Blogging While Angry

For an example of smug self-righteousness wrapped up in historical illiteracy, John Nichols has a fine example in the Nation. Mr. Nichols does not like Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, and has devoted a recent blog post to attacking her. For example:

Bachmann has for some time peddled the notion that the nation’s founding fathers worked “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” She is simply wrong about this. The last of the revolutionaries generally recognized by historians as the founders—signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and their chief political and military comrades—passed in 1836, with the death of James Madison. That was twenty-seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and twenty-nine years before the finish of the Civil War.

First, slavery still existed in the United States AFTER the Emancipation Proclamation and the finish of the Civil War. It didn't end until when the 13th Amendment was enacted in December 1865. It's a nitpick, but if you are going to excoriate Bachmann for getting historical details wrong, you need to get that right.

Second, James Madison did not sign the Declaration of Independence. Very few people signed both the Declaration and the Constitution. Nichols' definition of a founder is very narrow (Jefferson can't meet it).

Bachman had called John Quincy Adams a founder, which is why Nichols is attacking her. I personally wouldn't call Adams a founder, but he was alive during this period, so it's not implausible. More importantly, Nichols' definition isn't any better. Here's how he explains the issue:

Noting that many of the founders were slaveholders, George Stephanopoulos asked Bachmann the other day on ABC News’s Good Morning America to explain how she came to her distinctive view of the nation’s founding. “Well, if you look at one of our founding fathers, John Quincy Adams, that’s absolutely true,” the Minnesota congresswoman chirped. “He was a very young boy when he was with his father serving essentially as his father’s secretary. He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery…”

In fact, John Quincy Adams was just 8 when the Declaration of Independence was signed and just 20 when the Constitution was being cobbled together at a convention that agreed to a “compromise” that identified a slave as three-fifths of a human being. He did not sign either document. Nor did he participate in any significant manner in the debates regarding those documents—or the compromises contained in them—until the last years of his life.

Just so we're clear, Adams was an adult when the Constitution was written, and did not "participate in any significant manner in the debates regarding those documents", which means he might have participated a little bit. Is Bachmann's inclusion of him really outlandish?

More importantly, the three-fifths compromise is evidence that at least some of the founders were trying to diminish the political impact of slavery. Nichols doesn't mention that it was slaveholders who wanted slaves counted as full human beings because it would earn them more Congressional seats. The anti-slavery position was not to count slaves at all, in order to diminish the representation of slave states. Frankly, I don't know what point Nichols is trying to make, but the three-fifths compromise shows that some people were working against slavery. Nichols would acknowledge this later:

There were, indeed, founders who objected to slavery.

Indeed. So, what was Bachman's crime here? Should she have said some founders fought against slavery? Would that satisfy Nichols?

Nichols' post is one long mess. He would have been better off simply writing: "I hate Michele Bachmann." It would have saved everyone a lot of time.