Yesterday was the announcement of the finalists for the reality show Write or Flight. I am disappointed my name was not on the list. For a contest that I entered on a last minute whim, I sure came around to wanting it. Not just because it was two weeks in Peru, but for the writing challenge. (Sigh.) Onward. I am back to the writing challenges I have here at my own desk.

Speaking of challenges, I find it difficult to keep these blog posts light and cheerful given the seriousness of events occurring daily around the world. They say history repeats itself; I say history repeats because people don’t change. Below, I’m including an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s daily letter. She gives a beautiful example of history echoing through time. Her inspiration was the recent capitulation of the Democrats in the US Congress who voted in support of the Republican’s stopgap measure to fund the government for six months through September 30. The historical comparison she draws is a good story and one I’d never heard before;

In a similar moment in 1856, newly elected representative from Massachusetts Anson Burlingame catapulted to popularity by standing up to the elite southern enslavers who had dominated the government for years. Blustering, threatening, and manipulating the mechanics of the government, southern lawmakers had come to expect their northern political opponents, who valued civil discourse and compromise, to cave. Southern leaders threw their weight around to gather more and more power over the country into their hands. Finally, in 1854, they overreached, forcing through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted them to spread human enslavement into the American West. In the following elections, northerners sent to Congress a very different breed of representatives.

On May 22, 1856, pro-slavery representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina came up behind Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and beat him nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner had given an antislavery speech Brooks found objectionable. But rather than pleading for calm and compromise in the wake of the attack, Burlingame had had enough. On June 21 he rose and gave a speech about his colleague and his state, calling it “Defence of Massachusetts.”

Burlingame stood up for his state, refuting the insults southerners had thrown at Massachusetts in recent speeches and insulting southerners in return. And Burlingame did something far more important. He called out the behavior of the southern leaders as they worked to attack the principles that supported “the very existence of the Government itself.”

“[T]he sons of Massachusetts are educated at the knees of their mothers, in the doctrines of peace and good will, and God knows, they desire to cultivate those feelings—feelings of social kindness, and public kindness,” Burlingame said. But he warned his southern colleagues that northerners were excellent soldiers and that “if we are pushed too long and too far,” northerners would fight to defend their lives, their principles, and their country.

Burlingame provoked Brooks, and he, temperamentally unable to resist any slight, challenged Burlingame to a duel. Brooks assumed all Yankees were cowards and figured that Burlingame would decline in embarrassment. But Burlingame accepted with enthusiasm, choosing rifles as the dueling weapons. Burlingame was an expert marksman.

Burlingame also chose to duel in Canada, giving Brooks the opportunity to back out on the grounds that he felt unsafe traveling through the North after his beating of Sumner made him a hated man. The negotiations for the duel went on for months, and the duel never took place. Burlingame had turned Brooks, known as “Bully” Brooks, into a figure of ridicule, revealing that when he faced an equal opponent, his bravado was bluster.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southerners by standing up to them and vowing that the North would fight for democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call and, in so doing, reshaped politics.

One can only hope the Democrats in the US repeat this bit of history and send a different type of leader to Congress.

Keep your joy.

Anne Milne is an every Sunday blogger, unless it’s a holiday weekend. Or summertime. 

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