The national presidential election has come and gone and as this is written most Americans still do not know who will be sworn in as the President of the United States of America on January 20, 2021. The reason for this uncertainty is due to documented cases of fraud knowing to occur in the past in the same areas where it is now suspected. But for those of us who recall our history, this is not “unprecedented,” as many are fond of saying.
Aaron Burr came close to being the third president of the United States after George Washington and John Adams. Historian Thomas Baker has discovered much of this was possible due to electoral fraud being committed on Burr’s behalf, especially in New York. Alexander Hamilton vigorously opposed Burr’s candidacy and the consensus among historians is this is what gave Thomas Jefferson the edge. Jefferson was elected president, and Burr became vice president. Thomas Jefferson never trusted Burr though and dropped him from the ticket when he ran for re-election in 1804. Burr blamed this on Hamilton and so the world soon witnessed the spectacle of a former Vice President of the United States engaging in a pistol duel with a former Secretary of the Treasury (the first Secretary of the Treasury) which ended with the death of Alexander Hamilton.
Fortunately, present-day politics has not yet reached this level of animus.
In 1824, President Donald Trump’s personal hero, Andrew Jackson, beat the son of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, in the electoral college. The tally was split amongst four candidates: 99 for Andrew Jackson, 84 for John Quincy Adams, 41 for William Crawford and 37 for Henry Clay. Since no candidate won a majority (just as in the present race, 270 electoral votes was required to win) under the Twelfth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, the vote went to the House. In the end Adams won in what historians have labeled “The Corrupt Bargain.”
In American history there have been only two other events meriting the label “Corrupt Bargain.” Rutherford B. Hayes being elected president by a presidential commission, and Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon. But the first was the election of 1824.
Like his father, Adams was a one term president as Jackson beat Adams in the popular vote and electoral college in the election of 1828. Adams declined to attend Jackson’s inauguration. Other presidents have done the same, so if it is determined that the Biden-Harris ticket actually did beat the Trump-Pence ticket, as the mainstream media insists and demands, don’t be surprised if President Trump is not at Biden’s inauguration, either.
When Abraham Lincoln defeated Stephen Douglas in the election of 1860, South Carolina formerly seceded from the United States (making them not so united) before the end of the year. In 1861 ten other states followed South Carolina’s example; the last being the state of Tennessee on June 8, 1861.
Just as we see with the United Kingdom seceding the European Union, aka “BREXIT,” the secession of the states was not in and of itself illegal as each state was its own sovereign entity. However, once the newly formed United States of the Confederacy committed an act of war upon a federal fort in Charleston, South Carolina (Fort Sumter), Abraham Lincoln was forced to ask Congress to make a formal declaration of war. Four years of misery, horror, and an unprecedented death toll ensued.
When people say this country has never been as divided as it is now, you can refer them to the Burr/Hamilton duel to the death, The Corrupt Bargain of 1824, and the American Civil War.
In 1876 the presidential contest was between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. Three Southern states had contested vote counts and, in the end, per the Twelfth Amendment, Rutherford B. Hayes won. Forever after he would be known by his political enemies as “Rutherfraud.”
Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the vote in 1912, allowing the Democrats to win. Others argue Ross Perot’s Reform Party did the same thing in 1992.
The mainstream media has always painted itself with shame from Day One of this republic. From the vicious broadsides traded against each other by the Federalist and Republican newspapers of the 1790s, to the partisan Penny Press of the 19th century; to William Randolph Hearst’s and Joseph Pulitzer’s “Yellow Journalism,” to the mainstream media of today—which many believe to be a mere propaganda arm of the Democratic National Committee—the notion of “objective journalism” has usually been nothing more than a pipe dream.
In the realm of presidential politics, journalism has historically carried egg on its face. From The New York Herald describing Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election as “This Presidential Pigmy,” to The Chicago Tribune in the 1948 election putting out the banner headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” Americans’ trust in the mainstream American media has significantly decreased, especially since 1948.
In the end, this is a question about legitimacy. If the integrity of elections is questioned, then the state loses its legitimacy. William S. Lind writes:
The core problem is that no one in Washington realizes the state is already in a legitimacy crisis. They thus make no effort to preserve the state’s legitimacy, such as it still is. The Democrats think, well, if we win politically we will just use the normal instruments of state coercion, the police and the military, to force what we decide on the rest of the nation. They cannot imagine that the police and the military, most of whose personnel voted for President Trump, might refuse to obey their orders. Yet history is full of cases where it happened.
If exercised with too much hubris, as is already being done here in the One Party State of California where the governor orders arbitrary and capricious demands in the name of COVID and public health, then, as T.S. Eliot said, “The center cannot hold.”
Let us all hope that instead of deciding what we are all experiencing is a national crisis and react inadvisably, we instead gather some historical perspective and remember how previous generations of Americans dealt with rancor, malice, and bitter division. In the end they overcame it.
If we are to remain a viable republic, we need to follow the example of our ancestors.
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