The January 6 Capitol Insurrection and American History

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Today I'd like to fill you in on the many intriguing historical parallels to yesterday’s rioting in the U.S. Capitol Building, but there aren’t any. I’m a student of rioting, crowd action, and insurrection in U.S. history, and I just can’t come up with any time before January 6, 2021, when a crowd [UPDATE 1/10/21 THIS IS INCORRECT: even tried] to enter the national legislature and stop it from carrying out the legally mandated completion of a presidential election.

[CORRECTION: In 1861, a crowd did try to enter the Capitol and stop the final vote count, for Lincoln. You can read about it quickly here. I'd been thinking about Lincoln's inauguration and the turmoil around it; I overlooked the vote-count mob. Also maybe a little too pleased with the structural and rhetorical integrity of the original first two sentences of the piece; now that's shot, appropriately enough. I regret the error.

There are some other updates since the event, called out in brackets below.]

Yesterday’s crowd didn’t just try but actually somehow succeeded in entering—that’s amazing in itself, and disturbing—and by entering, it actually did succeed in halting the final step in the election process, if only temporarily.

Those events would be shocking in any case (because it’s the only case), but in this case (I swear, it’s the only case!) one of the crucial things to be blown away by, I think, is that this crowd making an assault on the representative branch was actively urged on by the president and rallied by members of the president’s party in the representative branch. I feel confident in saying that will go down in history.

Not that it’s a surprise that Trump would urge his followers in such a way. That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s been doing ever since he began seeking the Republican nomination. The mayhem he lives to sow is rising to a climax, as he faces, and denies, electoral defeat and the end of his term.

That’s what we get, when a Donald Trump is elected president of the United States. We might want to consider not doing something like that again. Maybe even take a hard look at the system that overcame the popular will against his becoming president, tweak a few things. Just a thought.

Nor can we truly be surprised by the culpability of Republican members of the House and Senate, and really the whole party at its national level. They’ve been outright denying the validity of one of the most secure elections in our history (at some point soon, when my head clears, I’ll do a little romp through some of the ones that were truly fraudulent). They’ve been telling people like those who ran amok yesterday that America has actually been stolen by the Democrats: time for patriots to put their lives on the line. Hawley, Cruz, Loeffler, and a few others in the Senate announced last week their intention to support the Republican members of the House who yesterday raised baseless objections to state-certified Electoral College results. McConnell and other leaders, though they argued on Jan. 6 against raising objections, nevertheless long refused to accept the election results, and yesterday they continued to press the false claim that Biden was elected through widespread fraud.

Then there are the Republican lawmakers who went on TV yesterday during the event and in tones mingling passion and sobriety, outright blamed Trump for what was happening. They could have removed him from office last year and avoided the inevitable mayhem; instead they excoriated the impeachment process and rallied behind him. There are also the super-Trumpist appointees who are now resigning—days before their jobs will end anyway. Mick Mulvaney was key to orchestrating the effort to trade U.S. foreign policy for help with illicit election mudslinging. Yet he’s decided he just can’t possibly be associated with the kind of things that went on yesterday; he actually made a little speech about it. We’ve known exactly who these people are, all too well, and for all too long.

So no one element of what happened yesterday can be surprising, but put it all together and it’s something it would be a bit nuts not to be shocked by. For all of the violence in our politics, lo these many years, what happened yesterday is unique in our history. With the encouragement of the president and his party, a bunch of jackasses got into the Capitol, stopped the election process, ran amok, and committed vandalism. Reports are now that four people died as a result of the riot. [UPDATE 1/8/21: Five now reported dead.] And how the rioters got in at all remains very disturbing. [UPDATE 1/10/21: Note that, as the Times piece linked above in the correction shows, the real difference between 2021 and 1861 is security.]

This sense of shock—anyone sentient has to feel it—is expressing itself in forms that do have some historical echoes, for me. The event was an insurrection in that it was intended to attack government. Does that make it an attempted coup as well? Was breaking into the Capitol an attempt to remove the U.S. government and replace it with a new government? Trump keeps saying he’s going to do just that—stay in office, declare martial law, call out the military, seize voting machines—and Cruz, Hawley, and others were demanding an extraconstitutional committee to review what was manifestly a valid election under the Constitution. Those who broke into the Capitol must have felt promised that if they launched the attack, then Cruz, Hawley, Loeffler, and others would take over the government, the Democrats would go away, and Trump would be president forever. They must not realize that Cruz, et al, were lying to them, not only about the nature of the election but also about the actual goals of Cruz, et al.

So the terrorists terrorized—the election process was stopped; the members were in danger—and because the Secret Service did its job, happily we’ll never know what might have happened if the terrorists had had any really serious encounters with legislators; [UPDATE 1/8/21: some were evidently thinking they could seize and hold members, with who knows what gruesome result. I have a feeling that even if the lawmakers hadn’t been moved quickly enough, attempts to attack them personally would have been met with lethal force by Secret Service and defeated. But we don’t know. The hypotheticals shouldn’t have to be raised. The insurrectionists never should have gotten as far as they got in real life. And now we know of a Capitol Police officer who has died of injuries sustained during the attack.]

In real life, however, breaking in violently is about as far toward coup as they got, and in the end—it seemed to me as I watched on TV—they did what American rioters I’ve studied, going back to the North Carolina Regulators in Hillsborough in 1768, tend to do: they partied and made a mockery of authority by sitting at podiums and in offices, breaking stuff, flying the Confederate flag, smoking and taking selfies: desecrating the general area. That party mood has been part and parcel of riot since early times. It’s good somebody thought to grab the states’ electoral certifications on the way to safety: if they’d been left in the chamber, they would probably have been seized, or just shredded right there (although I have to believe that in this day and age, despite the creaky, old-fashioned pageantry of the event, there are copies [UPDATE 1/10/21: of course the certifications are indeed digitized]). One of the most memorable video images, to me: some of the rioters coming into Statuary Hall not like rioters but like tourists, staying within the rope-lines. Like getting into a nightclub. Just plain weird.

Insurrections do better with leaders, plans, ranks, and tactics. We may come to see examples of that from the rightists, unhappily, but this one ultimately felt aimless to me, because there was really nowhere to go once the chambers and offices had, astonishingly enough, been accessed. [UPDATE 1/8/21: There’s a disproportion between the enormity of the crowd’s dream—to actually “storm” the Capitol, as media like to put it, flattering the Trumpists’ narcissism—with the attendant shock caused by their actually getting in; and the lame things they actually found themselves doing once inside.]

Among the much larger number of people outside not committing any obvious crime, there was mainly a lot of milling about. I thought of Braddock’s Field, where the Whiskey Rebels congregated, firing their weapons at trees and in the air while waiting for somebody to tell them what the plan was. If these self-styled patriots really thought Josh Hawley, who had given them such reassuring fist-in-the-air support earlier, would be there to lead them to some kind of glorious revolutionary victory, they must have felt confused, ultimately bored. I keep going back to “how the hell did they get in?”: even the most evidently paramilitary members of this crew weren’t in fact the British Army, or even a crack insurgency force, or even the Whiskey Rebels. All it would have taken to avoid everything that happened yesterday is a show of appropriate force at the perimeter. [UPDATE 1/10/21: And just forcing their way in turned out to be the most truly violent thing they did; at one entrance, it was very violent.]

The rioters’ impulse to mock and desecrate—once in, and with no other opportunities—also has ironic historical nuances. Some public deploring of the assault is taking the form of disgust at the very idea that rowdies from Nowheresville could not only violently stop a legal process—that’s the important thing, to me—but also plop their ugly, uninvited, loser butts down in office chairs belonging to legislators, thus defiling the sacred precincts of liberty not only practically but also, in a sense, aesthetically and even spiritually. It’s a fair-enough reaction, because it’s probably the intended reaction: the invaders might as well have been mooning us, [UPDATE 1/9/21: and maybe they actually did poop on the floor and so forth.] That kind of thing is as old as riot.

But the recoil at their very presence also puts me in mind of Edmund Burke’s rhetoric, when trying to gin up as much horror as possible at the French revolutionaries’ violence. Burke gives us this scene, starring Marie Antoinette, which he totally made up:

From this sleep the queen was first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her, to save herself by flight—that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give—that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just had time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband.

They “pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed”? Dude. Come on.

So now I gather there’s a plan underway to build an unscalable seven-foot wall around our sanctified temple of liberty, which will make it more like the White House, which at this point is essentially a fortified palace. Many are calling for new laws against ideologically motivated violence, as if we don’t have laws against what happened on Jan. 6, with means enough to enforce them. All we might have had to do—yesterday—was deploy security adequate to intimidating these disorganized if ambitious dissidents, egged on by the lying leaders who are now hanging them out to dry, and thus keep their action at the level of protest, not insurrection. That’s some of what my studies of far more effective American insurrections suggest to me.

There’s also been a lot of “I just never thought I’d live to see, in these United States of America, something reminiscent of the kind of thing we see in, you know, other countries that aren’t as good as ours.” That reaction too is in a sense fair enough, because the specifics of yesterday’s event are indeed unique in our history, and shockingly so. Then again, people have been saying things like that over and over again throughout the past four years. The attitude seems to reflect sheer bewilderment, and the bewilderment has to be based, in part, on not wanting to look realistically at our national past, even to the very beginning of the nation.

Here’s some John Adams (as proofread by me). He’s talking to Jefferson.

… you never felt the terrorism of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts. I believe you never felt the terrorism of Gallatin’s insurrection in Pennsylvania: you certainly never realized the terrorism of Fries’s. . . as I call it, treason; rebellion, as the world and great judges and two juries pronounced it. You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793, when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.

Maybe he’s exaggerating; he did that (he’s being fantastically unfair to Albert Gallatin; he did that too). But he’s talking about something real in founding-era America, including the wild action of 1793, in the temporary national capital Philadelphia, which a lot of people seem to be able to forget, over and over again. If it weren’t for the yellow fever epidemic that summer, Adams thought, the government might have fallen.

On the flipside, let’s recall that as president, Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made anyone who so much as expressed a negative opinion of his government subject to arrest, imprisonment, deportation—another kind of terrorism, and a feature of the authoritarian states that Trump so loves. “Can it happen here?” people have kept asking, and they’ve usually meant European fascism. But one answer is that, for all of the talk right now about temples of liberty never before pierced, it has happened here, and I only have to bring up John Adams to get way into it. Considering the long, authoritarian regimes of systematic violence against black Americans can remind us how much more of it there is.

But I’ll stick with Adams and close with this. In 1776, secretly collaborating with the crowds he so feared and loathed, he played a role in overturning a duly carried-out election. The body illegally thrown out was the Pennsylvania assembly. That was a patriot body, not a loyalist one; Adams falsely smeared it as loyalist to give cover to a militia uprising against it. He had no sympathy for the militia, or for uprisings, but there was a difference of opinion among even the most fervent patriots about declaring American independence, the assembly was getting in the way of a declaration, and Adams was tired of debating the issue and being stymied by due process. So he encouraged a white working-class rebellion. Its leaders thought that, with independence, they might get the vote for unpropertied men. Once their rebellion had overturned the duly elected government of Pennsylvania, Adams turned against those covert allies and did everything he could to thwart their efforts for greater equality. Meanwhile, that illegal uprising, overturning an American election by force, and resulting in a coup, paved the way for declaring American independence.

So I think we might more realistically ask “Can our country be pushed back to a lot of the bad old ways it used to have?” And the answer is probably “maybe.” But despite yesterday’s shocking outbreak—and its cynical encouragement by the likes of Ted Cruz—the answer is probably also “not by overturning the 2020 election.”

Meanwhile, Georgia will send to Washington only the second black U.S. senator from a formerly Confederate state since Reconstruction.

Further Reading

Skim

In honor of Raphael Warnock’s election, here’s an 1872 Currier & Ives image of the seven African American U.S. senators elected during Reconstruction.

John Adams and the Stamp Act Riots, from the Boston Tea Party  Museum, with some pictures.

Swim

On the Philadelphia Yellow Fever Outbreak.

The Adams quote above is from this important 1802 letter to Thomas Jefferson.  

Dive

Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution is a great founding work of conservatism, with a lot of remarkable writing.

I link to my own stuff only when relevant, even though, unlike the other material here, it’s not free: Declaration is about the intense few weeks of working-class revolution in Pennsylvania that brought about American independence.

On the Whiskey Rebellion, aside from my own book Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s eye-witness memoir is one of the great sources. And it’s free!