Just Ten Years
What we can accomplish
Merry Christmas + 1!
The mission of the Civil Conversations Project is to make America great…a more perfect union…by ending our thing with race. Unsaid is, “Within my lifetime.” I’m 75, so within 10 years.
We’ve always been a country with an idyllic, but unrealized vision of greatness, equality, and merit. Many like to wander around believing we’re there. That there’s really no more work to be done. They wander while wearing blinders similar to those worn by my grandad Richard’s horses, Tom and Jerry, that he used for tilling the soil of his farm in NH. Those folks want to avoid the hard work that every generation needs to put in to saving our democracy and creating a more perfect union.
Anyway, I’m occasionally asked if I’m optimistic or how can I be optimistic? I ain’t gonna lie, it can be a challenge. But you can’t do this work if you hold out no hope. So this exchange between Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jonathan Capehart and Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson got my attention and is worth reading or watching:
HCR: “When people ask me what this moment feels like I always say the 1850s which rarely brings comfort but what I mean by that is that if you lived in the United States in 1853 it looked as if the elite enslavers in the American South had gotten it all. They'd gotten the White House, they had gotten the Supreme Court, and they'd gotten the Senate. The only place that those people who did not believe in the spread of human enslavement to the West still had control of was in the House of Representatives. And then in 1854 Congress gets through the House of Representatives the Kansas Nebraska Act which overrides the Missouri Compromise[i] to say that in fact enslavement can go into the American West into that part of the American West that came into the union with the Louisiana Purchase.
With the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act those elite enslavers were going to have control over the entire United States because what it meant was that all the states that would be constructed there would have to be slave states because the Constitution mandates the protection of property and those western slave states would work with the southern slave states to overule the northern free states in the Congress and America would become a slaveholding nation. That was explicitly what they said they wanted to do.
So it seemed like the game was over except that the day it became clear that the Kansas Nebraska Act was going to pass through the House of Representatives a number of congressmen had a meeting in a boarding house in Washington in the rooms of Edward Dickinson who's a representative from Massachusetts and whose daughter, Emily, was already writing poetry.
They went into that room as Democrats and as Wigs and as Free Soilers and as No Nothing's, the anti-immigrant party, and they said to each other we don't agree about immigration. We don't agree about foreign affairs. We don't agree about finances. We don't agree about internal improvements. But we can agree that we don't want the slave power to destroy our democracy and they went forward from that meeting as an anti-Nebraska Party.
By 1855 and 1856 they've swept the House of Representatives. By 1858 they're going to have a new champion in Abraham Lincoln. By 1859 he's going to articulate a new ideology for a new political party - the Republican party that calls for a government that does not simply protect property but that acts for the good of ordinary Americans. By 1860 that Coalition of all White men is going to elect him to the White House. By January of 1863 he's going to sign the Emancipation Proclamation getting rid of enslavement in the areas that are still controlled by the Confederacy and by November of 1863 he is going to give the Gettysburg Address that calls for a government “…of the People by the people and for the people” and who dedicates America to “a new birth of Freedom.” In less than 10 years you go from James Henry Hammond, a senator from South Carolina who talks about how a few elite people should run the country and everybody else is the mudsills[ii]that are driven into the dirt to support that upper group of people.
You go from he (Hammond) gets everything he and his ilk get want, to the government belongs to all the people. Less than 10 years and when I look at this moment today where we have for example a number of Republicans and Independents turning against the extremism the current Republican party this is what I see.
If you had told me that Dick Cheney and I were going to be on the same side of anything a year ago, well… and what I would say to that is that I do think we're in a moment like this but one of the things I hear all the time is, “Well I'm going to be a party hack you know no matter what happens in this year” and I always think okay but in 1860 all those guys who came into that room to create a new political party - 10 years later you can't really predict where they were going to come out in the next iteration because all the issues had changed so dramatically so that some of the people who went into that room as Democrats and said we are always going to be Democrats leave in 1866 and leave the Civil War as died in the wool Republicans who will never change their opinions and some of them actually go back and become you know Democrats. So I that's what I see in this moment. Hope.”
If you’ve considered supporting us but have thought to yourself, “It’s hopeless.” It’s not. Ten years. If you’re able, we could use your support. Thanks.
[i] The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a law that tried to address growing sectional tensions over the issue of slavery. By passing the law, which President James Monroe signed, the U.S. Congress admitted Missouri to the Union as a state that allowed slavery, and Maine as a free state. It also banned slavery from the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands located north of the 36º 30’ parallel (the southern border of Missouri). The Missouri Compromise would remain in force for just over 30 years before it was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that the compromise was unconstitutional, setting the stage for the Civil War.
[ii] Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon. The term derives from a mudsill, the lowest threshold that supports the foundation for a building. Wikipedia