Blithering On

At the height of recent immigration enforcement efforts in Minnesota, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis compared sanctuary policies and the refusal of some state and local officials to cooperate with federal authorities—actions he characterized as obstructing federal law—to the way some Northern states resisted enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Acts from the late 18th through the mid-19th century. He didn't draw a moral equivalence between slavery and illegal immigration; he framed the issue as one of the rule of law and federal supremacy under Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution. Interestingly, similar historical references have surfaced on the other side of the debate—but with a very different emphasis. U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley have suggested that there are moments in history when laws become so unjust that defiance is warranted, applying that logic to current immigration enforcement debates. Gavin Newsom has been more explicit, ...

We know from experience that it's difficult to distill an event to a sentence or even to a paragraph and accurately capture its fullness or its context and implications. Leaving important voids in the storytelling leaves it to others to tell it their own way to the point that they might distort the facts and the story. But the retelling of history is full of examples where that very thing happens, where the story is told and retold inaccurately. Sometimes it's done to illustrate a broader point. Sometimes it happens to make the history easier to follow and more relatable to students. Sometimes it arises out of mythmaking where over time, the myth takes on the appearance of truth. Take Mason Locke Weems for example. In his "The Life of Washington," Parson Weems wrote that young Washington damaged his father's cherry tree and confessed as much to him: "I cannot tell a lie...I did cut it with my hatchet." Some retelling has it that he didn't just cut th...

In 1786, a group of farmers in western Massachusetts—many of them Revolutionary War veterans—rose up to stop the courts from seizing their land for unpaid debts. Led in part by Daniel Shays, they shut down the courts and attempted to seize a federal arsenal in Springfield. In response, Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin raised a militia and dispersed the rebellion. That episode spotlighted a fundamental weakness in the early American national government under the Articles of Confederation. There was no standing army, no reliable authority to raise one, and no clear power for the national government to intervene in state-level unrest. The implication was unmistakable: if a larger or multi-state rebellion arose, there might be no coordinated response at all, potentially leaving states to act independently to preserve their own security. The rebellion also sharpened awareness of broader defects in the Articles of Confederation. The national government had no power to tax, which kept it ...