The attack on our nation’s capital was not outsiders, but instigated and directed by President Trump, who then incited the mob with his son Don Jr., and Rudy Giuliani, backed by 12 Republican senators, all promoting the fake news that Trump’s “landslide victory” was stolen from him by left wing socialists who need to be violently stopped. Encouraged to conduct “trial by combat,” they unleashed Trump supporters with guns, pipe bombs, fire-bombs, and lynching nooses, to vandalize, loot, and threaten our duly-elected law-makers to “Stop the Steal.” Then senators Josh Hawly and Ted Cruz used the insurrection they encouraged to fundraise off the carnage that took five lives.
Although the groups that participated have new names, they represent forces with deep roots in our history. Insurgents with Confederate banners agitating for a New Civil War call themselves “Boogaloo,” the affiliation of the local man who shot two security officers in Oakland on May 29, 2020, killing one, and shot two sheriff’s deputies in Ben Lomond on June 6, 2020, killing one. The Proud Boys white nationalist group claim close ties with the White House and police. Q-Anon has modernized the basic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a lie employed to lethal ends by Marxists, Nazis, and Klansmen. This 1903 Russian hoax claimed that Jews, Liberals, and Freemasons, planned to enslave white people and rule the world through economic oppression and sexual exploitation.
The recent attack on our Capital is far from over, as insurgents promised to return and disrupt the swearing-in of the new president. And the lies have not abated, with NPR reporting that Trump supporters appalled by the violence are insisting these were evil liberals pretending to be Trump supporters to make them look bad. Mitt Romney, Republican senator from Utah, tried to cut through the stolen election lies by saying, “The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset, is by telling them the truth!” We may have different opinions, but there is only one truth. And lies undermine our unity as a nation, our decency as Americans, our political cooperation as equals, and our sympathy for those in peril.
Birth of a lie
John C. Calhoun was vice president to John Quincy Adam in 1825, then to his successor Andrew Jackson in 1829. When agriculture boomed in the South, so did Slavery. Calhoun flipped the popular saying, from “Slavery is a necessary Evil, that will die-out on its own,” to “Slavery is a positive good that must be protected and expanded.” Then he backed a belief that States Rights allowed states to ignore Federal laws they don’t like, through a fake invention called “Nullification.” On the verge of armed conflict over nullification of a tariff, a compromise was reached in 1832-33. Calhoun used this victory to make it seem Nullification was law, if determined in a state convention, when in fact it violated the 1803 ruling that Constitutional interpretation belonged exclusively to the Judicial branch.
Calhoun said if the Constitution was amended in a way a state considered unacceptable, that state had the right to secede from the Union. Yet this is not true. States were not autonomous nation-states, but part of a whole. No single state had the power to make sweeping decisions affecting the entire country. Calhoun did not support Secession, but used the empty threat of Secession to compel the North to give slave-owners advantages. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery north of the 36º30’ parallel, except for Missouri. The South hoped to always have a numerical balance between Slave and Free states.
When California statehood was being considered in 1850, there was a move to make Southern California a Slave State and Northern California a Free State. Northern California not only had the majority of the state’s population, but was the center of gold mining, shipping, and San Francisco-based enterprises. California leaders took the unprecedented move to have Northern and Southern California enter the union as a Free State without going through the territorial period. Southerners objected, in the hope of making Southern California a Slave State. Yet Calhoun died March 31, 1850, before California came up for a vote in September. Abolitionists in Congress helped approve an undivided California in 1850, as part of a goal to keep Slave States out of the west.
Santa Cruz County was called the most American county in California, with a large settlement of Abolitionists. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, forced citizens of Free States to become slave-catchers, and the Dred Scott decision in 1857 said an enslaved person entering a Free State was not freed (over-ruling local laws to the contrary), allowing for the transport of slaves into Free States; and that no Black person, free or enslaved, could become a U.S. citizen. As Lincoln said in his House Divided speech of June 15, 1858, “…this Government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” it will either be all the one or all the other.
Back in California, Spanish Californios felt disenfranchised, and some joined with resident Dixie transplants for two unsuccessful attempts to make Southern California a Slave State. The third attempt was by Assemblyman Andres Pico, brother of Alta California’s Mexican governor Pio Pico (1845-to-1846). The 1859 Pico Bill proposed creating the “Territory of Colorado” just south of Monterey County, to include the modern counties of San Luis Obispo, Kings, Tulare, Kern and part of Inyo. This gained 75% approval by residents of these counties, and with the backing of state senator Milton Latham, was expected to pass in Washington.
Meanwhile, President James Buchanan was being called the worst president ever, a Northern-born Southern sympathizer, investigated by the Covode Committee as the most corrupt administration in American history, due to extortion, abuse of power, and attempting to bribe members of Congress to impose the proslavery Lecompton Constitution on an anti-slavery Kansas. When a report exposing corruption did not result in grounds for impeachment, Buchanan declared himself completely exonerated.
The 1860 presidential race was contentious. The Democrats were so divided, they ran Stephen Douglas, the fiery Senator from Illinois on a Slavery Compromise platform. Yet Buchanan’s vice president John Breckinridge (Mary Todd Lincoln’s cousin) ran as a Southern Democrat, for Expansion of Slavery in the West. Break-away Know Nothings and Whigs ran John Bell in the Constitutional Union Party to preserve Slavery and the Union. The Republicans had much stronger nominees, but each alienated various factions, so they settled on a lesser-known moderate, Abraham Lincoln, on a platform to prevent slavery’s expansion.
Local Lincoln
Abolitionists were highly motivated. Northeastern Free States were being invaded by Southern slave-catchers, taking not only escaped slaves, but free Black people. Slave-catchers often came at night to avoid the angry citizens. Lincoln supporters started calling themselves the Wide Awakes, and in political parades, dressed as Night Watchmen with lanterns and slickers, because their eyes were open to the outrages of the South. A Wide Awake in Santa Cruz was liveryman Charlie Lincoln, second cousin to Abraham, yet heartbroken that his 21st birthday was exactly a month after election day, so he couldn’t vote. Lincoln won no states in the South because his name wasn’t allowed on Southern ballots. His win came from New England and the Great Lakes States, Oregon and California, with his stronghold in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay areas. Lincoln won by the second lowest popular vote in history: 39.8% (after John Quincy Adams at 30.92%).
However, Buchanan turned his lame-duck period into an interminable national crisis. On Dec. 20, 1860, South Carolina declared it was seceding, even though Calhoun’s “secession” lie had no basis in law, and was just stealing land from the American public. Buchanan could have shown strength, but instead he declared secession was not lawful, yet he had no way of stopping it. Without any consequences, from Jan. 1 to Feb. 1, six more states seceded, as Lincoln fumed, helpless to intervene.
On Feb. 11, 1861, Lincoln’s train left Illinois for Washington DC, under rumored plots to blow-up the Capital, kidnap Buchanan, tear-up train tracks, blow up bridges, or assassinate Lincoln. A Baltimore murder plot forced the president to pass through town unscheduled at night.
At his inaugural address on the steps of the unfinished Capital building, Lincoln tried to reassure the South he had no intent to interfere with Slavery. But he would defend the Constitution against the break-up of this perpetual union, for even if secession were possible, it could not be legally done without the consent of all of the states, North and South. Yet not even a man so eloquent could reach those blind and deaf to all but their own lies, fears, and self-righteousness. Calhoun’s “secession” lie would cost 750,000 American lives, the nation’s highest death toll in war after the 407,316 in World War II.
Meanwhile, secession left the Slave State of Colorado to be carved out of the middle of California with no advocates, and California remained whole.
Ross Eric Gibson is a former history columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and Santa Cruz Sentinel.
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