In These Truths, Jill Lepore asks her reader to consider a central question as she makes her way through her 800-page survey of American history. It is a question first posed by Alexander Hamilton in 1787 in what became known as Federalist Paper #1. He asked newly independent Americans faced with a constitution to ratify, or not, “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Lepore asks us, possibly cynical, likely concerned, twenty-first century Americans to contemplate the same question. The earnestness with which she addresses us makes clear this is no rhetorical question.
We know the delegates of the Constitutional Convention and the state legislatures who ratified their work did choose the government that, in amended form, still guides us today. Yet in reading Lepore we better understand the extent “accident and force” have played throughout our history, including and perhaps especially in our current time of political polarization, disputed elections, and doubts for democracy. If we feel buffeted, we are. If we feel hopeless, helpless, we are not. Reflection can make real choice possible.
Lepore has structured America’s story in four parts: The Idea (1492-1799), The People (1800-1865), The State (1866-1945), The Machine (1946-2016). Each part, in turn, is subdivided into four chapters. Each chapter begins with an introductory section which sets its theme suggested by its title. While some of these sections feel like ordinary introductions, more than a few are uncommonly inspired, none more so than chapter 7, “Of Ships and Shipwrecks.” Lepore opens with the scene of Secretary of State Abel Upshur’s untimely demise aboard the corvette USS Princeton. The last of a series of ceremonial deck gun salutes misfired, exploded, and killed seven, including Upshur and the Secretary of the Navy. “The death of Upshur had serious political consequences,” writes Lepore. [236] President Tyler replaced him with Southern firebrand, John C. Calhoun. Where Ushur had promoted the annexation of Texas as an issue of liberty, keeping the issue of slavery mostly unstated, Calhoun “talked about Texas only with reference to slavery.” (The ship theme returns throughout the chapter, from a poem by Longfellow to the death at sea of Margaret Fuller.)
Indeed, the United States’ continuing expansion in these years “led to…staggering constitutional distortions and moral contortions.” [262] Even if adopted by choice, Lepore implies, its ratification requires continual renewal by each subsequent generation. Accidental gray areas, not explicitly accounted for in the Constitution, become political battlegrounds. Partisans resort to force–raw power–to better shape it to their purposes. Texas and California, Kansas and Nebraska: states were traded, slave and free, to ensure the balance of power. But the balance wouldn’t hold. Violence and force erupted: Bleeding Kansas. As soon as its losing position became irreversible, the Southern states seceded. Civil War ensued.
But other incidents of accident and force threatened the adolescent Republic. A national bank was not chartered in the Constitution. Some were for it; some were agin’ it. President Andrew Jackson was very much in the latter camp. He abolished the Second Bank of the United States and threw the country into the worst economic panic to date. Future leaders would interpret the constitutional issue differently. In these mid-nineteenth century years, Congressmen were driven to use canes and fisticuffs to press their political positions: “Although hardly ever reported in the press, the years between 1830 and 1860 saw more than one hundred incidents of violence by congressmen, from melees in the aisles to mass brawls on the floor….” [244] Bowie knives and pistols were common accessories for Southern Congressmen.
With the country and its leaders in such a state of rancor, it wasn’t uncommon to fall prey to pessimism. Lepore highlights Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s despondency in his poem, “The Building of the Ship” (1849).
…where, oh where,
Shall end this form so rare?
…Wrecked upon some treacherous rock,
Rotting in some loathsome dock,
Such the end must be at length
Of all this loveliness and strength! [259]
But the contingencies of history are such that, in the end, Longfellow left us a more hopeful poem. A dinner guest later that year, Charles Sumner waxed enthusiastic about the new Free Soil Party he was joining and, hence, almost optimistic about the Republic. Longfellow was inspired to try a new ending for his poem:
Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State!
For thee the famished nations wait!
The world seems hanging on thy fate! [260]
Lepore returns to Longfellow’s metaphor in her final chapter, “The Question Addressed.” “Can a people govern themselves by reflection and choice? Hamilton had wanted to know, or are they fated to be ruled, forever, by accident and force, lashed by the violence of each wave of surging sea?” Looking at recent years, this is what she discerned:
The ship of state lurched and reeled. Liberals, blown down by the slightest breeze, had neglected to trim the ship’s sails, leaving the canvas to flap and tear in a rising wind, the rigging flailing. Huddled below decks, they failed to plot a course, having lost sight of the horizon and their grasp on any compass. On deck, conservatives had pulled up the ship’s planking to make bonfires of rage: they had courted the popular will by demolishing the idea of truth itself, smashing the ship’s very mast. [788]
After eight hundred pages of text and four hundred years of history, it becomes clear that Hamilton’s question has no definitive answer. Rather, it is a perennial question to be answered continually by each subsequent generation. In those times when accident and force are most salient, the importance of reflection and choice becomes all the more heightened. We are in one of those times now, a time when it is well to consider Lepore’s final admonition: “A nation cannot choose its past; it can only choose its future.”
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