James Roger Sharp is professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Sharp has written extensively about the political history of the early Republic, including the book “The Deadlocked Election of 1800 : Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance” (University Press of Kansas, 2010).
The assault on our Capitol last Jan. 6 by insurrectionists who vowed to overturn the election of Joe Biden by interfering or stopping the official final tally of electoral votes was the same lawlessness that drove our Founding Fathers to write our present Constitution.
In 1783, the newly installed Articles of Confederation government faced a major crisis when a group of angry officers at the encamped Continental Army in Newburgh, New York, warned of a potential mutiny and threatened the use of military force against the Articles’ government in New York City if their demands for back pay were not met.
After a shocked and horrified Gen. George Washington confronted and denounced the mutineers, the planned mutiny collapsed.
Three years later, a group of angry farmers in western Massachusetts stormed the local courts to prevent foreclosure on farms for non-payment of taxes. This, Shay’s Rebellion, which was put down by the Massachusetts’ militia, nonetheless sent a shockwave through many Americans who feared that it signaled the beginning of a period of chaos and insurrections.
Washington wrote James Madison in 1786, “We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion, thus confirming Great Britain’s arrogant prediction that the union would soon dissolve.” Shay’s Rebellion had demonstrated “the want of energy in our governments ... which imperils life, liberty, or property.”
The next year, the Articles’ government approved a constitutional convention to meet in Philadelphia.
The document, ratified in 1788, revealed the Founder’s suspicion of power. Sovereignty was divided between the federal and state governments and federal authority was dispersed, with a checks and balance system, dividing power between the executive, judiciary and a bicameral legislature.
Reflecting the Founders’ deep fear of standing armies, chaos and insurrections, the Second Amendment was adopted. It reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Within six months after the adoption of the amendment, Congress passed the Militia Act underscoring the central role the Founding Fathers accorded to the militia. The act required that “each and every free able-bodied white male” from 18 to 45 “shall... be enrolled in the militia….” In addition, the act required that every member of the militia “shall… provide himself with a good musket or firelock,” or rifle.
The militia, under the law, would serve to repel an “invasion from any foreign nation or Indian Tribe.” But in addition, the militia would be mobilized “whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state.”
Here, clearly the insurrection of Jan. 6 was exactly what the Founders warned against.
Within the next decade militia forces were called upon the put down two insurrections: the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and the much smaller Fries Rebellion in 1798-1799.
Western Pennsylvanians complained that the excise tax on whiskey was “most dangerous to the civil rights of freemen.” Numerous violent attacks were made on federal tax collectors to prevent the collection of the tax. And even more threatening were reports of growing unrest in Kentucky and the Carolinas.
In response, President Washington organized a militia force of 15,000 from militias from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to crush the rebellion. With Washington riding at the head of the column, the insurrection collapsed and many of the leaders fled into the Western interior and those remaining repented and promised obedience to the law.
Eventually, after the initial lawlessness and accompanying insurrections, the country developed a conservative, two-party system that for the most part was able to solve political differences through compromise and the acceptance of a loyal opposition that could be trusted with the reins of power.
This, sadly, was the “old normal.” The “new normal” has been radicalized with former President Donald Trump’s supporters refusing to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s election. And millions of Americans have been infected by Trump’s big lie of a stolen election, which undermines the very foundation of democracy. A social media blitz has promoted the wildest of conspiracy theories that the country will only be saved by severely reducing the size of the electorate, preventing any positive government action, and provoking hysteria that convinces some that the only solution would be a civil war.
A number of recent books and articles have pointed out the frightening similarities between the rise of authoritarianism in other countries with the increasing violence and chaos in the United States.
We must not assume that since a democratic two-party system has served and protected us in the past will somehow reemerge, and the Republicans, who have become more of a cult than a party, will rejoin the two-party system and shed the disabling lies and threats and fact less rants from Trump and his followers. Americans must reclaim their democratic heritage by resoundingly defeating the voices of division, cruelty and disorder.
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