How does History move? A generation ago, in the Nineties, it seemed to have forgotten how: perhaps, as Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, History was on a journey, or it was sleeping and not to be awoken. Francis Fukuyama infamously proclaimed, with apparent triumph but actual melancholy, that History had reached its end. For Fredric Jameson the situation was even more grave: amid the uncanny blur of late capitalism, a sense of the historical had not just expired but vanished altogether.
Now, we are told, History is back, and so is action, power, and ferocious ideological combat. Donald Trump threatens to abolish American democracy and install a dictatorship, perhaps a fascist one. In Western Europe, the old liberal order trembles before a rising tide of right-wing populism, while Russian armies lay siege to Ukraine. And everywhere, from Moscow and Beijing to Tehran and Caracas, powerful authoritarians menace the peace and liberty of the world.
But if History is on the march again, its movements appear strangely constricted. In our time, the political dramas of the past two centuries—vibrant tales of revolution and reaction, narrated in accents variously romantic, tragic, and ironic—have collapsed into a single story: in short, History moves only when the political right acts and the center reacts. (The left, offstage, yelps sorrowfully.) This master plot of contemporary history bestows two presents at once. The rancorous, reptilian, essentially unknowable right—rising from the wastes like Trump, Putin, or Sauron—receives the Promethean gift of historical agency. It always throws the first punch. Meanwhile, the muddled, indecisive center, whose own fecklessness allowed the right to take form in the first place, is awarded the gift of heroic opposition. Only by joining battle with its antagonist can the existing order redeem itself and vindicate its true humanity.
In literary terms, this plot produces a narrative of somewhat less subtlety than Avengers: Infinity War. Yet it has proved not only compelling but addictive and exportable across time and space. From Timothy Snyder’s chilling parables of fascism abroad to Heather Cox Richardson’s portraits of extremism at home, our leading professional historians have played no small part in entrenching this sequence as the fundamental narrative of our time.
It is no coincidence that our staple analogies of historical agency all bear its imprint. If liberal victory can come at all, it is only as a reluctant response to vicious and unprovoked outrage: the slaveholders who dissolved the Union, the Nazis who invaded Poland, the Jim Crow fanatics who trained their fire hoses on peaceful protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. It was actually in the Nineties, a much-lauded new book argues—while politicians dithered and theorists pronounced the disappearance of History—that the dark forces of today’s right began to cohere.
History itself, of course, is different from what any of these narratives suppose, and wilder. Does it matter, for instance, that America’s most desperate crisis and most radical revolution began with a mass movement on the political left? Perhaps it should.
In the fall of 1856, a jittery, fractious republic girded itself for a presidential election that would decide its fate. The air was thick with real and rumored violence: politicians and journalists assaulted in the nation’s capital; extremists and paramilitary groups playacting at combat on the plains of Kansas; millions of recent immigrants targeted by a rising nativist movement, leading to bloody riots from Baltimore to San Francisco—all of it enabled by a febrile, partisan media, its reach extended by new technology, and a broken political system unable to contain, much less repair, the deep rents within the social fabric.
American dysfunction stewed in the company of global discontent. In Europe, a coalition of Western powers had united to block Russian aggression on the Black Sea, but the war that followed was deadly and inconclusive. From all around the world—Nicaragua, Iran, Afghanistan, Tibet, and the South China Sea—came daily news of unrest, invasion, and massacre. In Europe and South America a new type of strongman discomfited liberals and won over the masses, successfully combining national populism and authoritarian chic. The worldwide cause of democracy, moribund since the failed uprisings of 1848, had a bleaker outlook than ever.
“The American republic,” admonished one historian about a century later, “ought to have been the hope of oppressed men throughout the globe—and it was instead laying itself open to the scornful gibes of illiberal critics.” The presidential campaign that year was frenetic and bewildering, marked by unlikely nominations and unholy alliances, bizarre and unbelievable charges that were nevertheless widely believed, dramatic events soon overtaken by yet more dramatic events and then forgotten, apocalyptic rhetoric on all sides, and a good deal of vigorous brow-furrowing in the New York Times. The outcome, all agreed, would be determined in Pennsylvania.
The oldest and strongest political organization in the country, the Democratic Party, recognized as much in the selection of its presidential nominee. Passing over their embattled incumbent, Franklin Pierce—the first time in U.S. history that a party had cast aside its own elected president—Democrats instead arrayed themselves behind Pennsylvania’s favorite son, James Buchanan.
Now chiefly remembered for his dithering on the eve of the Civil War, Buchanan was at the time of his nomination a distinguished statesman of sixty-five, with more than four decades of experience as a state legislator, congressman, senator, secretary of state, and most recently, the country’s minister to Britain. The “old public functionary” did not inspire devotion, but he did suggest safety, or at least stasis. In the words of John Updike, the portly, courtly bachelor “projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence.” Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because he came from a vital swing state and had been across an ocean since 1853, Buchanan was regarded as the most electable Democrat in the country.
The Whig Party had imploded in the political chaos of the previous two years. Yet a former Whig president emerged as one of Buchanan’s chief rivals in the fall campaign. As the nominee of the nativist, anti-Catholic American Party, Millard Fillmore was an odd fit. Never in his long career had he expressed hostility toward immigrants; his recent European tour had included a friendly audience with Pope Pius IX in Rome. But the fifty-six-year-old lawyer thirsted for a return to the White House, which he had occupied for more than two years after the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850. In 1856, buoyed by conservative former Whig allies in New York and the South, Fillmore presented himself to the people as an unobjectionable native-born Protestant male, a vague Unionist, and an intentionally colorless alternative to the hyperbolic moral politics that had claimed center stage.
However unusual their nominations, Buchanan and Fillmore together embodied the nineteenth-century political system as it had been for decades. In this respect they did not suit the temper of the moment. “Two galvanized old men,” roared Walt Whitman,
close on the summons to depart this life. . . . A pretty time for two dead corpses to go walking up and down the earth, to guide by feebleness and ashes a proud, young, friendly, fresh, heroic nation of thirty millions of live and electric men!
His verdict was not unique to underemployed freelance writers in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn. The brand-new Republican Party, formed in 1854 in opposition to slavery, took a leaf out of the same book. Rejecting the “old, cautious party politicians” and “antediluvian Whigs” in their ranks, who had lined up behind John McLean, a Supreme Court justice of conservative reputation, Republicans instead nominated a national celebrity of no political reputation whatsoever.
Colonel John C. Frémont had made his name as a man of action. Through his marriage to Jessie Benton, the favorite daughter of a powerful senator from Missouri, the young Frémont had won fame with a series of well-publicized expeditions across the distant, mountainous West. Dubbed “The Pathfinder” by the press, Frémont also led the mass killing of native Wintu families in the Sacramento River and played a key role in the U.S. war against Mexico; in 1847, he accepted the surrender of Mexican California in an adobe house a stone’s throw from what is today Universal Studios in Los Angeles.
Whitman had dreamed of a “healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West” who would “walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast and arms.” Frémont appeared to conjure the poet’s fantasy into flesh: just forty-three years old, with flowing locks and rugged beard—the first in presidential campaign history—communicated Romantic ardor, and perhaps even exceptional virility. He had, after all, spirited off the beautiful Jessie from right under her father’s nose.
The Republican press feasted on the animal contrast between Frémont, “sun-burnt and frost-blistered,” and his pallid, papery rivals. Compared with the old bachelor Buchanan, “who never had the courage to take a wife,” Frémont’s portrait displayed
that blended expression of strength and serenity which marks the hero. Soft blue eyes; hair brown and profuse; moustache and beard; a rosy face, not without some lines stamped upon it by toil, exposure and care. . . . It is the face of a man with whom it was inevitable that Jessie Benton should run away. No girl worthy of him could help it.
The politics of performative masculinity, however, were not what made the 1856 campaign different. Unlike any national election that had come before, the race that year turned on the question of human slavery. And in the violent American political collision over human bondage, it was the antislavery side—the Republican Party of Frémont, Whitman, and Lincoln, among many others—that acted as the aggressor.
This idea may sound strange to modern readers, taught as we are to foreground the belligerence of the pro-slavery South and the border ruffians stealing elections in Kansas, or of Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner on the Senate floor. Yet this very real Southern aggression was not only balanced by equally real antislavery violence—John Brown’s posse hacking five settlers to death at Pottawatomie Creek—but also represented a reaction to what was genuinely new in 1856: the arrival of an antislavery party that could elect abolitionists like Sumner to the Senate in the first place.
For nearly a century, the American republic had persisted half-slave and half-free. Most people in the free states opposed human bondage, in a general way, but the thin reed of public opinion was no match for the institutional strength of slavery in the South. The national economy, supported by Northern merchants and bankers, assumed its indefinite continuance; the national party system, stretching from Louisiana to Maine, insulated it from political challenge. Against this fortress of legal, financial, and organizational power, the isolated howls of abolitionists could do little.
These were the barricades that Republicans stormed in their 1856 campaign. The new party did not promise to abolish slavery overnight. It incarnated something far more radical than any paper demand: an organized mass movement that made Southern slavery—its power in government, its threat to freedom, its cruel and criminal essence—the subject of politics.
The Republicans did this with purposely inflammatory rhetoric, including a platform that proclaimed bondage a “relic of barbarism,” and by rejecting any settlement that might win sectional peace and once again remove slavery from political debate. Instead, the Ohio senator Benjamin Wade declared, “All compromises must be annulled and rendered inoperative, and agitation must be the watchword.” “Our object,” the Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson told the Republican convention, “is to overthrow the slave power of the country.”
Naturally, Republicans also talked of moderation, conservatism, and the Union. But this was a party whose campaign was endorsed by notorious abolitionists—Frederick Douglass gave Republican stump speeches in 1856—and whose elected officials, including the governor of Michigan, talked freely about winning emancipation in the South. Why should any moderate or conservative trust an organization whose leaders celebrated the violent defiance of federal fugitive slave law, and whose Speaker of the House said he would prefer to let the Union “slide” rather than accept a government invested in “the perpetuation of human slavery”?
In fact, cautious institutionalists across the country did not trust the Republicans. A virtual who’s who of the antebellum Establishment, running from Beacon Hill to Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, emerged to oppose Frémont: several former presidents and vice presidents; multitudinous colonels, commodores, and other military men; the great political names of Brahmin Boston, Winthrop, Choate, and Everett; and a cavalcade of famous statesmen’s sons, including James Clay, Fletcher Webster, and John Van Buren.
A Republican presidency, financial elites worried, would “ruin all the Commercial and monetary interests of the United States.” Big donations flowed to Buchanan and Fillmore, while the Frémont campaign struggled to pay its speakers in Pennsylvania.
The cautious moderates arrayed against Frémont included West Point graduates Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and William T. Sherman, who all feared that a Republican victory would mean civil war. Of course, they were right. In 1856, Buchanan’s narrow triumph postponed the crisis, but four years later the same radical party was back with a stronger and even more ideologically committed nominee. Abraham Lincoln’s election on an all-Northern electoral vote overturned more than eighty years of precedent and put the government in the hands of an organization whose raison d’être was unyielding opposition to slavery.
This was seen as an abomination and a catastrophe, not only to the slaveholding South but to nearly all the leading institutional actors of the antebellum republic. The most violent, revolutionary decade in American history had begun, and it was not the fascists who had thrown the first punch.
