A Story of Hope: When the Past Can Provide Consolation in the Fog of Electoral Despair

If you had lived in 1853, you would have thought that the slaveholding elite had become America's rulers. They represented only a small minority of the US population, but through the control of the Democratic Party they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court.

They used this power to prevent Northerners, who wanted the government to, for example, clear rivers and harbors of congestion or fund public colleges for ordinary people, from pushing such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to expand their system of human slavery throughout the country, since the much larger northern population held control of the House of Representatives.

Then, in 1854, elite enslaved people, with the help of Democratic President Franklin Pierce, pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House of Representatives. This law abolished the Missouri Compromise, which had prevented the enslavement of blacks from the American West since 1820.

Since the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—expanding slavery into these territories would mean that the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work with those of the southern slave states to overrule northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together they would nationalize enslavement.

America would become a slave nation. The enslaved were fully aware that this was their goal.

South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond specifically rejected “as ludicrously absurd the much-vaunted but nowhere recognized dogma of Mr. Jefferson that 'all men are born equal.'” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes consist of people. The “Mudsills” were boring workers whose work produced the food and products that made society function.

On them rested the superior class of people who used the capital the mudsills produced to advance the economy and even civilization itself. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsleeves, but the superior class had the right – and even the duty – to rule over them.

But it didn't happen like that.

As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C. to figure out how they could fight back against the slave power that was forcing the government to do so had forced the South's system of human slavery to spread.

The men met in the chambers of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poetry—and although they came to the meeting from all political parties, often bitterly disagreeing over specific policies, they left the meeting with a single goal: to Stop the Overthrow of American Democracy.

The men returned to their homes in the North for the summer, sharing their belief that a new party must arise to oppose the slave power. They found that there was an “anti-Nebraska” sentiment in their cities; A young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]In every fight he would rise and grab whatever he could reach first – a scythe, a pitchfork, a chopping ax or a butcher's cleaver.”

In the next midterm elections, those who called themselves “Anti-Nebraska” candidates captured both national and state offices throughout the North, and in 1856, a new political party emerged from the opponents of the slave power: the Republicans.

But the game wasn't over yet. In 1857, the Supreme Court attempted to take away Republicans' power to stop the spread of slavery in the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no authority to legislate in the territories.

This made the Missouri Compromise, which had prevented the enslavement of the land above Missouri, unconstitutional. The next day, New York Tribune Republican editor Horace Greeley wrote that the decision “carried as much moral weight as the judgment of the majority of those gathered in a bar in Washington.”

In 1858, the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone grasping tools to fight the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats labeled Republicans radicals because of their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that Republicans were the country's true conservatives because they were the ones who held firmly to the Declaration of Independence. The slave owners who rejected the principles of the Founding Fathers were the radicals.

The next year, Lincoln formulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans who defend the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.

In 1860, at a time when suffrage was almost exclusively reserved for white men, voters elected Abraham Lincoln to the White House. Enraged, Southern leaders and their states seceded from the Union and began the Civil War.

In January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ending the American system of human slavery in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. In November 1863 he gave the Gettysburg Address, firmly anchoring the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence.

In this speech, Lincoln urged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He called on them to “dedicate themselves more fully to the cause for which they have given their last measure of devotion, so that we here may firmly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall experience a new birth under God . “Freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, will not perish from the earth.”

In less than ten years, the country went from being a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that all men were created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses to one Government that defended the government of the people. by the people, for the people and to leaders who demanded a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do this alone: ​​he always depended on the votes of ordinary people who were determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s, the work of these people established freedom and democracy as the cornerstone of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who wanted to destroy it through their own greed and power. Every time, democracy won thanks to ordinary Americans.

Now it's our turn. In our time the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders have rejected the idea that all men are created equal and are attempting to destroy our democracy in order to gain permanent power.

And just like our ancestors, Americans are using every tool at our disposal to build new coalitions across the country to fight back. After decades of believing they had little political power, ordinary people have mobilized to defend American democracy and have discovered—with an electorate that now includes women, black Americans, and brown Americans—that they have power are.

On November 5th we will find out how strong we are. Each of us will decide which page of the historical ledger we want to put our name on. On the one hand, throughout our history we can stand with those who have claimed that some people are better than others and have the right to rule; On the other hand, we can list our names alongside those from our past who have defended democracy, ensuring that American democracy will continue into the future.

I have had hope in these dark days because I look at the extraordinary movement that has emerged in this country in recent years, and it seems to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom.

As always, the outcome is in our hands.

“Dear fellow citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We… will be remembered despite ourselves.”