Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Richardson summarizes the demographics of people in the American colonies. Settlers were largely Christian, but there were populations of Jewish and Muslim people as well. Most Black people were enslaved, and most Indigenous people did not have rights or legal protection. Husbands and fathers were legally considered owners of children and women. However, the backbone of the economy “depended on Black, Indigenous, and women’s labor” (161). Easterners thought those who moved west were lawless, while westerners thought easterners were “snooty money-grubbers.” Amid these divisions, the British crown held people together.

Strategies Parliament used in the early 1760s to raise money to pay for the Seven Years’ War were perceived by colonists as an abuse of power. This sparked their efforts to “govern themselves.” To do this, Founders and colonial leaders needed to develop strategies to explain their intellectual arguments and complicated laws to regular colonists. Leaders encouraged anti-crown gang activity, which they thought rallied ordinary people to political causes. Political power slowly moved to the colonists in events like the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party. The first two Continental Congresses met to strategize about growing tensions and raising an army. Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense tipped the scales toward declaring independence, reaching an immense number of people in several months.

Though independence was declared in 1776, and the American Revolution followed, 40 years later John Adams said that the war was essentially a side effect of revolution, as the real revolution had been waged in the minds of the people the 15 years prior.

Richardson asserts that the Founders didn’t understand the “larger implications” of their argument for independence, since they perceived it as a statement of their own right to be equal to white Englishmen. Their first attempt at a government was the Articles of Confederation, which centered state power and cooperation, but the states wouldn’t work together. The Founders came together in 1786 to draft the Constitution. The Constitution centered the federal government, which was derived from the will of its citizens. Elected legislature would write and draft laws, oversee the treasury, and determine the machinations of the military and courts. They would balance a single executive who carried out these laws.

Small states didn’t want to be less represented than large states, while northern states didn’t want enslavers to inflate their power. The framers developed the House of Representatives, to reflect a state’s population, and the Senate, which had two representatives per state. Without mass media, the framers didn’t anticipate their populations would know who the best president would be, so they instituted the Electoral College.

After the Constitution, the framers made the Bill of Rights to preserve people’s liberties and put bumpers around the federal government. In practice, these liberties were “exclusively limited to white men” (173). Though they didn’t anticipate partisanship, it both “engaged ordinary voters” and “weakened the nation’s framework” by hampering checks and balances (174). After the 1796 election, Thomas Jefferson urged electors to vote as winner-take-all rather than as a reflection of their state’s voting. Founders also couldn’t “foresee” or “imagin[e]” the addition of large, sparsely populated states or immensely populated states that would make the Electoral College or Senate operate less democratically.

Beginning in 1776, women like Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley, Indigenous Americans like Mohegan cleric Samson Occom, and Black Americans like mathematician and naturalist Benjamin Banneker noted that the principles underlying their new country did not apply to them. The new government gave marginalized people the language to seek equal rights, like when enslaved people Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker sued for their freedom using the Declaration’s language.

After his 1824 loss to John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson disseminated rhetoric stating that the federal government was a tyranny run by elites. Southern white men increasingly argued that states were the seat of democracy and the federal government imposed “unwelcome values” like recognizing the Cherokee as a sovereign nation. Their emphasis on states’ rights “kept white men in charge” (180); they developed Manifest Destiny as a justification for a “populist ‘democracy’” that took Indigenous lands and enshrined protections for enslavement. In the 1850s, the pro-enslavement officials “rewrote American history,” saying that the Founders “had deliberately established a nation based on states’ rights and white supremacy” (181).

White Southerners said the Founders were “fundamentally wrong” when they declared all men equal; they believed white men were superior. South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond proposed that most men were “mudsills” who had low intellect and few skills. Southern elites thought they were “chivalrous men” with a duty to protect these people, who might be enslaved folks, women, or poor white neighbors. 

Proportionately, enslavers were a tiny fraction of the American population, so when northern leaders moved to stop enslavement, they styled it as an attack on states’ rights and democracy. They used fearmongering to spread false ideas about what Black Americans would do to Southerners if freed—“steal” their property and “rape” their wives and daughters—and outlawed books that questioned the system of enslavement.

In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Founders purposely excluded Black people from their definition of “men” and that Congress had no power to stop enslavement’s spread into the west. The northern men who opposed this stance didn’t necessarily support Black rights, but they opposed the wealth and power enslavement created in the South. Abraham Lincoln rose to prominence by arguing that society didn’t progress thanks to a few rich elites, but thanks to ordinary people who worked hard, innovated, and participated in the economy. He believed the government should level the economic playing field. Lincoln and the Republican party “tied equality before the law to the principles of the Founders” (188).

After Lincoln was elected, seven states left the Union, on the basis that the “great truth” of the nation’s founding demanded the insubordination of Black people to white people.