My question, after looking back to 1861 and then at 2021, is this:
What is the definition of insanity? How many times will we do the
same thing over and over before we realize that it is impossible for
democracy and capitalism to coexist?
Carl Jarvis
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 07:47:41 +0000
Subject
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new voter suppression
law last night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will
Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished
table, with six white men around him, under a painting of the Callaway
Plantation on which more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. As
the men bore witness to the signing, Representative Park Cannon, a
Black female lawmaker, was arrested and dragged away from the
governor’s office.
It was a scene that conjured up a lot of history.
Voting was on the table in March 1858, too. Then, the U.S. Senate
fought over how the new territory of Kansas would be admitted to the
Union. The majority of voters in the territory wanted it to be free,
but a minority of proslavery Democrats had taken control of the
territory’s government and written a constitution that would make
human enslavement the fundamental law in the state. The fight over
whether this minority, or the majority that wanted the territory free,
would control Kansas burned back east, to Congress.
In the Senate, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, who
rejected “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born
equal,” rose to speak on the subject. He defended the rule of the
proslavery minority in Kansas, and told anti-slavery northerners how
the world really worked. Hammond laid out a new vision for the United
States of America.
He explained to his Senate colleagues just how wealthy the South’s
system of human enslavement had made the region, then explained that
the “harmonious… and prosperous” system worked precisely because a few
wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect
and but little skill.” Hammond explained that in the South, those
workers were Black slaves, but the North had such a class, too: they
were “your whole hireling class of manual laborers.”
These distinctions had crucial political importance, he explained,
“Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do
vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your
political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the
ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine,
where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your
government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of
the ballot-box.”
Hammond believed the South's system must spread to Kansas and the West
regardless of what settlers there wanted because it was the only
acceptable way to organize society. Two years later, Hammond would be
one of those working to establish the Confederate States of America,
“founded,” in the words of their vice president, Alexander Stephens,
upon the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth… that the
negro is not equal to the white man.”
Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln recognized that if Americans accepted
the principle that some men were better than others, and permitted
southern Democrats to spread that principle by dominating the
government, they had lost democracy. "I should like to know, if taking
this old Declaration of Independence, which declares ... are equal
upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” he
asked.
Led by Abraham Lincoln, Republicans rejected the slaveholders’ unequal
view of the world as a radical reworking of the nation’s founding
principles. They stood firm on the Declaration of Independence.
When southerners fought to destroy the government rather than accept
the idea of human equality, Lincoln reminded Americans just how
fragile our democracy is. At Gettysburg in November 1863, he
rededicated the nation to the principles of the Declaration and called
upon his audience “to be dedicated… to the great task remaining before
us… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom —
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”
The United States defeated the Confederacy, outlawed human enslavement
except as punishment for crime, declared Black Americans citizens, and
in 1867, with the Military Reconstruction Act, began to establish
impartial suffrage. The Military Reconstruction Act, wrote Maine
politician James G. Blaine in 1893, “changed the political history of
the United States.”
Today, as I looked at the photograph of Governor Kemp signing that
bill, I wondered just how much.
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