Even When Tom Cotton is Right, Tom Cotton is Wrong
Mixing the Spirit of ’76 with the Realities of ‘87
Tom Cotton, US senator from Arkansas, has let 2020 invigorate his appetite for controversial statements. Or in the political patois of our times, “telling it like it is.” Cotton is a strong militarist and semi-authoritarian by temperament and showed his colors in response to the George Floyd protests: Send in the troops. Constitutional fanatics never fail to fail.
However, not to be deterred, Cotton recently talked about the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” which sought to analyze and re-imagine the role of slavery in American history. While Cotton’s ultimate conclusions rested on a typical notion of those of his moral and political world view, that America is a great state of freedom and derring-do for right, he has been misunderstood by his detractors. That purposeful misuse of what Senator Cotton said is an issue unto itself. It adds fuel to the right-wing victimhood bubble, but at no point did Cotton endorse slavery as a necessary evil of American history.
In his interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Cotton said:
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country,” Cotton said in the interview. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
Let’s break this down.
1. Without a doubt, he endorses the study of slavery in the formation of the United States.
2. The amorphous historical mass modern Americans like to call “The Founding Fathers” debated slavery in moral and economic terms, often bitterly. He is right, many of them, including slaveholding members of the Constitutional Convention, thought slavery was antithetical to the Revolutionary ideal and would eventually have its reckoning.
3. Lincoln said it was built to abolish Slavery? He did say that. Cotton gets another point. But there is always more to the misuse of history for politics.
Politicians lean on the distant American past to make simple cases about the principles guiding the country or to burnish their image. None have freed themselves of the need to mischaracterize the humanity of the Founders all the way through the Civil War leaders. Often, the uses of past leaders stop there. Legislators are still deciding if the reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century were, in fact, a good idea. Don’t dare get them started on the New Deal and Civil Rights.
Historians, on the other hand, attempt to pull from primary sources a narrative about the past. History is a story: the human story. Those basic facts are Historian’s craft 101, yet the simple premise “what do the sources say in context” eludes those who are more interested in making a point than understanding from where they come to know where they are going. Context is the elixir from which a Historian draws life. It aids his or her’s narrative by allowing us to acknowledge that Lincoln did, undoubtedly, say the Founders set Slavery on a path to extinction.
Lincoln said many things, as did the Founders. Lincoln wrote to George Robertson in the early fall of 1855, a few years before he gave his House Divided speech, bemoaning the sorry state of the Union as it tackled the thorny issue of slavery. An intense fog of pessimism floats around Lincoln’s words as he tries to see his way through the conflict that eventually rendered the nation a battleground.
“That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery, has itself become extinct, with the occasion, and the men of the Revolution,” he wrote in full knowledge of how the nation had grown away from founding principles. One of those founding principles was slavery and the allowed preservation of the institution. Abraham Lincoln was as sharp a knife as the presidential toolbox has ever had, but he knew in his heart this conflict was coming. That he later would publicly express hope for peaceful reconciliation was politics and optimism — everything in context.
In 1859, in a speech in Cincinnati, Lincoln poked the southern bear, aware that a delegation of Kentuckians was sitting in the audience. He was there “to consolidate, the national reputation that Lincoln had earned the year before because of the campaign he had run against Stephen A. Douglas in the Illinois Senatorial contest,” as George Anastaplo observes in his book Reflections on Slavery and the Constitution. He asked the southerners just what they were to do with this new country they would form should a Republican ascend to the presidency? The flood of fugitive slaves escaping the south had beguiled the southerners for years, but laws from local to constitutional protected southern rights to pursue their slaves in northern territories and reclaim what was their property. How would such a law be enforced in a divided land, Lincoln wondered, where half the country did not have a taste for the institution of slavery and would be ill inclined to return escaped slaves. Northerners, especially those in the Republican Party of the time, had judged slavery a wrong and in need of abolishment. It is in the continued interest of the south to remain in the Union where their “peculiar institution” is legally protected. Lincoln conceded that constitutional authority limited the demolishing of the slave regime but did not prohibit its prevention in territories and yet unformed states. Explicitly, he stated the policy must be for the wrongness of and the need for the eventual demise of slavery.
A noble, if tainted, notion. Lincoln wanted power and a place in the national government. Not that he was not a profoundly moral man: he was one of the more thoughtful and morally conflicted men ever to hold the office of the presidency. This 1859 speech, and its eventual 1861 counterpart, put him on the national stage and make him distinct from the other prominent Republicans of the day. Though not a primary system as the modern electorate understands it, Lincoln still had to politically beg for his bread like any other and support his being the best candidacy for national office.
Can a cynical view of Lincoln’s antislavery views stand? Not entirely. Lincoln’s family, while not abolitionists, were no friends to slavery, nor was he. By modern standards, he was a white supremacist. Not as vile or as obviously so as someone like John C. Calhoun, whose very existence and policies refutes much of Senator Cotton’s assessment of historical inevitabilities, but Lincoln did not see the “negro race” as on par with whites intellectually. William Lloyd Garrison, he was not. As a policy, Lincoln desired the total emigration of the former slaves to Liberia as their new homeland. A plan he abandoned only in 1863 when it became apparent it was logistically impossible to re-home millions of people across a vast ocean safely. The much-lauded Emancipation Proclamation was the freeing of slaves under Union-occupied Confederate land. Not to neuter the vitality of the Emancipation, but Lincoln was no more than an especially adept politician with a strong moral sense and keen understanding of what was needed to preserve the Union.
Lincoln was a man enchanted by the mythology of the Founding Fathers and the creation they had wrought. The ideals of the Declaration were both practical and noble. Still, many of the great expressions of human agency were neutered and abandoned when the practical business of forming a functioning government collided with those august ideals. It took him much philosophical strife to conclude that the Constitution, as written, was an imperfect document and would never, in its current mechanisms, cure the nation of the consequences of slavery. From this, Lincoln forced his hand, and passing the 13th amendment enshrined freedom for all people under the aegis of the United States’ rule.
From the modern viewpoint, the notion that the Constitution can be amended to fix, or stress test an idea such as absolute human freedom seems hardly radical, but that was not so in Lincoln’s time. In his time, the amendment process was a silver polish on process meant to correct unforeseen errors of government, not retool the entire notion of the American experiment. As with anyone, as with Tom Cotton, if he ever were to give them an honest reading, the founders of the country never fail to disappoint by showing they were not the demigods Jefferson touted them to be but men of brilliance, yes, but also practicality and cruelty and callous self-interest.
The rest of the history of Lincoln’s brief time left after passing the 13th amendment is well-worn territory. He remained moderate to his end, blocking the radical wing of the Republican party from punishing the treasonous southerners. He asked for modest assertions of loyalty from the states to re-enter the Union. His goal was never explicitly to abolish slavery but to preserve the Union. Slavery, however, evil an institution he found it to be, was the roadblock to the preservation of that Union. If something less than absolute abolition solved the problem, Lincoln would take it. It would not, thus the 13th amendment. Behind every noble remembrance is a real human with real failings. Were it only possible for the Senator Cottons of the world to notice.
A student of history, as I claim to be, can write articles full of facts and interpretations until the second coming. As much as I want to express my view and put these facts and my understanding of them into the world, I know Tom Cotton and people who think as he does have cultural and emotional reasons to believe as they do. It is imperative to the conservative world view that the United States always was and always will be the “Empire of Liberty,” as Mr. Jefferson called the new country. His closest compatriot, James Madison, often had to talk Jefferson off his cliff of ideological flights of fancy. What insanity might come from the right if they learned Jefferson floated wiping the Constitution away every nineteen years? Rights are eternal, not governments. This flight of whimsy is the premise of his Usufruct letter, which Madison gently refuted as perhaps the most nonsensical thing Jefferson had ever said. To the conservative, the far-right, to those who don’t want to question the glory of the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. is a benevolent agent of freedom. Any institution antithetical to that philosophy was planned for demolishment by the wise men gathered around the manger in which laid the Constitution. If it were only so, what a story it would be.
Cotton is no stranger to hypocrisy, what politician ever is, but the submission his bill “Saving American History Act of 2020,” which denies federal funding to schools that utilize the 1619 project curriculum as part of their history programs. In the act of criticizing the misuse and suppression of history, Cotton drafted a bill to use Congress’ appropriation power to suppress history he does not agree with. The drafters of the 1619 project, including its lead editor, have acknowledged that as with all learning materials, it will need reconsideration and revision as it is used and reviewed by experts and academics.
What is truly annoying is Tom Cotton, and others like him may well understand this completely. History, as a subject, is one of the most politicized areas of learning in education. Hearts and minds are made in the civics classroom. And they use it as a prop to pump the outrage cycle to keep the whitewashed façade of an America that never was alive. If only Tom Cotton followed his principles as much as he insists others do so.