When Insurrection Is Seen As Preferable to Change

This past week I was introduced to John Archibald Campbell through a quote he made over a century and a half ago. He is a fascinating figure from our nation’s history, born in Georgia and serving on the U.S. Supreme Court prior to the Civil War. At 41 years of age with no judicial experience he was appointed to the court by President Franklin Pierce as an attempt to appease the South and prevent what seemed like an imminent insurrection. Because Northern Democrats believed he would be a moderate whose appointment would put a limit on growing sectionalism, his nomination was confirmed in just three days.   Dred Scott  But those hopes were short lived. Campbell voted with the majority in the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision in 1857 which ruled that blacks were not citizens and struck down the Missouri Compromise limiting the expansion of slavery into western states. That decision would prove to be a direct contributing factor to the Civil War that broke out just three years later. So much for avoiding insurrections.   To his credit, Campbell sought to prevent the outbreak of the Civil War by representing Southern interests in talks with the Lincoln administration regarding the garrison at Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor. He was initially assured by Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward that the federal troops would withdraw from the island fort but Lincoln later reversed course and chose to reinforce that post. Days later the attack on Ft. Sumter would ignite the Civil War.   Prison barracks, Ft. Pulaski, GA  Lincoln would later reveal that he had become aware of treasonous communications between Campbell and Confederate States President Jefferson Davis. At that point, Campbell resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court and was soon appointed Confederate Secretary of War by Davis. Campbell would join two other Confederate mediators who met with Lincoln and Seward in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate an end to the Civil War just before its conclusion weeks later at Appomattox. With the assassination of Lincoln days after the end of the war, Campbell was suspected of complicity and was remanded to custody in a federal prison in Pulaski, GA. Only after two of his former Supreme Court colleagues intervened on his behalf was he released.  (Source: Wikipedia) A Deep Loathing Against People of Color  Initially prevented from practicing law, his petition to rejoin the Bar along with that of many other Southern attorneys was granted in 1866. His most noteworthy case thereafter would be the Slaughterhouse Cases arising out of New Orleans butchers’ guild. On its face, the case sought to address insider deals that had led to the pollution of New Orleans’ water supply by the offal of the slaughterhouse industries near the Mississippi. At a deeper level, the objections of the plaintiffs were rooted in the opening of the industry to all butchers regardless of race. And for all of his nobler aspects, this case revealed the true Campbell. Campbell had settled in New Orleans having left federal prison with a deep resentment against Reconstruction and an even deeper loathing of people of color. He wrote to his daughter, “We have Africans in place all around us. They are jurors, post-office clerks, custom house officers, and day by day they barter away their obligations and duties.” The depth of his rage over Reconstruction’s de facto integration of Southern society is revealed in his later comment that “white ‘insurrection’ would be preferable to Reconstruction.” (Source: Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (NY: Henry Holt, 2008), pp. 117-118) I cannot remember the program on which I heard those final words quoted last week but I knew the minute I heard them and wrote down his name and his quote that I needed to research their source. I was struck by his reference to white insurrection and its similarity to what occurred January 6, 2021 at our Capitol. That analogy became even more disturbing as I uncovered the history of the quote and the analysis of the actual insurrection inflicted upon our Capitol.   In an initial analysis by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, the backgrounds of 377 of the then identified participants in last January’s assault on the Capitol revealed a disturbing but familiar pattern.  Like Campbell, the vast majority of the participants were white, male and professional class.   Perhaps counterintuitively, they did not come from deep red counties where unchallenged group think might well have devolved into true believers being radicalized into violence, as Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein’s Going to Extremes would have suggested. Rather, they came from blue and purple counties where the candidate whose Big Lie they served either came close to losing or, in the case of 52% of them, actually lost. In short, they were surrounded by people who did not unquestioningly share their ideological perspectives. But here’s the finding that really jumps off the page and ties it to a racist ideologue of 150 years ago: By far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.   (Source: Robert A. Pape, Ph.D., “What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us,” Washington Post,  (April 6, 2021) found at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/06/capitol-insurrection-arrests-cpost-analysis/ ) No doubt in these counties with changing demographics, people who are other than non-Hispanic white in ethnicity have begun to take their rightful places as members of juries, serving in post-offices and governmental agencies. Not only were the January 6  assailants from places with diverse thinking, many of the people who surrounded them in their daily lives were different from them.   Clearly, that is deeply disturbing to white males who presume an entitlement to continue dominating those communities simply based upon their sex and race (noting that this does not speak for all white males, the author of this blogpost included). What is even more disturbing is the realization that a century and a half later, the open wound from chattel slavery and its ill-begotten descendants of Jim Crow and segregation continues to fester in our nation’s soul. John Archibald Campbell lives.  Will January 6 Prove a Mere Opening Act?  The insurrection of January 6, 2021 took many of us by surprise. Perhaps that simply shows how out of touch some of us in our safe blue urban islands are with what’s going on in our own communities, much less in the angry red seas that surround us.   The truth is our nation has not done the hard work to come to grips with our past. We have not faced the demons that lurk in our Shadow just waiting for the opportune moment when the tranquil conscious surface is disturbed to leap into action, encouraged by the siren song of the opportunistic amoral demagogue. And until we do, the events of January 6, 2021 could prove but an opening act.   The level of energized vitriol that has poured out of state legislatures across the country since the election of 2020 provides a real insight into the state of America’s soul. These laws that seek to wholesale disenfranchise voters and to prevent the teaching of American history in any form other than chamber of commerce superficiality really evidence a level of urgency if not despair. They also reveal the clear preference of many for authoritarian approaches to government rather than democratic. We should not presume that our fellow countrymen believe in and value democracy. When your ultimate concern is domination, democracy is a liability, not a strength. We can only hope that this eruption of violence in our national capitol and the assault on human rights in our state capitols is the final act in a long tragedy, a tragedy that has come at the cost of millions of lives of those whose humanity has been reduced to instrumental terms: You’re either a means to our ends (chattel slavery) or an obstacle (indigenous genocide). But one thing we can be very sure of is this: Those who retain a white-knuckled hold on power and privilege in this changing country will not release that hold willingly. Our nation’s martyred prophet Martin Luther King, Jr recognized that early in his leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. In his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail he observed that “Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”. The traitors who participated in the Insurrection and the traitors who have sought to legitimate it ever since have told us first by their words and now by their deeds that they would rather fight than deal with the changes that they can no longer forestall. We need not shy away from strong terms because they unsettle us. Just like the Confederates whom I claim as part of my ancestry, we need to call their thinking and behavior what it was - treason. And after January 6, 2021, we have no reason not to take them deadly seriously. We are a good nation with a rich history mixed with great nobility and deep depravity. This reflects a good people marked by incredible creativity in meeting the challenges that our history has presented us over four centuries as well as utter moral failures in our challenge to mature sufficiently to value the rich diverse populace which has assembled on our shores.   How we as a people respond to this crisis will no doubt determine if the America we say we love survives. Owning all of who we are is a first step toward attaining the true greatness we have always proclaimed of ourselves. And it is the only way we can ever be true patriots, loving our country with all of its warts.  I am certain we are capable of doing exactly that. The question is whether we will muster the will. Even so, this day I remain hopeful.      ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  Harry Scott Coverston  Orlando, Florida   frharry@cfl.rr.com  hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com  If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.  Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi  For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures  Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)     © Harry Coverston, 2021  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++