Joanne Freeman on Political Violence in America

Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History, specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.

Episode Transcript

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You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,

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presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a special conversation with author and Yale historian Joanne Freeman.
Joanne is a leading expert on the history of political violence in America,
and author of The Field of Blood, Violence in Congress, and the Road to Civil War.
This conversation was recorded in Grand Rapids, Michigan in October 2024.

(00:28):
Joanne is interviewed by CNN senior producer Ryan Struck.
So, we've got a ton to get to, but before we dive in, I hear that this is your first time in Michigan.
So, how is it so far?
It is my first time in Michigan, and I speak to you as a New Yorker, at least a part-time New Yorker.

(00:52):
I got off the plane this morning and went into the airport,
and it was so quiet and nice, and people smiled at me.
It was very nice. I thought, I'm not in New York City anymore.
So, very pleasantly surprised and pleased.
I think I can speak on behalf of all Grand Rapidians and say that we are very proud of that part of ourselves.

(01:13):
So, we're glad that you felt welcomed to our city.
All right, so we are just 20 days from Election Day.
In the last few months, we've had a sitting president drop out of the race,
a historic nominee who took his place.
She is running against a former president who is a convicted felon facing more criminal charges.

(01:37):
We have had two assassination attempts.
So, as someone who knows what this country has been through before,
I think I speak for all of us when I say,
can you help us start to wrap our minds around what is happening?
Wow, okay, starting with a big question.
These are, as all of us, I'm sure, are thinking amazing, bizarre, sort of mind-gobbling times to be alive.

(02:07):
I, as a historian, the period that I deal with most often, the founding period in the early 19th century,
those are periods when really there was a lot of experimentation taking place.
People didn't know necessarily what would come next.
So, we assume, for example, that the founders are these blocks of marble,
and they knew absolutely what they were doing, and ideas beamed down,

(02:28):
and the fact is they were making it up as they went along.
All improvisation.
And so, a lot of the time, what I end up thinking about now is,
I kind of didn't think I would be alive at a time
when we would be living through that kind of improvisation,
where we don't know from one, I was going to say, from one week to the next,
from one hour to the next, what's going to be happening,

(02:51):
what it's going to lead to, the sort of huge amount of contingency,
where we really don't know what's going to happen, that's a lot.
And I don't think in my lifetime, really, except maybe for the period right after 9-11,
I don't think there's really been a moment, well, actually, January 6th,
which I'm sure will come to, but there have only been a handful of moments where I thought,

(03:14):
whoa, I don't know what's going on here, I don't know what's coming next.
So, this is a really, it's going to sound like the most obvious thing in the world to say.
It's a historic moment.
Like, we know that history is happening, we know that history is being made,
and history is always happening, but not in such a way that you know,

(03:34):
I know as a historian, right, in 10, 15, 20 years, I think all the time, right?
I have grad students, I think about future historians writing,
and I think all the time something will happen, and I'll think,
well, that'll be 18 dissertations for a PhD, right?
Because there's so much going on, and there's so much that needs to be understood,

(03:54):
and there's so much we don't fully understand yet, really, at all.
We're watching it unroll as we're living it.
Well, we're definitely going to dive into all of that history over the course of next hour,
but speaking of the crazy news cycle that we live in,
I just wanted to get your reaction to a bit of breaking news that happened just a couple of hours ago.

(04:17):
Republican Vice Presidential nominee, J.D. Vance,
said this afternoon in Pennsylvania that no, Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election.
This is a question that he has refused to answer and has dodged repeatedly over the last several weeks,
and now he has given the answer, and the answer is no, Donald Trump did not lose in 2020.

(04:41):
Okay. You're not starting out easy here, are you?
Well, okay, so let me back up a little bit and talk a little bit about the framers of the Constitution
and how they might have thought about that declaration.
So I think a lot of us as Americans think about the Constitution as, you know,

(05:03):
the great document that was sort of beamed down.
We don't think about it as something that a bunch of people in a room sat and sort of figured out
and put together. The people who were in that room, they understood that they were structuring a
government, but what they also thought they were doing was creating a process of government.
The process really mattered. In the first paragraph of the first Federalist essay that

(05:28):
Alexander Hamilton wrote, which he wrote to defend the Constitution in the hope of states ratifying
it, I'm going to give you a really bad paraphrase, but you'll get the idea. Very first paragraph.
He says something like, it has been chosen for the people of this country to decide
whether it is really possible for people to create a government through choice and reflection,

(05:51):
or whether nations will always be created from accident and force. And a wrong decision on the
part that we might act may deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
Very beginning of the Federalist. So he is assuming that the process, the fact that these are people
who are sitting in a room trying to figure out a system mattered. And James Madison, I don't know

(06:17):
if many of you are aware that he took James Madison, I don't know if you have an image of him in
your head, but he was a small kind of mousy individual with very small mousy handwriting.
And he took notes of everything that happened in the Constitutional Convention. And at night,
he would make them neat. They're owned actually by the Library of Congress. The Library has like

(06:38):
its top 10 treasures, and these are one of the top 10 treasures. But Madison was being really
careful about recording every detail because the process of making that Constitution mattered
enormously. He thought, well, maybe there are going to be other countries that are going to want to
know how to do this. Look at us, how we're doing this, and we're creating a process that ideally

(07:01):
is going to carry the nation into the future. Not unchanged. They didn't assume it would sort of
sit like a rock forever. But what they cared about was process, which is a long way of getting around
to that statement by J.D. Vance. So what he's saying there is basically, I don't care about the
process. I think what I think. And I think that this is how the election went. And I say that

(07:24):
because the process kicked in, right? There were all kinds of trials. There were attempts to prove
that that election had gone wrong again and again and again and again and again. There was no evidence.
There was no proof. And we have a system that allows elections to be questioned. But that's part
of our system. So when someone stands up and says, I know that we have the system. I know that the

(07:47):
system kicked in and it evaluated that election and came up with the idea that, you know what,
Biden won and still says, this is what I think. The framers creating that process
would be really horrified. They would see that as taking away an emergency net for our government.

(08:08):
You know, the presidential election of 1800 was our first really, really fraught election.
It's not that far. It's like, oh, good. We lasted 10 years and then had a fraught election. But it
was really fraught. It was the one in which ultimately Thomas Jefferson won. And for a while,
there were people in Virginia and Maryland arming themselves in case they needed to seize the

(08:32):
government for Jefferson. It was a tide election. It was tied for 36 votes. It was thrown into the
house as it's supposed to be. 36 times they tried to break the tie. People were armed and ready to
march on the Capitol to take the presidency for Thomas Jefferson. And after it was all over,
and Jefferson won, someone said to him, wow, that was a moment. What would you have done

(08:58):
if things had gone wrong? What do you think would have or could have happened? And Jefferson says,
well, you know, we would have had some kind of convention. We would have tweaked the Constitution.
We would have fixed the process and then gone right back to where we were. He was relying on
the process, the constitutional process, to hold things together. So that's like our safety net.

(09:23):
And you don't cut holes in the safety net. You don't turn your back on the packs that we have
between us as to how just on a basic level our process of government works.
There was a major disruption to one of those processes four years ago on January 6, 2021.

(09:48):
You're an expert on political violence, but you also argue that January 6 was more than just
political violence. You've called it an attack on us. What do you see as different about that day
that still makes it relevant even now four years later?
Well, I think that in a really literal way that it was an attack on us. That's the people's house,

(10:14):
right? Congress is ours. It represents us. It's the basis of representation. The presidential
electoral process was percolating along as it should have. And then we had a group of people
who first of all attacked our house symbolically and in reality, and then wanted to overturn that
process and seize an election. You know, I mean, the government and Congress is us, right? And I'm

(10:43):
sure we'll talk about it later. But one of the distinctive things about the United States as
a government and as an experiment is that unlike all the other governments in the world at the
time, they were all monarchies and the United States tried something different. And the main
difference in what the Americans were trying to do was they put the people at the center.

(11:05):
They said, we're going to not allow power to go unchecked. The American people, public opinion,
matters more than anything. We're going to set up a system that in one way or another, hopefully,
can get a hold of public opinion. And it's comical because they all knew, like we created a government
where public opinion matters. And then they all said to each other, who's the public and how do

(11:26):
we get their opinion? So they kind of didn't know the basics. But the idea was really important.
And that makes this government different, right? That made us certainly at the time very different
from other governments. Was setting up a government like that a risk? And if so, how?
It was a huge risk, for sure. I mean, they honestly did not know if it would work. And when you study

(11:51):
this time period, you'll see in letters that people write to each other, like politicians,
leading politicians like James Madison, will write to someone and say something, a throwaway line.
If this government lasts five years, here's what I think we should do. So the degree to which it was
really, really improvisational and experimental is off the charts. There's an anecdote I always like

(12:14):
to tell because it gets really down to a human level as to how people really thought the whole
thing could go down in a moment. There's a Pennsylvania senator in the first Congress. His
name is William McClay. He has an amazing diary. And he writes about his dreams and the toys he
buys his kids. And you know, as a historian, you love when you find those kinds of diaries like that.

(12:34):
And McClay adored George Washington. He doesn't even use his name in his diary. He just refers to him
as the first man. And in his diary, he describes walking into a dinner party. And there's the first
man by the door. And McClay doesn't know what to do. He's besides himself. And he decides he
makes a bow. He says in his diary, it was an awkward bow. I looked so stupid, which we all

(12:57):
have those moments too in front of people we want to impress. And he takes a few steps away
from Washington. And Washington says, Senator McClay, why don't you come and sit here by me?
Okay, what does McClay do at that moment? McClay thinks to himself, I had already taken a few
steps away from Washington. If I turn around, it's going to seem like I'm cowtowing to him.

(13:24):
And he may get the idea that he's like some king like presence. And he may start to think too
highly of himself. And then the Republic might die. He doesn't take the seat. He keeps walking.
Because he sincerely believed that if you make some bad choices at the very beginning of the

(13:46):
experiment, it could set things off and they could collapse. And that's our founding era, right?
That we don't think of our founding that way. But they truly understood that it was an experiment.
We've lost some of that sense of contingency, right? We assume that everything is stable and
everything works and it always goes ahead and it's all predictable. And we're living in times that

(14:10):
are reminding us that that's not necessarily always the case. Do you still view American
democracy as an experiment today? That's a really interesting question. Okay, so I would say,
and I'm guessing probably like some of you in this audience, I took it for granted.

(14:33):
I mean, I was born in the 60s. And a friend of mine said recently, like maybe we were like alive
in the decades when it was all peaceful. And maybe we were just lucky we got the peaceful decades.
I don't know. But I think I, like many people took it for granted. We have a democratic government.

(14:56):
It's a wonderful thing to have a democratic government. Not a lot of the rest of the world
has this kind of government. And I consider myself patriotic. I love the country. I love the government.
I think I took it for granted. And even as a historian who studies the founding period and
all of these things I've said to you about how improvisational it was, I still in modern times

(15:17):
kind of took it for granted. And I don't anymore. I really don't anymore. I understand in my gut
and in my soul in a way that I didn't understand before how fragile democracy can be, how fundamentally
fragile it can be, and how easily we can lose it. I didn't understand that. And I say that as a historian

(15:39):
who's been teaching for 30 years about the founding, I didn't have that in my gut and in my soul. And
it might be the most important lesson of our time for us to understand the significance of democracy
and the fact that we can lose it truly, that we can lose it.

(16:03):
I want to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about political violence. You've
become the go-to expert on that in the United States recently. Sadly, there are several recent
examples of this in our politics. The two assassination attempts on former President
Trump this summer. We talked about January 6th, the pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC,

(16:28):
not to mention the attack on Speaker Pelosi's husband, the Gabby Giffords shooting,
the congressional baseball shooting right here in Michigan, the kidnapping plot against Governor
Gretchen Whitmer. We're seeing threats against rank and file election officials across the country.
How abnormal is this when you look back over the course of American history?

(16:51):
Okay, you really got these great questions here. Man, you're not making this easy at all.
It's a job. I understand that. You're doing an excellent job.
Okay, so speaking as a historian, obviously American history is violent across the board,

(17:12):
right? You go all the way back and I write about violence. Someone once said to me that my resume,
all of the articles and papers and things on it, it's like, shoot, kill, maim, duel, destroy.
I sound like a really violent person. I'm really not. I write a lot about violence and any period
of history that any of you out there know, you can think about the violence in that period.

(17:33):
So to say violence is unusual is wrong. To say that having violence in our politics is unusual
is wrong. One of the things that's distinctive about this moment is that there are some people
in one of our two major parties who appear to be using violence in a deliberate kind of a way

(17:55):
to intimidate people. And as this gets into the world of my book, so my book is about
violence in Congress, physical violence in Congress, fist fights, canings, people pulling guns on
each other, people throwing desks over, I mean like big brawls, things that got censored out of
the record and that I, diaries were very helpful, that I dug up and found in a variety of different

(18:21):
ways. And I forgot where I was going. Your question was violence.
When you compare this moment with the history of political violence, how about
abnormal is the time that we're in? So there was a lot of violence, but what was distinctive about
some of the violence in the book is Southerners who wanted to defend the institution of slavery

(18:44):
realized early on they were losing the majority, they no longer had a majority of power.
There were increasingly people who are anti-slavery or abolitionists who were rising up and organizing
against them. And understanding that they were a minority interest and that they were desperate
to preserve the institution of slavery, they began deliberately deploying threats and violence

(19:07):
to shut up their opposition. It was a deliberate political strategy. They talked about it that
way. There's a Virginia congressman, I want to say in the late 1840s, so there's an abolitionist,
this really Joshua Giddings of Ohio, he was like this big guy and he liked picking fights
with slaveholders because he just knew he would say something deliberately anti-slavery and almost

(19:33):
like on command, a Southerner would run at him with his cane and Giddings would say, look up to the
gallery of reporters and say, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the barbaric self. So the Southerners
performed that again over and over and over again. But this one particular Southerner, Giddings heard
him say, here's what you've got to do to handle these anti-slavery people in Congress. Keep them

(19:57):
afraid for their lives. Point blank, that is what he said. Why? Because he assumed if people are scared,
they're not going to speak up, they're going to be silent, they're going to be compliant,
they're going to be easy to deal with, they won't resist. So the book talks about people with a
minority of power using violence to maintain and seize power deliberately. And so part of what I

(20:26):
see now and part of the connection, I mean, I have to say as someone who writes about political
violence, this is a really strange time to be alive and witnessing what we're witnessing.
But very early on in this period, that was one of the first things I thought was,
and we don't think of it that way, right? We see violence and we see individual episodes of violence
and some of them are eruptions and outbursts and coming from people on the outside. They're not

(20:50):
all strategic. But some of it is strategic. When someone with political power makes a threat of
some kind or suggests something threatening that might happen, that's deliberate. That is aimed
to have an impact. And if you know you don't have a majority of power and you begin resorting to those

(21:13):
kinds of threats in the hope of quieting people who oppose you down, I think it's important for us
to realize the fact that that's a strategy and we need to understand it that way. It's not something
that's just happening. It's done with a deliberate motive. And we have to understand that and not
be swept under by it. These are people who are using that to try and maintain power. And just as

(21:37):
Americans and as voters, we deserve to consider options and make choices on our own without
feeling threatened. That's democracy. So I think the fact that some of this is strategic and it's
aimed to quiet us down and shut us up and keep us, in some cases, keep us from voting, we need to know

(21:59):
that. We need to be aware of that because that's, you know, our fundamental, you might even call it
sacred right, is our right to vote. To not be afraid to vote.
I also want to ask you about the role that misinformation plays in political violence.

(22:23):
When you look at the threats today, just this week, a man was arrested for a threat against a
female worker. A meteorologist right here in Michigan took to Twitter to write murdering
meteorologists won't stop hurricanes. Misinformation is playing a very big role today.

(22:44):
Has it played a role in the past and what parallels do you see to the roles playing now?
It, so it has, you know, like so many other things that we're experiencing right now. It's not that
some of this is brand new, never happened before, but part of what's giving this misinformation
more power has to do with technology. So technology fundamentally shapes democracy. If you think about

(23:08):
democracy as a conversation between we the people who have power and the people we give the power to,
then any technology that shapes that conversation shapes democracy. So you see that really early
on with the telegraph in the late 1840s and 1850s. Telegraph comes along and all of a sudden people

(23:30):
in Washington and Congress, they used to be able to have some wiggle room, they'd say something
stupid or threatening and they might be able to go to the newspaper office and say,
maybe calm that down a little or change the wording a little and suddenly the telegraph,
you have people from all over the country that people don't know sitting all over the room
and then in 45 minutes the entire nation knows something, there's no wiggle room. So suddenly

(23:54):
at this moment where the slavery crisis is heating up, you have northerners learning what
southerners are saying about northerners and southerners learning what northerners are saying
about them, you have technology and you would think like, oh how great that everyone knows what
everyone is saying, but at a moment of crisis with a new kind of technology that people don't
understand how it works, that causes a big crisis. If you think about TV in the civil rights era

(24:22):
and the fact that a lot of people watching TV in the 1960s saw the kind of violence being used
against civil rights activists for the first time, they understood that in a different way
because they could see it. Again, technology and what we have now really obviously is social media
which is, you know, we have no control over social media. It was interesting enough when we had a

(24:45):
tweeting president as a historian, I was like, oh this is going to be interesting, a tweeting
president, like that's technology and politics, I don't know how this is going to work out, but
social media kind of like the telegraph means that instantly anything goes anywhere, there's no one
controlling that, it's kind of like with the telegraph, the people who are doing the spinning

(25:06):
in Congress no longer control the spin because the telegraph is sending it everywhere, there's a
great incident that happens in 1850 in which one senator pulls a gun on another senator
and there's, whenever that happened, there would be what the word they liked to use was
stampede, right? Someone pulls a gun on someone and then people either run to see what happened

(25:28):
or jump up on their desks to see what happened or run away from whatever's happening. So there's
this moment, it's a bad moment, and then ultimately nothing happens, they pull the gun away, everybody
sits down and they're going to go back to work because that happens in Congress all the time,
but someone stands up and says, actually a New Hampshire senator stands up and says,

(25:49):
I hope you all realize here in the Senate that in 45 minutes the entire nation is going to be
reading that we're slaughtering each other in here because of the telegraph. We have no control
over what's going to go out and the nation is going to think we're shooting guns at each other in
here and their solution is let's instantly say there will be an investigation and the idea is,

(26:12):
right, that'll make it seem like we're in control, yes there will be an investigation,
which of course produced nothing in the end, but the fact that that could happen and the
telegraph meant we have no control at all. We live in a moment just like that because of social
media in which it's fast, we don't know what's real, we don't know what's not real, if we're good

(26:34):
we try and check things, again as an academic and a scholar I really try to check things and even I
sometimes I'm like oh I think that's true and then 20 minutes later I'll think oh you know what,
I don't think that's as true as I thought it was and I have to take it down because I'm not going
to stand behind it. This is a challenge for all of us, smart adults, right, we have to figure out

(26:56):
what's real and what isn't and not everyone is as interested in figuring out what's real and what
isn't. So the social media and technology is really magnifying a major problem which is we
don't always know what's real and in a democracy if we don't share like a basic starting point about
like literally what's happening that's a bad situation for any kind of democratic government.

(27:22):
As I was reading your book I I learned so much it was it was really fascinating and had so many
just examples of this kind of violence happening as you said on the floor of the House and Senate
which is kind of bewildering but I want to ask you about two major events that happened.

(27:45):
One there was a deadly duel that left a congressman dead and a brutal beating with a cane on the
Senate floor and can you tell us about those two and then the responses to those two were very
different as well. For sure. The first one it takes place in 1838 and one congressman ended

(28:06):
up killing another congressman in a duel. What's striking about and that's actually where my book
started because I knew I wanted to write about violence and congress and all I knew is that one
congressman killed another one in 1838 so I thought well that's a good place to start and I went to
find the records actually letters to his wife of a congressman who was from the same state as a

(28:27):
person who's killed and lo and behold he had wonderful amazing bizarre things to say. So in that
case these two congressmen one from Kentucky one from Maine end up getting in a fight that
isn't really their own causing they're kind of pulled in by other people and they don't really
dislike each other but they can't find their way out without losing face and they end up fighting

(28:50):
this duel and one ends up killing the other. Now that started me off in my book because I it was
about the pull of violence how it's hard it can be hard if people are expecting certain things of
you to pull away and move away from violence. So that one was interesting just as an example of the
ways in which dueling and violence were kind of incorporated in some ways in congress in that

(29:14):
early era but the later episode in 1856 that's the really famous caning of Charles Sumner the
abolitionist senator from Massachusetts. It's so it took me 17 years to write the book and in all of
those 17 years whenever I said violence in congress people if they might not know the names but they
were like there's that guy it's like yeah there was that guy Charles Sumner got camed in that case

(29:38):
this is the importance of context being different in that case Sumner who was a really ardent abolitionist
stood up and made a really assertive anti-slavery speech in the Senate and it was printed in the
newspaper which most speeches were there was a representative from South Carolina who saw it

(30:00):
and was insulted by it one of his relatives was also insulted in the course of Sumner's speech
and he came into the Senate and went up to Sumner and said you know you've insulted my kinsmen you've
insulted my part of the country and had a cane and and beat him violently to the ground and the

(30:20):
desks and the chairs in the Senate were bolted down so you couldn't the desks you couldn't move
them at all and the chairs were hard to pull out so Sumner was trapped as he was being camed and he
literally wrenched the bolted desk out of the ground in his desperation to get away from that

(30:41):
beating put him out of commission for a long time but what made that distinctive is it happened at a
moment when there were lots of northerners being attacked by southerners violently we don't know
about all those other instances because this became the famous one and it became famous in part
because it took place in the Senate chamber Preston Brooks the South Carolinian who did the beating

(31:05):
he actually hung out around the Capitol for three days hoping to catch Sumner before he went into
the Capitol because he knew how bad it would be if he did this in the Senate chamber it's like I
got to catch him outside it'll be much better if I do this outside and then he couldn't and he went
into the Senate chamber actually ridiculous anecdote is he stood in the Senate chamber with his cane
and apparently there was a woman talking to someone in the Senate and he wouldn't do the caning while

(31:30):
the woman was there and someone came over to him and said she's rather attractive isn't she and Brooks
said I wish he would leave right he just wanted to cane Sumner but what was different about that was
the context the framing because what it seemed like given all these other incidents was that the
South was literally beating the North to the ground physically as well as politically it seemed like

(31:55):
now it was a campaign and the degree to which Northerners were outraged this is actually part
of where the Republican Party comes from the Republican Party started as an anti-slavery
northern party and it came to power with the the sort of motive the motto we're going to fight the
slave power and in Congress they meant that literally they came with weapons like we're

(32:20):
going to be a different kind of Northerner in Congress we're going to come with weapons we're
going to stand up to these guys the caning of Sumner is part of that moment where Northerners
were like you know what we've been following the rules we've been doing everything we can the way
it's supposed to happen and now that all this is happening I think there need to be different kinds
of Northerners that get elected to Congress because we're going to have to stand up in a different

(32:43):
way so it leads to really dramatic changes in Congress because Northerners now Northerners are
electing into Congress people who come some of them with weapons there's a there's a um
Ohio senator who comes with a gun and puts it down on his desk in the Senate when he arrives
okay I'm fighting men don't come for me because I play your game so you can see how violence warps

(33:10):
that institution so in the second instance it seems like part of a trend almost a conspiracy
and it has a different meaning and it it's like sets the nation on fire
uh you've described this as uh kind of the the the Southerners taking the the um kind of violent

(33:32):
initiative against the Northerners and starting the the the situation another threat that just
jumped out of me in your book was this kind of inversion of reality that the South was trying
to project that it was the other side that was violating the rule of law and the other side was
violating decorum violating the democratic norms and I wonder if that sounds familiar to you

(33:57):
well I mean you're always going to be or you're going to assume you're going to have the advantage
if you can prove that it's the other guy who's violating norms in some way Southerners were
really good and this is partly has to do because of dueling culture right so the in dueling culture
if you could prove or if you could convincingly say that someone insulted you your response seemed

(34:22):
justified right violence seemed justified doing something dramatic back seemed justified so
Southerners were really good at that there's an instance um I think in the 1830s when um
a Virginia congressman comes into the house with a newspaper and he says Democrats in the house

(34:43):
are corrupt and this other congressman says no we're not we're not corrupt and the Virginian says
very dramatically turns to face this other congressman and says are you calling me a liar
okay that's that means a duel is like this close and of course that congressman backpedals no no

(35:05):
no I'm not calling you a liar that's a great example of threats getting people to to back down
in one way or another so yeah the Southerners very much wanted to suggest that they kind of had the
upper hand make well they might even argued morally but certainly that they had a right to do what
they wanted to do and that the Northerners were um not discriminating but um sort of humiliating them

(35:30):
and um making them sort of look lowly in a way that they didn't deserve and that yes they were
justified in whatever they did back so the other kind of narrative through your book is you follow
the life of uh the house clerk uh at the time Benjamin Brown French and at one point you
write this amazing line and it says French abhorred slavery and wanted no new slave states

(35:55):
and defended slavery and didn't want to discuss and people like this were called dough faces
uh because they kind of opposed slavery and kind of didn't and they just didn't really want to talk
about it and wanted to keep the status quo um and I wonder whether you see any parallels
uh in the dough faces to the politics of today interesting question um and so indeed you know

(36:21):
Benjamin Brown French um is this wonderful guy he's not a famous person he was from a small town
in New Hampshire he ends up going to Washington in the 1830s um and he's actually this kind of
hail fellow well-met guy and people love him from north and south and they love him from both parties
when he's made clerk of the house it's a unanimous election nothing happens in Congress by unanimous

(36:43):
anything so he's really popular um but he in the course of being in Congress uh he gets to
know Southerners and it's part of the I don't want to call it the plot the logic of my book was in
part because he comes early on and loves everyone and everyone loves him and by 1860 he goes out to

(37:05):
buy a gun in case he needs to shoot Southerners that same person between 1837 and 1860 and of course
he he writes in his diary I went into town I bought one of those small guns I can keep on my person
at all times is they're going to come after us for our ideas I want to be armed I know this
is supposed to be funny but I have to quote this because it's from his diary he actually the thing

(37:28):
about diaries as a historian is they they bring the past to life in a way it's hard to get so he
says in his diary it's dramatic line I you know I bought a gun in case they're gonna shoot us or
come after us for our ideas I want to have a gun and he then says I also bought three pairs of
underwear and I have a pair on right now and they're really comfortable we're talking about real

(37:50):
people here real people but he is a dough face meaning he didn't like slavery he thought it was
wrong when he was in Washington he like went to plantations so that he could see for himself what
it was and decide what he thinks about it but in the end he didn't want anything done about it he
didn't think it was a northern problem he didn't think northerners should have anything to do about
it he didn't think congress should deal with it he thought you know it's bad I don't like it and I

(38:14):
don't think we should do anything I just think we should shut up and hold the union together and
make nice because if we do something it's going to get ugly so yeah they were known as dough faces
because they were weak because they didn't stand up for what they thought because they were just
trying so hard to placate and you know it was an insult to be called a dough face it was it was in

(38:39):
essence to be called craven in one way or another cowardly and yeah if you think of people who know
that something is wrong who know that it can do damage who disagree with what it is who don't
necessarily say that loudly but you know that they don't like what it is who can see wrong things
happening all around them and don't say anything don't want anything said won't speak up won't allow

(39:05):
anybody else to speak up dough face is a good word for that a dough face is someone in essence without
a spine a dough face is an accommodator a dough face is someone who just wants to make nice so that
things can just go along as they go along so yeah you know I mean we live in a time where

(39:27):
people think things and say things and don't always do things and you know all of us in one way
or another I think are going to be judged by how we think and act in this time in small ways and
big ways but being alive at this time and all of these things are happening even if it's just within
our families or within our circles or within our communities the way we deal with this moment matters

(39:55):
french described himself at one point you write that he felt like a mourner who was following his
country to his grave but the constitution was a thing that was you say it was emotional for you
to write this book about discord at this moment why oh there's a big question um he he does say that

(40:22):
every time that a congress would start and it would be unable to organize they couldn't come up with
the rules they couldn't get started they would just be trying to organize and be unable to organize
and if they can't organize they can't get a speaker it can't go ahead and when that happened he would
tend to say now I feel like I'm watching my the nation go to its grave I feel like the union's

(40:42):
going to go down I feel like the government is collapsing and it was very emotional for him
you know it took me 17 years to write the book so when I started the book it was not timely right
when I started the book it was a book that I as a historian wanted to write which is I knew there
was all the violence I didn't understand why no one had found it before I wanted to understand the

(41:04):
mystery and I was pursuing it along those lines and the longer it took me to write it the more
current events started sort of reflecting what I was writing about in the book and yeah it became
very emotional because I could see the characters in that book like French seeing what was going on

(41:25):
feeling that they were in a crisis worried about the state of the nation not sure what they could
do about it watching an increase in violence losing faith in the government in systems of
government in their colleagues you know there was a period in the 1850s where people when they went
to congress in the morning they strapped on a gun and went to the capital those are people who no

(41:48):
longer believed that the congress can protect them those are people who don't believe in the
institution of congress so as someone with you sort of in this moment watching this other moment
where I could see people like French seeing things happening not sure what to do about them
not knowing what was coming this is the other thing we know like the civil war is just lurking

(42:10):
so we look at 1850 and we know just coming down the pike and the mind game that I had to play with
myself to write this book was I have to pretend that I don't know the civil war is coming because
they don't and if I want to understand how they're living their lives and thinking about it I can't
know the war is coming so what I saw was people in crisis worried that something bad would happen

(42:33):
and yeah how can we not I'm sure many of you feel this right how can we not feel emotional
about something we love being in danger right we love this country if you're here you do
how can that not be emotional so uh for the last question I want to ask you as you look forward

(42:57):
and look down the pike at what's coming what gives you hope for American democracy okay I'm
going to do an unlikely thing here and I'm going to start with John Adams I know you didn't expect
me to go there but how many people here know who Rodney Dangerfield was oh thank you you're in my

(43:19):
age bracket thank you very much so so Rodney Dangerfield was a comedian who his sort of
um line was you know I don't get no respect he said that all the time John Adams is the Rodney
Dangerfield of the founding he just felt like no one ever respected him ever but he lived a really
long time he lived to be in his 90s and if you were a founder who lived a long time in your old age

(43:41):
people would write letters to you all the time strangers and say tell us about the signing
of the declaration tell us you know just tell us what it was really like which of course if we
had the chance we would all do that too right tell us so he got a lot of those letters and what he
said over and over and over and over again was in one way or another thank you for the letter

(44:03):
often they were from younger people thank you for the letter I'm very pleased to be among the
fathers you revere thank you for including me among them but here's the important thing
we were no better than you we were no better than you we didn't know what we were doing
we made mistakes there's one letter in which he said we made mistakes in 1775 76 77 he like marches

(44:27):
his way all the way through the civil the revolutionary war he says we didn't know what
we're doing he says I sat and I watched people sign the Declaration of Independence and I could
see on their faces there were a lot of people that were not happy about signing that document he says
what's important to know is that we weren't better than you and our government wasn't better than yours

(44:48):
you're supposed to keep it going you can keep it going you're just like us this is your job right
this is whatever they put together they didn't assume there was a golden period in which they were
alive and that everything after that point would be a downhill slide Adam said explicitly if you
think we were so special no government after this point will ever seem good enough and that's not

(45:09):
what they wanted so he truly believed and said all the time that in essence it's our job it's future
generations job to keep this going not to look back and see them as as prophets of a sort but to
understand that they set something in motion and that we're supposed to keep that going this maybe

(45:30):
comes back to the idea that you know democracy is fragile but it's up to us to preserve it and in a
way that's what Adams was saying he was saying that this is your job democracy isn't an endpoint
it's a process and the assumption is we will all take part in that process that gives me hope

(45:52):
because you know we in this room are a we just by the fact that we're all here we are a we together
here interrogating this moment in time talking about it asking questions that matters that's
democracy democracy is about we the people and we the people can be a mighty diverse disagreeing

(46:15):
ornery nasty group but it's still a we and we are the people who are at the heart of this government
we are the people with the rights at the heart of this government the right to vote the right for
free and fair elections the right for people who hold power that are accountable to us who gave them
that power the right to expect the rule of law to be in play we as long as we understand that we're

(46:41):
a we and that if we come together as a we we can do things we can speak up we can voice outrage
we can form communities and engage in asking questions I for almost four years I've had a
weekly webcast Friday mornings called history matters and so does coffee because I'm not a

(47:02):
morning person and I need coffee and there are people from all over the world who come
every Friday morning and I talk for a half hour about history and politics and then they ask
questions and the thing about that is anyone can do that this is if you can say there's a positive
thing that came out of the pandemic zoom is that thing because you can have conversations there are

(47:25):
people from Italy and Belgium and England engaging in this conversation every Friday morning it's a
community of people we do not all agree with each other who are just interrogating what's going on
that's a we that's just a we that we created and anyone can do that so I think it's so important
it's so easy to feel isolated in this moment because we're nervous and we're scared and we don't know

(47:49):
what's going to happen and I think it's so important in this moment to remember that we are we the people
that's a vitally important we that's the most important we of all and we should stand up for each other
Dr. Joanne Freeman thank you so much

(48:16):
Dr. Freeman thank you Ryan we're going to do a brief Q&A here my colleague Julian on this side
if you want to if you have a question you'd like to ask if you could walk over here and Julian
I'll have a microphone for you just want to say wow thank you so much for traveling out here both
Ryan and and Professor Freeman you just just a little context here as as to why Dr. Freeman joined

(48:42):
us I am a Calvin College grad but I live now in a lobster village in Maine and one of my
neighbors is Heather Cox Richardson the historian and I was talking to her about this program we're
doing of bringing historians and Heather is doing an event for us as well at Pennsylvania
and was showing her the list of historians and she said you got to get Joanne

(49:05):
Joanne is better than all those people on the list and so this is a real honor pleasure to have you
here your first time in Michigan so thank you and I and I wanted to again give another round of
applause here for our moderator Ryan Ryan I think is a really great example of more the type of

(49:28):
purpose that we need more of in media in journalism the objectivity to your questions the rigor and
Ryan where I think I can say this right right as a producer for Jake Tapper and I feel this way
about Jake Tapper that he asks really hard questions honest and pointed and Ryan is a big part of that

(49:48):
so thank you it's a real just treat to have you both here and if we have some questions nobody has
any questions we silenced them okay well we we do have one in the back I'm gonna hand the microphone
over to Julian okay okay there was a woman right up front too thank you this has been quite a treat

(50:15):
I am a patriot but not in the way it's being discussed today I would like to know if at any
time in history the people we elected as our officials had to fill out resumes had to list
their credentials just like I've had to do for every single job I've held I think it's time to have

(50:45):
our people fill out resumes and show that they've accomplished something that will help them make
good decisions on our behalf is that too much to ask I I do not think that's too much to ask I think
one of the interesting aspects of this moment in time along the lines of what you're saying

(51:09):
is that a lot of things that we didn't think about before that we thought of as norms
right this is the way things work we get politicians who have a certain kind of experience
we assume that you know they they have a certain amount of transparency about what they've done
or haven't done we have assumed that that's kind of a norm and right now that's not so much a norm

(51:32):
and one of another interesting thing about this time period is that it has driven home to me in
a different way I understood it intellectually but now I understand it kind of with my emotions
norms are just there because we just think they're there they're the guardrails but they're pretty
wimpy guardrails right there's nothing they're not laws they're not rules they're just kind of the

(51:55):
way we think things ought to work and we live in a time where they're being violated again and again
and again so in a way what you're talking about is a desire for some kind of norm to be a little
more than a norm right to be maybe something more of a standard or maybe something that we really
expect as opposed to just kind of whist wishing out there that might happen and I think there's

(52:16):
probably a lot of things that ideally when we come out of this time there will be some things
that we didn't really have a way to you know they existed until they didn't and suddenly we went oh
wait a minute that was only a norm and now it went away and we can't you know what that maybe we'll
be bolstering some things like that for example that just giving it a little boost of of normalcy

(52:37):
and permanence might help our process that's a valid question we have a question right over here
thank you for being here um there are people today who would distinguish between
misinformation and disinformation do you ascribe to that and if there is a degree of disinformation

(53:02):
what can we do to combat that right so misinformation and disinformation i'm always getting confused as
to which one's deliberate and which one isn't um dis is deliberate so dis information we live in a
world of dis information which is people deliberately and you know it back in the age that I study if

(53:24):
you accuse someone of lying it was an instant duel and I've been watching the press find all kinds of
ways of saying you know well he's straight from the path of truth you know well he you know all of
the ways in which people have avoided the word lie and I've almost laughed at that because in my time
period no one wanted to use the word lie right that was the word um but yeah there's a huge difference

(53:48):
right it's one thing to deliberately lie like deliberately do it to get something you want
and another thing to just spread misinformation because you're not informed now the question is
which started with me saying I always get confused between dis and miss it's hard to tell the difference
and it's really hard to tell the difference on social media or even sometimes in the media itself

(54:12):
again this comes back to us needing to be really vigilant readers of information and and look for
receipts but as far as something you know almost more concrete what you said was kind of concrete
right can we do something to have people running for office have to like show something about themselves

(54:33):
when they run this is harder this is one of the things about technology warping democracy is that
it happens when technologies are relatively new and no one knows how to corral that it's a it's
like a loose cannon and that's the phase that we're in now with social media spreading both of
those things so I don't have an easy solution to that but I do know we need to know that whatever

(55:00):
it is we're reading or seeing we should not automatically believe it we you know we should
think I tell this a lot I talk about this a lot on my webcast if someone says something to you
and you have a very powerful reaction to it it makes you really mad or really happy that's a
moment to pause and think if there's someone who wants you to be really mad or really happy right

(55:25):
because very often the answer is yes so when you get a strong reaction to a piece of information
that's a that's a great moment to pause and consider whether someone's you know what what do
they call it rage harvesting right which is I think is an amazing phrase maybe someone wants
you to have rage and they're giving you this piece of information and we all you know they do that

(55:47):
because we feel rage or happiness or joy or anger or whatever we all do that's what this grows from
but I think we need to pause nowadays and and ask ourselves why we're having that reaction and
whether there's someone out there who strategically wants us to have that reaction and what that means

(56:11):
so you mentioned that during prior to the civil war people didn't necessarily know that they were
on the path to civil war and having to write as from that perspective when did it start to become
clear like based on reading these people's diaries that they thought they were on the path to a civil
war and when did they know my interesting question so when did they know that they were on the path

(56:35):
to civil war um what's interesting is they talk a lot about the union in a way that we don't anymore
right and the union collapsing the union falling apart they talked about that all the time but I
think you know take Benjamin Brown French my New Hampshire clerk um his wonderful diary up until
the very end he was trying to do something to stop civil war from happening he he was at that point

(57:01):
like the nation's leading mason and uh and he was actually at his wife's bedside his wife was dying
and he's at her bedside writing letters to leading masons around the country and saying look we all
know we're leading masons we all know at least 10 other people who are masons and if we write
to our friends about what's happening now maybe we can pull this in which I know sounds ridiculous

(57:27):
because we know a civil war is coming but there's someone who was in congress for decades and he at
that just before the civil war is still thinking if we can personally connect with people if we can
can touch people personally in some way maybe we can stop this from happening now it's really
interesting he sends this letter out all over the place and there's a who is he he's a I think

(57:53):
it's a virginian writes back to him and his letter is very um sweet and you know come on like we
can do this together you know he's kind of a sweet guy Benjamin Brown French and he gets a letter back
and the guy says yeah I know all about you northerners you're going to come in to our fireplaces

(58:15):
and slaughter our families like that's what you guys want to do I'm not going to listen to you I
don't want to hear what you have to say I'm not really going to say anything to your letter other
than don't bother writing and French gets that letter and just doesn't know what to do like he
can't he doesn't that's a moment where I think he realizes that communication isn't really going to

(58:38):
work anymore um so you know there is a moment when I think people in their own lives individually
can kind of feel a shift in the wind he ends up becoming friends with Abraham Lincoln Benjamin
Brown French is like the um what is it the the movie about the Woody Allen movie about the guy

(58:58):
who's there every in every was Zeleg thank you thank you very much um he's like the guy who
if something happened that was important historically somehow Benjamin Brown French was like standing
there always you know it's like um someone tries to assassinate Andrew Jackson French sees it happen
John Cosy Adams has a stroke uh in the house there's Benjamin Brown French holding his hand

(59:21):
um Abraham Lincoln he wakes up uh and Abraham Lincoln uh has been shot and who's at the bedside
holding his hand Benjamin Brown French so you know he's really living in the in the moment he's great
for a historian that he's that guy but um he tries down to the very end on a personal level

(59:41):
I don't think we all can say when our personal lives have some kind of a feeling in them that
we know things aren't going to change but I do think I do think it matters what our life experience
and what we're living in addition to whatever information we're getting and we're being given
about where we are at a given time we have one right here in the aisle um hi I probably will

(01:00:09):
get this mixed up um but there has been discussions um about the differences between democracy and a
republic and uh that it's distinct enough that it comes up quite often in social media um and that

(01:00:29):
the term democracy um or democratic is not in the constitution um just some insights that's a great
question I mean speaking as a historian who's on social media a little too much are we a republic
or are we a democracy is like constant constant constant this is not going to be a satisfactory

(01:00:54):
answer but I'll explain it we're a democratic republic guys we have a democrat so whenever I
have this argument people will say well we're a constitutional republic and I'll say yeah the
constitution phase a democratic form of government right so we're not a democracy period we are a
republic but we're a democratic republic and those things can be there at the same time so we have a

(01:01:19):
democratic form of government what's interesting is so um it's harder to do now but I I initially
was on social media a lot because I saw it as a great teaching venue and because I don't tend to
yell at people or call people names on social media I had a lot of people I engaged with who
really didn't agree with me so it was really interesting to have those kinds of conversations

(01:01:41):
and there was someone at some point early on who said um I I said why because he clearly didn't like
democracy it's like well why like what do you have against democracy he said well it's kind of
unseemly it's kind of wild like it's not who we are and I thought wow that's that's a really
interesting way of thinking about democracy I actually fundamentally think some people don't

(01:02:02):
know what it is and I don't mean that in an insulting way at all I just think in part because we
took it for granted for so long people won't necessarily really know what it is and now
that we're in a moment where people are talking about it all the time that's that that makes
this a tricky moment right well what is democracy a friend of mine told me about another historian

(01:02:28):
about being in a conversation um and there were a lot of historians and they were all asked in
this group discussion like what is democracy and they were being academics you know well it's this
and back in this time and this and it you know they're coming up with all kinds of complicated
answers my answer to that question is you can boil it down to three things at its core it's much

(01:02:50):
more complicated than this but it has to do with the rule of law applying to everyone it has to do
with free and fair elections and it has to do with our leaders being accountable and those are the
three things there are many more things that are important those are the three things at the core of
of democratic governance but I think that's a I don't think most people are thinking in that way

(01:03:12):
I think they somehow think that democracy is a free for all with all kinds of people grabbing
things of one kind or another and they don't think about that what it really is is government by we
the people grounded on us grounded on public opinion grounded on our will so that's an excellent
question but that's my answer we are a democratic republic and we have time for one more question

(01:03:33):
here and then we're going to wrap it up okay this might sound stupid but I have a fear of
Donald Trump winning because he seems to want to grab power and he doesn't seem to respect the rule
of law if he does win what's gonna how can I not be fearful like is there checks and balances that

(01:04:02):
will keep him in line yeah that's a boy that's a question so how can one not be fearful about the
idea of of Trump winning first of all I'll say as a historian and I don't so much look forward I look
back but that said I think that I have faith in the fact that there are still people who believe

(01:04:26):
in the rule of law who believe in our system of government who know that this is gonna happen
it's not going to be a surprise that there's going to be a grab at power it already happened once
so it'll happen again so this time people kind of know it's going to happen we don't know what
the outcome will be and I don't like I was thinking about this this morning actually I don't think

(01:04:48):
it's useful for people to automatically say it's going to be crazy it's going to be violent we don't
know that and that buys right into my crazy southerners who are like bad things y'all I'm going to kill
you if you and you sit down and you shut up because you're afraid of that's going to happen
that doesn't help us to expect that even though it's natural to think that so I think part of the

(01:05:13):
answer to that question is to be aware that we don't know what comes next that the things being
promised are not necessarily going to happen because we live in this time of extreme contingency
I say this all the time I say it so often on my webcast that they have bingo cards and contingency
is always on the bingo guard always um but we we live in this time of extreme contingency and that

(01:05:36):
means two things on the one hand it means things might get really really bad because we don't know
where things are going it also means maybe things are going to go in a direction we don't expect
and we can improve things we can use this moment of change as an opportunity to move for something
better and I believe in that as well so I can't say don't be scared of anything but I can't say

(01:05:58):
don't assume what's going to happen be in the moment and and watch what's happening and and and sort
of don't jump into panic which is very easy for me to say I realize and maybe not a satisfactory
answer but you know it's very natural to assume horrible things are going to happen but we just

(01:06:20):
don't know yet well there are rules the question is what happens and who's going to enforce them
and we don't know right I mean we don't know we really don't know this is a really weird time to
be a political historian as I always tell people I have like two brains and my historian brain is
you know what a fascinating time to be here you know a moment of extreme contingency and then my

(01:06:45):
citizen brain is kind of with you going I know um and so the way I sort of you know pull those
things together is to remind myself that for better and worse we really don't know what's coming
next but we shouldn't assume the best or the worst I guess that's that's maybe for now the best I
can offer thank you and I think that's a great question to close on please join me in thanking

(01:07:10):
Dr. Freeman and Ryan
and I would add one one thing to your final answer if I can which is I think that hope is
intrinsically tied to democracy and as long as we are democracy we as people and citizens

(01:07:30):
have the ability to affect that change and hope for a better future and make that future reality
we we we I also want to thank again Calvin University for hosting us this evening the
Ford Foundation for being a partner in this project in West Michigan I also want to thank this is our

(01:07:51):
25th event in two months with historians and public academics I want to thank Doug Coopman
professor here at Calvin who has been our sort of liaison here in West Michigan I want to thank
Jill DeVries a photographer local that has been helping us Julian Wolfe on the democracy first team

(01:08:12):
who has been criss-crossing the battleground states Joe Flanagan Ari and his film crew have been
instrumental in making this project a success so thank you all for all the work that you have
done thank you all for coming and we will we will preserve