Opinion/Chaput and DeSimone: RI's history offers insights on debate over shape of democracy
Erik J. Chaput teaches at Western Reserve Academy and in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. Russell J. DeSimone has written widely on a wide range of topics in Rhode Island history.
In early August, President Joe Biden met with a group of prominent historians and journalists to discuss the state of American democracy. According to The Washington Post, the conversation was designed to help the president “think about the larger context in which his tenure is unfolding.” For Rhode Island humanities teachers preparing for students to return to the classroom, the White House meeting highlights the importance of understanding history and its modern relevance.
As the historians, including Princeton's Sean Wilentz and presidential historian Jon Meacham noted, the toxic political stew of fear, hatred and extremism has led to the questioning of the legitimacy of political institutions and the destabilization of the political system at various times in our history. Special attention was paid during the meeting to the history of the Civil War era (1850s-1860s).
Democracy in Rhode Island
This fall, teachers should explore with students how democracy in Rhode Island has evolved and how past generations have dealt with threats to the democratic order. New digital resources, especially the expanded EnCompass textbook sponsored by the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Small State Big History website, along with the ongoing Rhode Island digital newspaper project and the Dorr Rebellion Project Website, could help students learn in the classroom.
Digital Commons: Learn more about the Dorr Rebellion.
Though it is customary to start the conversation about the origins of the Civil War and the rise of political discord with the westward expansion of slavery in the 1850s, teachers should utilize new digital sources to begin the curriculum several decades earlier. It was during the 1830s and 1840s that Rhode Island experienced a period of severe civil and political discord.
By the 1830s, as students will read in the EnCompass text, there was a movement to change the antiquated system of government that was a vestige of colonial times and to expand the state’s body politic. A report of a constitutional convention in 1834 has modern relevance in terms of what was discussed: inequality of representation, extension of suffrage, voter qualifications, and improvements of the judiciary.
The Dorr Rebellion Project Website, which covers a major political upheaval in Rhode Island in 1842, will help teachers carry the story forward and include a wider range of voices. Whereas African Americans and women were not part of the reform movement in the 1830s, their voices and their desire to become part of the political community took center stage.
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The website’s digital letter collections, along with interviews with scholars, including historian Patrick T. Conley, will also help students understand the contours of the debate in early America about democracy versus republican government. In what ways can and should the people’s sovereignty be channeled? How do political institutions fit into the framework?
After Thomas Wilson Dorr, the leader of the rebellion, fled the state in June 1842, the president of Brown University remarked that Dorr’s attempt at reform nearly led to “the horrors of civil war.”
However, Dorr’s ideology of the sovereignty of the people found its way into the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the latter part of the 1840s and was repackaged as a way to settle the vexing question of slavery. By the end of the 1850s, an anti-democratic insurgency led by pro-slavery ideologues splintered that party and opened the door for the newly created Republicans. By 1860, it was the antislavery Republican Party that claimed the authority of the people to legitimatize its war against the Slave Power.
Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election quickly led to Southern secession. His statesmanship during the war ensured democracy’s survival.
An engagement with the past, as the historian Gerda Lerner once noted, “gives us a sense of perspective about our own lives and encourages us to transcend the finite span of our life-time.” Rhode Island humanities teachers may never get an invite to the White House, but the task at hand remains vitally important for the future of our democracy.
As the Connecticut writer Noah Webster noted in 1802, it is no easy task to defend a government “against the invasions of undue influence and corruption.”
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI's history offers insights on debate over shape of democracy
