The Dangers of Democracy

In 1860 the United States gave the international community an object lesson in the dangers of democracy. At the time, most of the major nations of the world were governed by hereditary monarchies, mixed monarchies or aristocracies. The vast majority of people resident in those countries had no direct say in the selection of those who governed or the policies they pursued, which made the people "subjects" rather than "citizens". What influence the people came from the fact of their numbers and the threat posed to civil order by mob action.

The United States was alone among major nations in that the national sovereignty was vested in the people – not all of the people, but a large number of them compared to other nations. In 1860 the United States essentially all white male adults had the right to vote, and the government was made up of elected representatives and officials chosen by elected representatives. (While the United States had universal male white suffrage, Britain's Reform Act of 1832 increased the electorate to about seven percent of the adult male population.)

Those who doubted the inherent stability of a government based upon any kind of universal suffrage – "mob" rule – were vindicated by the events of 1860. At the start of that year the United States was a vast nation that stretched from coast to coast across the middle section of North America. The strains in the body politic became cracks and fissures with the approach of the state and national elections in the autumn to choose all the members of the national House of Representatives, the members of the electoral college who would select the president and vice president and the members of the state legislatures who would select one third of the members of the national Senate.

The disintegration of the United States started immediately after the election results were known. Whereas in November there was only one great republic in the world based upon democratic principles, in February 1861 there were two, and by April of that same year those two great republics were at war with one another.

Context

"I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course."
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing: A Play


My original plan, when I began working on the manuscript that became Four Score and Four, was to write about the year 1860 with the politics and the Civil War left out. Politics and war, after all, are the maintstays of most histories, and those stories about America in the Civil War era have been told repeatedly. The importance of politics and war in the course of history is as undeniable as it is in our daily live, but what those histories merely nod to, however, are the social, cultural and technological contexts in which the political and military events occurred. As we think about events in our daily lives, we do so with reference to Ebola, the internet, health insurance, terrorism, the price of oil and Starbucks. But all those things are irrelevant to the events of 1860, and in their place we need to be conscious of consumption (the disease better known today as tuberculosis), the telegraph, slavery, coal overtaking wood as a primary fuel, and raw cotton as the primary export product of the United States. Politicians in 1860 did not Tweet or orchestrate sound bites for cable news. They made speeches to crowds that they reached by horse and buggy, railroads, and riverboats. The population was largely literate – literacy was more widespread in the United States in 1860 than in the other principal nations of Europe – and people got most of their news by newspapers. Copies of newspapers passed free through the mails to the editors of other newspapers, and by this method (in addition to the telegraph – the Associated Press was in business) news was disseminated across the nation. The newspapers made no pretense of objectivity, and political patronage was given to newspaper editors and writers as though they were party functionaries.