Last week, I moderated a conversation with Robert Parkinson, Michael Auslin, and Jim Rasenberger about their new books on the Declaration of Independence and July 4 at the George Washington Presidential Library. My final question asked them what they wanted to see this year for the 250th semiquincentennial anniversary. But I set it up by listing all the previous commemorations: 1826, 1876, 1926, 1976….
Those are generally not considered particularly good years or even particularly good decades for the United States. As I was preparing for the event, I got thinking about this run of dates. What is it about the nation that make our commemorations fall at these tense or difficult times? What have past generations done with those celebrations and what does that say about us? We didn’t really have time to dig into it on the panel, but it has stuck with me.
Let’s start by going through those decades as a quick refresher.
In 1826, the Missouri Compromise was a recent memory. In 1820, the Senate was evenly split between 11 free and 11 slave states. Missouri had petitioned for statehood in 1818, but an anti-slavery representative from New York added an amendment to the statehood bill, prohibiting slavery in the new state. The Senate killed the bill.
Two years later, Missouri again petitioned for statehood. This time, Speaker of the House Henry Clay engineered a compromise that welcomed Missouri into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state—preserving the balance in the Senate. The bill also drew a line across the Union, marking the land above the 36th parallel as free and the land below as slave territory. When pro-slavery House members tried to scuttle the bill the next day, Clay declared the motion out of order until the day’s business was finished. He quietly signed the bill and sent it to the Senate.
The Missouri Compromise loosely held until the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, but everyone, and I mean everyone knew that it was a temporary solution. As long as there were free and slave states in the Union, enslaved people would seek their freedom and force the issue. Northern states would always be frustrated by the inflated representation for slave states in Congress and the Electoral College based on the enslaved population. These concerns lingered in the background.
As Jelani Cobb wrote about last week, the apocryphal deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826 shook the nation. When John Quincy learned of his father’s death, he wrote in his diary, “The time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson, are visible and palpable marks of divine favour.” Perhaps providence had shined on the nation, but many Americans wondered whether the nation would survive without the leadership of the founding generation.