NARRATION: American democracy was a new invention, an evolving experiment. The founding documents of the United States made no reference to establishing a “democratic” government in the new breakaway republic. Though the signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution sought to reject the tyranny of monarchs, they had grave concerns about losing control to the masses.

JOANNE FREEMAN (HISTORIAN, YALE UNIVERSITY): Most of the founding generation were not particularly comfortable with democracy. They were in a world of monarchies and here they were trying this more democratic mode of government. There’s a story about how, right after the Constitutional Convention, a woman came up to Benjamin Franklin and asked him what kind of government had just been created, and Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” So right from the get-go, right from literally the closing of the Constitutional Convention, there is Franklin saying this is a new kind of a government. This is a more fragile government than a monarchy seems to be. Are you, the American people, going to be able to keep it?

ERIC FONER (HISTORIAN, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY): Just before the writing of the Constitution, you had had Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts, where farmers who were suffering from debt tried to close the courthouses, so their land wouldn’t be taken away by creditors, etc. And many sort of well-to-do founding fathers saw this as an example of the excesses of democracy and you needed a stronger national government to keep a lid on popular enthusiasms and popular chaos.

NARRATION: As the founders sought to unify the nation, it was a delicate balance between respecting the will of the people and protecting their fledgling democratic system. 

ALEXIS COE (AUTHOR, “YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST: A BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON”): Free speech exists because the founders wanted us to question things openly, to press for answers, to expect better from the people who we elected. And if they did not deliver, we could assemble peacefully to protest. Encouraging that from the very beginning encourages a certain amount of dissension, and that is a good thing. At the same time, there were limits, and when people threatened the sanctity of the union, of the democracy, of the republic, the founders reacted and often overreacted.

NARRATION: During George Washington’s inaugural presidency, whiskey distillers in western Pennsylvania would highlight the central tension after refusing to pay taxes to the newly-formed federal government, and then turning to violence. This was the Whiskey Rebellion.

ALEXIS COE: Hundreds of people assembled. And when that didn’t work, they started to tar and feather tax collectors. Some were hurt, someone had their house burned down. Washington felt as though this was the first show of defiance towards his government. He sidestepped the Constitution, raised an army and rode out with them. But he turned around at the last moment, thinking, “Oh, maybe this isn’t such a good look.”

JOANNE FREEMAN: In the early years of the government, because the government was experimental — and they used that word a lot, that it was an experiment — they were constantly afraid that everything would collapse, that the next crisis or the next bad decision would bring it all tumbling down. They weren’t naïve, so they did assume there would be conflict, that, in a sense, there would be factions of people banging up against each other. What they were worried about was organized factions. They were not excited about the idea of organized political parties. There’s a lot of debate over how much democracy — and by that I mean, mass protest in the street — how much of that is safe? How much of that isn’t?

NARRATION: It wasn’t just that the founding of American democracy was a contested experiment. From the beginning, it had left many American people excluded altogether.

JELANI COBB (STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER): So there’s a fairly deceptive mythology about American democracy, and it requires that people overlook that very many of the founders owned slaves. The American Revolution, which was fought around the cause of no taxation without representation, immediately yielded a circumstance in which there were millions of people who could not vote, who could not be represented, but who were nonetheless part of the American economy as noncitizen labor. Immediate contradictions. So the mythology has to gloss over all of that.

KATHLEEN BELEW (HISTORIAN, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO): We start the country’s narrative with this set of radical promises about equality; about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And we often forget that, at the outset, those promises were not meant for most people. They were meant for white, free, property-owning men. Full stop.

MARCUS NEVIUS (HISTORIAN, UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND): The fundamental problem of the founding era, in my view, is the problem of compromises that were reached to protect slavery, to extend slavery, to push back against efforts to bring slavery in the early United States to an end. And it just got worse. As the new nation began to expand westward, those who sought to establish new slave states in the West ran up against those who sought to establish new spaces for freedom in the West. The question came up time and again as the new nation expanded.

NARRATION: In Kansas in 1854, a state-level civil war broke out over the issue, with competing factions pouring across state lines to enforce their positions. Abolitionist John Brown and his sons famously resisted the effort to extend slavery into Kansas.

MARCUS NEVIUS: These tensions created flashpoints that ultimately, in some cases, became outright physical violence. And blood was shed. As the press picked up the reports, the headline became “Bleeding Kansas.”

NARRATION: Even inside the U.S. Congress, violence became commonplace as a political tactic. Congressmen commonly carried pistols or bowie knives, and in this time of rising tensions, there were more than 70 violent incidents on the congressional floor.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Democratic government, at its core, is communication between people with power and people who’ve given them that power, the American public. They’re partly playing for an audience. In the 1840s and the 1850s, increasingly, the American politics was centered around the issue of slavery. In 1856, a lightning-rod incident involved Massachusetts abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner.

MARCUS NEVIUS: Sumner gave an anti-slavery speech on the floor in Congress, and characterized a representative out of South Carolina as, essentially, a handmaiden to pro-slavery interests. Several days later, he was attacked by one of his colleagues, Preston Brooks, and caned to within an inch of his life.

JOANNE FREEMAN: In the end, he collapsed, bloody, from this intense beating, which many all over the nation took as the South beating the North into submission.

ERIC FONER: The 10 years before the Civil War is a period of mounting violence in the United States, both in Washington itself and out in many parts of the country. I’m not saying that that caused the Civil War, but it did make violence seem more acceptable.

NARRATION: In 1860, with the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the expansion of slavery to new states, the experiment in American democracy was shaken to its core. Refusing to accept the results of the presidential election, Southerners moved to secede from the republic in defiance, and a catastrophic civil war broke out.  

ERIC FONER: It seems that there are some issues which democracy is simply incapable of handling, and slavery in the United States was one of them. It wasn’t democratic processes, it wasn’t arguments, speeches — the fate of slavery was determined on the battlefield. It’s a melancholy reflection on the fact that political democracy cannot, it seems, solve every problem.

Our history is not just a straight line of greater and greater democratic progress. But it has also survived many traumatic moments in our history.

(END)