10/9/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with Jonathan W. White’s latest piece for RealClearHistory, “Why Slaveholders Restricted Free Speech.” White, a fellow of the Jack Miller Center, examines how Southern slaveholders in antebellum America “used state laws, a congressional gag rule, suppression of the mail, and physical violence to silence abolitionist speech because they believed it was dangerous.” Pushing back on all of this in his famous Cooper Union speech, Abraham Lincoln pointed out the hypocrisy of these Southern Democrats, who “were more likely to ‘grant a hearing to pirates or murderers’ than to Republicans.” By contrast, White notes that Lincoln encouraged “his Democratic opponents to reflect on the consequences of restricting free speech.” When slaveholding “Southern Democrats and their Northern allies tried to silence words and ideas they disagreed with simply because they believed them false or dangerous,” White contends that “they were denying both their political opponents and themselves the opportunity to reach new and better conclusions.” In closing, White argues that Lincoln’s lessons are as true today as they were when he first taught them: “If democracy in the United States is to flourish, we must foster habits of mind among our citizens that promote the free exchange of ideas.”

At Law & Liberty, Paul Carrese, a Senior Fellow of the Jack Miller Center, wraps up his forum on American civics education, thanking his interlocutors for generating “more light than heat” and demonstrating the kind of “civil disagreement appropriate to free, self-governing people.” He notes that despite some disagreements on the margins, restoring “a liberal and civic education is a serious academic issue, and its absence is one cause of the recent crescendo of violent protest culture and anti-academic ideology on our campuses.” Carrese also posits that recovering a civics education worthy of America is “an existential necessity for our democratic republic.” In closing, he argues, “If we don’t address this deficit, then Lincoln’s prescient warning of 1838, about the desperate need for a renewed civic education to overcome growing polarization, lawlessness, and violence, will come true for us as for his era: we will have set ourselves on the path to national ‘suicide.’”