More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jill Lepore
Read between
November 3 - November 12, 2022
Yet the origins of the United States date to 1492 for another, more troubling reason: the nation’s founding truths were forged in a crucible of violence, the products of staggering cruelty, conquest and slaughter, the assassination of worlds. The history of the United States can be said to begin in 1492 because the idea of equality came out of a resolute rejection of the idea of inequality; a dedication to liberty emerged out of bitter protest against slavery; and the right to self-government was fought for, by sword and, still more fiercely, by pen. Against conquest, slaughter, and slavery
...more
Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans there by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.
But the voyages of Columbus and Dias also marked a turning point in the development of another economic system, slavery: the wealth of the Americas flowed to Europe by the forced labor of Africans.
Ralegh’s men made landfall on an island on the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina, sweeping beaches edged with seagrass and stands of pine trees and palms.
Unlike the Spanish, who set out to conquer, the English were determined to settle, which is why they at first traded with Powhatan, instead of warring with him. James granted to the colony’s settlers the right to “dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper,” the very kind of initiatives taken by Spain, but he also urged them to convert the natives to Christianity, on the ground that, “in propagating of Christian Religion to such People,” the English and Scottish might “in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a
...more
Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain.
This state of nature, for Locke, was a state of “perfect freedom” and “a state also of equality.”
What does that even mean??
People who leave “great Tracts of Ground” to waste—that is, uncultivated—and who owned land in common, have therefore not “joyned with the rest of Mankind.” A people who do not believe land can be owned by individuals not only cannot contract to sell it, they cannot be said to have a government, because government only exists to protect property.
The only way to justify this contradiction, the only way to explain how one kind of people are born free while another kind of people are not, would be to sow a new seed, an ideology of race. It would take a long time to grow, and longer to wither.
It was lost on no one that the loudest calls for liberty in the early modern world came from a part of that world that was wholly dependent on slavery.
In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave a license to white political opposition. The American political tradition was forged by philosophers and by statesmen, by printers and by writers, and it was forged, too, by slaves.
There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.
In Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson asked, dryly, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson’s opposition to slavery was far more than rhetorical; a free Jamaican, a black man named Francis Barber, was his companion, collaborator, and heir. (“To the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies,” Johnson declared, in a toast he offered during the war.) But Johnson’s charge of hypocrisy amounted to no more than the charges made by Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush the year before: “Where is the difference,” Rush wondered, “between the British
...more
Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore’s declaration did “more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies—than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”70 Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.
The Declaration that Congress did adopt was a stunning rhetorical feat, an act of extraordinary political courage. It also marked a colossal failure of political will, in holding back the tide of opposition to slavery by ignoring it, for the sake of a union that, in the end, could not and would not last.
The Revolution was at its most radical in the challenge it presented to the institution of slavery and at its most conservative in its failure to meet that challenge. Still,
The convention began its work eleven days late, on May 25, when at last a quorum of twenty-nine delegates had arrived. Washington, almost as striking at fifty-five as he’d been as a young man, was unanimously elected president. (His beauty was marred only by his terrible teeth, which had rotted and been replaced by dentures made from ivory and from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.)
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE had been signed by members of the Continental Congress; it had never been put to a popular vote. The Articles of Confederation had been ratified in the states, not by the people, but by the state legislatures. Except for the Massachusetts Constitution, in 1780, and the second New Hampshire Constitution, in 1784, no constitution, no written system of government, had ever before been submitted to the people for their approval.
Only the males
extraordinary. Nearly every English colony in North America had been settled with an established religion; Connecticut’s 1639 charter explained that the whole purpose of government was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.” In the century and a half between the Connecticut charter and the 1787 meeting of the constitutional convention lies an entire revolution—not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution. So far from establishing a religion, the Constitution doesn’t even mention “God,” except in naming the date (“the year of our
...more
Earlier political thinkers had suggested that this system could only work if a republic were small. Madison argued that it could only work if a republic were large, for two reasons. First, in a large republic, there would be more men to choose from, and so a better chance, purely as a matter of numbers, for the people to elect men who will guard the public interest. Second, in a large republic, candidates for office, in order to be known and to appeal to so large a number of voters, would need to be both notable and worthy.89
as early as 1791, Madison had begun to revise his thinking. In an essay called “Public Opinion,” he considered a source of instability particular to a large republic: the people might be deceived. “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,”
It was an ingenious idea. It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; the Internet would hold the Republic together. Each time, this assertion would be both right and terribly wrong.
The number of delegates to the Electoral College would be determined not by a state’s population but by the number of its representatives in the House. That is, the size of a state’s representation in the Electoral College was determined by the rule of representation—one member of Congress for every forty thousand people, with people who were enslaved counting as three-fifths of other people.10 The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.
Eaton, who ran Jackson’s campaign, shrewdly revised his Life of Andrew Jackson, deleting or dismissing everything in Jackson’s past that looked bad and lavishing attention on anything that looked good and turning into strengths what earlier had been considered weaknesses: Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t uneducated; he was self-taught. He wasn’t ill-bred; he was “self-made.”
The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish a religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”
religion. The separation of church and state allowed religion to thrive; that was one of its intentions. Lacking an established state religion, Americans founded new sects, from Shakers to Mormons, and rival Protestant denominations sprung up in town after town. Increasingly, the only unifying, national religion was a civil religion, a belief in the American creed. This faith bound the nation together, and provided extraordinary political stability in an era of astonishing change, but it also tied it to the past, in ways that often proved crippling.
He insisted on the right to revolution. Addressing his white readers, he wrote, “Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?”
For centuries, Europeans had based their claims to lands in the New World on arguments that native peoples had no right to the land they inhabited, no sovereignty over it, because they had no religion, or because they had no government, or because they had no system of writing. The Cherokees, with deliberation and purpose, challenged each of these arguments. In 1823, when the federal government tried to get the Cherokees to agree to move, the Cherokee National Council replied, “It is the fixed and unalterable determination of this nation never again to cede one foot of land.” A Cherokee man
...more
Busy dueling for the mantle of “party of the people,” neither the Whigs nor the Democrats offered a plausible solution to the problem of slavery; they barely addressed it. This led to the founding of new parties, including the evangelical Liberty Party, formed in 1839. “We must abolish slavery,” the party pledged, “& as sure as the sun rises we shall in 5 or 6 years run over slavery at full gallop unless she pulls herself up & gets out of the way of Liberty’s cavalry.” Its bid to evangelical Whigs: “Vote as you pray.”
When Webster’s replacement died of a burst appendix, Tyler appointed Upshur. He might have seen something of himself in him. Upshur, like Tyler, was a southern aristocrat, disdainful of the people (they “read but little,” he said, “and they do not think at all”). Upshur believed that slavery solved the problem of the tensions between capital and labor by giving even a white man of desperate circumstances a reason to accept the economic order: “However poor, or ignorant or miserable he may be, he has yet the consoling consciousness that there is a still lower condition to which he can never be
...more
Assholes
Efforts to legalize abortion were begun in the 1960s, not by women’s rights activists, but by the doctors, lawyers, and clergymen who ran Planned Parenthood.
The men who wrote and ratified the Constitution had left women, sex, marriage out of it. “Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams had warned her husband in 1776, advice he had ignored. The consequences of writing women out of the republic’s founding documents were both lasting and devastating. That the framers of the Constitution had not resolved the question of slavery had led to a civil war. That they regarded women as unequal to men nearly did the same. Over the course of American history, women had often written themselves into the Constitution by way of analogy. Discrimination by sex was like
...more
“We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights,” Justice Douglas said in the majority opinion. Although no right to privacy is mentioned in either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, Douglas maintained that it is nevertheless there, not in words, but in the shadow cast by words, in “penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”12 This would prove a dangerously imperfect support for the many cases that would try to build upon Griswold over the next half century.
In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court extended Griswold’s notion of privacy from married couples to individuals. “If the right of privacy means anything,” Justice Brennan wrote, “it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
The Constitution, whose framers did not believe women to be political subjects, offered very little guidance. “There is nothing in the United States Constitution concerning birth, contraception, or abortion,” Jay Floyd, Texas assistant attorney general, told the court in Roe v. Wade, when the case was first argued, in 1971. Floyd spoke on behalf of Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, defending a Texas anti-abortion statute. Floyd was right. But there is also nothing in the Constitution about a great many things on which the court had ruled, from segregated schools to wiretapping. The
...more
In the summer of 1975, when Betty Ford sat on that floral sofa with Morley Safer, she did not hold back. “I feel that the Equal Rights Amendment ought to probably pass in our Bicentennial year,” she said, hoping for ratification in 1976. He asked her about abortion; she cited Roe v. Wade: “I feel very strongly that it was the best thing in the world when the Supreme Court voted to legalize abortion, and in my words, bring it out of the backwoods and put it in the hospitals where it belongs. I thought it was a great, great decision.”
