to seize Anthony Burns, a fugitive who had escaped to Boston, many former moderates found became angry, and radicalized. Amos Lawrence, a conservative businessman and politician, later attested, “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Armed anti-slavery mobs increasingly proved willing to engage in standoffs with federal officials. Outside Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Maryland slaveowner and his son, accompanied by armed marshals, showed up at a farmhouse and imperiously demanded the return of a Black man whom they claimed was their runaway slave. Local residents, Black and white alike, engaged in a gun fight with the “man stealers,” leaving one of them dead and two others wounded.

Something changed in the tenor of anti-slavery rhetoric as well. Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved person and lay preacher, declared that he was a “peace man,” but white men who willingly acted as “bloodhounds,” hunting down human beings to return them to slavery, had “no right to live.” “I do believe that two or three dead slaveholders will make this law a dead letter.” In a speech entitled “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” Douglass conceded that perhaps it was not strategically smart, given the disbalance of power, but he affirmed that it “is in all cases, a crime to deprive a human being of life” and not a sin to kill those who would. “For a white man to defend his friend unto blood is praiseworthy,” Douglass wrote in 1854, “but for a Black man to do the same thing is crime. It was glorious for Patrick Henry to say, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ It was glorious for Americans to drench the soil, and crimson the sea with blood, to escape the payment of three-penny tax upon tea; but it is a crime to shoot down a monster in defense of the liberty of a Black man and to save him from bondage.”

His was a minority opinion in the mid-1850s, but it was catching steam.

A new generation of leaders welcomed an eye-for-an-eye approach to keeping the western territories free. Subsidized by a group of Massachusetts businessmen and religious abolitionists, the New England Emigrant Aid Company offered material assistance to Northern homesteaders willing to relocate to Kansas to populate the state with an anti-slavery majority. It also furnished them with rifles (known popularly as “Beecher’s Bibles,” an homage to Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent anti-slavery clergyman) and ammunition to help settlers stave off attacks by border ruffians who pillaged Free State property and rigged territorial elections. By 1857 the normalization of political violence advanced so far that when a prominent abolitionist urged the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to furnish material support for armed insurrections by enslaved people, even Wendell Phillips, a leading abolitionist and heretofore a pacifist, rose to agree. “I want to accustom Massachusetts to the idea of insurrection,” he said, “to the idea that every slave has the right to seize his freedom on the spot.”

It was this embrace of retributive justice and support for violent liberation that led figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a Unitarian minister), Gerrit Smith (a wealthy reformer and founder of a nonsectarian church in upstate New York), Theodore Parker (also a Unitarian clergyman), and Frederick Douglass to furnish John Brown with funds for his failed attempt to organize an uprising of enslaved people. Brown, a religious zealot who came to believe that he was God’s instrument in the service of emancipation, was widely scorned as a fanatic when in 1859 he was hanged for murder, incitement of an enslaved people’s rebellion, and “treason” against the state of Virginia. Within a few short years, many Union soldiers would come to memorialize him in song as they marched through the South.

Members of Congress, too, tired of being under the Southern Democrats’ boot. When Galusha Grow, a Republican from Pennsylvania, wandered over to the Democratic side of the House floor in 1858, Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina snarled, “Go back to your side of the House, you Black Republican puppy.” Grow, a future House speaker, clocked Keitt with a right hook and sent him spinning.

In 1860 Rep. Owen Lovejoy, a Republican from Illinois and brother of the slain editor, rose to deliver a blistering anti-slavery harangue. In response, Rep. Roger Pryor of Virginia physically assaulted him, prompting Rep. John Potter of Wisconsin to intercede. Potter so thoroughly walloped Pryor that the Virginian felt compelled to challenge him to a duel — a common ploy, as Northerners tended to view dueling as barbaric, and normally declined. Potter astonished his Southern colleague by accepting the challenge and stipulating (as was the right of the challenged party) bowie knives as his weapon of choice. Pryor, recognizing that he’d likely be hacked to death, backed out, claiming that knives were beneath the dignity of a gentleman’s duel. (Potter might well have taken his cue from Benjamin Wade, a radical Republican senator from Ohio who, when challenged to a duel by a Southern colleague, stipulated squirrel riffles at 20 paces.)

Within a year, full-blown war had broken out.

Today, political violence is on the rise. It doesn’t always emanate from the right. Several years ago, a left-wing radical attempted to gun down several Republican congressmen and nearly succeeded in killing GOP Whip Steve Scalise. But in the main, the coercion and bellicosity reside on the right. We see it in the rise of far-right, white power militias like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who in some cases enjoy semiformal relationships with local Republican Party organizations and leaders. We see it in MAGA rallies, where former President Donald Trump regularly incites violence against journalists and political opponents, oftentimes with GOP officeholders and candidates standing silently beside him. We see it in the growing number of political ads in which Republican candidates brandish assault weapons and even shoot things up.

On some level, none of this is new. The United States has seen more than its share of political violence — from Redemption (the process by which white Southerners violently ended Reconstruction in the South) and Jim Crow, to presidential assassinations in 1865, 1881, 1901 and 1963. As recently as the early 1970s, bombings and sabotage were a common tool of far-left domestic terrorists. All told, between January 1969 and April 1970 there were over 5,000 terrorist bombings in the United States and 37,000 bomb threats, many emanating from the radical left, not including the attempted bombings of over two dozen high schools.

But here is the difference this time: In 1970, liberal members of the Senate didn’t march alongside members of the Weather Underground, pump their fists in the air and egg them on. They didn’t align themselves with violent extremists — court their votes, grant interviews to their underground newspapers, appear at their conferences. That’s the stuff of the 1850s, when mainstream Democrats turned away from democracy and openly embraced violence, vigilantism and treason to protect a world they saw at risk of disappearing.

The decision of so many American conservatives to embrace political violence, or the language and symbolism of political violence, is a troubling reality. We can’t have a functioning democracy if one side refuses to accept its norms and rules.

But history suggests we might have more to worry about.

Democratic violence in the 1850s ultimately led a majority of Republicans, who represented the political majority, to draw a line in the sand and enforce it by violence when necessary. If history is a guidepost, we are on the precipice of dangerous future in which politics devolves into a contest of force rather than ideas. That’s a future everyone should want to avoid.

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The War Never Ended


HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
OCT 30
 
 

This week, news broke that as a guest on the right-wing Real America’s Voice media network in 2020, Republican candidate for Michigan governor Tudor Dixon said that the Democrats have planned for decades to topple the United States because they have not gotten over losing the Civil War. According to Dixon, Democrats don’t want anyone to know that white Republicans freed the slaves, and are deliberately strangling “true history.”

Dixon’s was a pure white power rant, but she was amplifying a theme we hear a lot these days: that Democrats were the party of enslavement, Republicans pushed emancipation, and thus the whole idea that Republican policies today are bad for Black Americans is disinformation.

In reality, the parties have switched sides since the 1850s. The shift happened in the 1960s, and it happened over the issue of race. Rather than focusing on party names, it makes more sense to follow two opposed strands of thought, equality and hierarchy, as the constants.

By the 1850s it was indeed primarily Democrats who backed slavery. Elite southern enslavers gradually took over first the Democratic Party, then the southern states, and finally the U.S. government. When it looked in 1854 as if they would take over the entire nation by spreading slavery to the West—thus overwhelming the free states with new slave states—northerners organized to stand against what they called the “Slave Power.”

In the mid-1850s, northerners gradually came together as a new political party. They called themselves “Republicans,” in part to recall Jefferson’s political party, which was also called the Republican party, even though Jefferson by then was claimed by the Democrats.

The meaning of political names changes.

The new Republican Party first stood only for opposing the Slave Power, but by 1859, Lincoln had given it a new ideology: it would stand behind ordinary Americans, rather than the wealthy enslavers, using the government to provide access to resources, rather than simply protecting the wealthy. And that would mean keeping slavery limited to the American South.

Prevented from imposing their will on the U.S. majority, southern Democrats split from their northern Democratic compatriots and tried to start a new nation based on racial slavery. They launched the Civil War.

At first, most Republicans didn’t care much about enslaved Americans, but by 1863 the war had made them come around to the idea that the freedom of Black Americans was crucial to the success of the United States. At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln reinforced the principles of the Declaration of Independence and dedicated the nation to a “new birth of freedom.” In 1865 the Republican Congress passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ending enslavement except as punishment for crime (we really need to fix that, by the way).

After the war, as southern Democrats organized to reinstate white supremacy in their states, Republicans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment, giving the federal government power to guarantee that states could not deny equal rights to American citizens, and then in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing Black men the right to vote. They also established the Department of Justice to defend those rights. But by 1871, white Republicans were backing away from federal protection of Black Americans.

Democrats continued to push white supremacy until 1879, when former Confederates took over Congress and threatened to destroy the government unless the federal government got out of southern affairs altogether (it’s a myth that the army left the South in 1877). Voters turned so vehemently against the former Confederates trying to impose their will on the nation’s majority that national Democrats began to shift away from their southern base, which dominated the southern states. In 1884 they ran New Yorker Grover Cleveland for office and won.

For the next fifty years, both national parties would waffle on race, trying mostly to ignore it.

But World War II changed the equation.

Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun to offer some economic protections to Black Americans with the 1930s New Deal, but Black soldiers coming home from the war demanded true equality. The blinding of Black veteran Isaac Woodard in 1946 by South Carolina law enforcement officers woke Democratic president Harry S. Truman up to the need for equal protection of the laws.

Unable to get civil rights laws through Congress, Truman worked to desegregate federal contracting and military installations. Immediately, racist southern Democrats, led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, broke away from their own president to form their own short-lived “Dixiecrat” party backing racial segregation.

Then, in 1954, Republican Dwight Eisenhower put Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, at the head of the Supreme Court. It promptly used the Fourteenth Amendment to declare the segregation of public schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It seemed both parties had come around to supporting racial equality.

But white supremacists in the South responded to desegregation by attacking their Black neighbors. So in 1957, with a bipartisan vote, Congress passed a civil rights act to protect Black voting. Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history to try to stop it.

Republicans who hated the government’s postwar regulation of business saw an opening to get the Dixiecrat contingent on their side. In 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative, published under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, called for getting rid of the business regulation and social safety laws passed since 1933, and claimed that the Supreme Court’s protection of civil rights was unconstitutional.

When Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he gave a rousing inaugural address promising to bring freedom to the world but, afraid of alienating southern Democrats, didn’t mention race at home. World War II veteran James Meredith promptly decided to test just how committed to human rights Kennedy actually was. Meredith sued for admission to the University of Mississippi, and when the courts ruled the state had to admit him in 1962, Kennedy had to choose between the northern wing of his party that supported civil rights, and the southern racists. Pushed by his brother and attorney general Robert, Kennedy backed Meredith’s registration with federal troops.

Republicans already mad at business regulation now worked to pick up the white supremacists who had backed the Dixiecrats and who, by 1964, were attacking Black Americans and their white allies as they tried to enroll Black voters. In 1964, Republicans ran Goldwater for president on a platform calling for slashing federal power and empowering the states to run their affairs as they wished. Goldwater lost the election, but Strom Thurmond publicly switched parties, and Republicans picked up the five states of the Deep South (as well as Arizona) for the first time since Reconstruction.

Democrats, meanwhile, went all in on racial equality. Kennedy had come around to calling for civil rights legislation, and after his assassination, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, pushed hard first for the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which Congress passed while FBI agents were searching for three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi—and then, after law enforcement officers in Selma, Alabama, attacked voting rights advocates as they crossed a bridge named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Democrats had become the party of equality. But the votes for the civil rights laws had been bipartisan, and it was not at all clear that the Republicans wouldn’t also back civil rights. After all, Goldwater had gotten shellacked when he made common cause with white supremacists.

But in 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon knew he had a hard fight ahead of him. He figured he needed to pick up the old Dixiecrats, who were now politically homeless. He went to Thurmond with a quiet promise not to use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South in exchange for his support. This “Southern strategy” worked. Thurmond publicly backed Nixon.

From then on, white supremacists made up a key part of the Republicans’ base, and the party increasingly pushed on old racial themes—Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, for example, or George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad, or the trope of “makers” and “takers”—to keep them on board.

The parties had switched positions over equality and hierarchy. Since 1964, Republicans have always won the majority of the nation’s white vote, while Democrats rely on Black voters, especially Black women.

And that is the actual true history of how it happened that a Republican candidate for office, representing a party that once defended civil rights, made white power rants on public media.

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