Future freedom in America is hardly a sure thing | Opinion

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VINALHAVEN, Maine — Heather Cox Richardson is speaking to a full house in Smith Hokanson Memorial Hall. Her appearance has been long-planned and much-anticipated. On this rockbound island 13 miles out in the Atlantic, it’s an event.

Americans love celebrity, and Richardson is one. College professor, political historian, bestselling author. Her expertise is the Civil War and Reconstruction, a period in which she situates the United States in these anxious days.

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At 62, she’s an unlikely star. She lives in a fishing village on a peninsula, married to a lobsterman. She isn’t glamorous, showy or stylish; in fact, she’s wry, confident and authoritative, a “breakout” success, called the most successful independent journalist in the country.

What Richardson says matters to some 1.5 million subscribers who receive her newsletter every day on Substack, the plucky social media platform. Newsletter? Her influence comes from her explanatory essays — “Letters From an American” — sent out early morning by email.

She writes about the news, placing it in the context of the past. In another time — say, 18th century revolutionary France — she might have been a pamphleteer. Although she calls herself a progressive, she doesn’t preach or proselytize. This is no flame-thrower.

Richardson’s surprising message: she is hopeful about America. Why? Today reminds her of the frothy period between the early 1850s and the early 1860s, when Americans saved themselves from a class of wealthy white planters trying to turn the whole country into a slave state.

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As she explains, those southern aristocrats had pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the West to slavery, killing the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That year, she notes, the Republican Party was founded, opposing the expansion of slavery. Its nominee lost in the presidency in 1856, but the eloquent Abraham Lincoln won in 1860.

By 1863, she notes, he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing millions of enslaved, and “dedicated the nation to a new birth of freedom based on the Declaration of Independence and the idea that everyone should be treated equally before the law and have a right to a say in their government.”

In less than a decade, she says, “we go from the idea that a few rich guys should control everybody else to the idea that government should work for ordinary Americans. I mean, that’s truly amazing.”

She doesn’t deny the threat of Donald Trump, who, if he wins the presidential election, would mean “the end of democracy.” Nor does she predict what will happen in November. Still, her sense of the past tells her that things will work out.

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She speaks plainly, innocent of jargon. She’s folksy, funny and bone tired, having spoken to packed houses everywhere for the last six months.

Her optimism is appealing. Who doesn’t welcome a voice of light amid the gloom? The problem with her analysis — which goes unchallenged this particular evening — is that Lincoln’s new birth of freedom did not just fall from the sky. It came with blood, treasure and tears.

Lincoln was elected with less than 40 per cent of the vote (no southern states.) When he took office in March 1861, seven states had left the union. The next month, the Civil War began at Fort Sumter. When Lincoln went to Gettysburg in November 1863 to give his lyrical address, he looked out on a battlefield on which some 48,000 had died in July. At war’s end, some 620,000 had died, still more than all America’s wars combined.

That conflict would claim Lincoln, too, the first of four presidential assassinations, a peculiarly American form of violence.

Without Lincoln, Reconstruction failed. The South rescinded minority rights. It took another 100 years of segregation and struggle to regain them.

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Richardson knows this, of course, but doesn’t sew it into her narrative. Her point seems to be that, yes, Americans can seize this moment in history, if they stand up for democracy.

It’s unlikely to take a civil war like the one fought in the 1860s, we know. Still, as events unfold ominously this season, if a second new birth of freedom is coming to America, its arrival doesn’t seem obvious or imminent, from this island or anywhere else.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, commentator and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

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