Two days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, we authored a piece for the Washington Post drawing on our expertise in Civil War and Reconstruction era political violence to contextualize what had happened. Somewhat later, as the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol began to assemble expert testimony on political violence, staffers asked us to provide an account of the fragility of American democracy in the 19th century and to suggest some of the likely consequences of refusing to fully grapple with the implications of January 6. 

We wrote and submitted the report published below, “Our Fragile Democracy: Political Violence, White Supremacy, and Disenfranchisement in American History,” for the committee that May. Scholars of the 20th century also wrote reports contextualizing January 6 within the history of American political violence and extremism.

In the end, the committee did not publish our report or similar reports it had commissioned. While we were never told the reason, reporting at the time suggested tensions among committee members over whether to solely spotlight Trump or to contextualize Trump’s appeal within the nation’s broader history, including its history of white supremacist political violence. In the end, the committee’s public and published record focused closely on Trump’s action up to and on January 6.

In some ways this may have been good politics, as it attempted to isolate Trump from the main currents of American political life. But that effort proved unsuccessful, as Trump’s election in 2024 demonstrated. And meanwhile, the decision meant the committee’s work ended up shorn of the very context its staffers sought, a context that might have helped Americans reckon with the likely recurrence of political violence and efforts to undermine democratically elected governments, whether in support of Trump or of some other figure.

We offer the report now on this anniversary as a way of helping to provide that context both for what happened on January 6, 2021, and for how the committee responded. The rot within the U.S. political system goes deeper than President Trump and requires a fuller, more honest engagement with the country’s history, difficult as that may be to imagine right now.

Statement of Kate Masur, Professor of History, Northwestern University, and Gregory Downs, Professor of History, University of California, Davis to the United States House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol

Submitted on May 9, 2022

Although there are no perfect analogies in history, any student of the American past will see common threads between the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical events, including the secessionist movement that caused the Civil War, the terroristic campaigns against biracial democracy during Reconstruction, and the disenfranchisement movement of the 1890s, which established the southern “Jim Crow” order. In American history, political violence against constitutionally elected governments and attempts to diminish the power of non-white voters have often gone hand in hand.

The lessons of nineteenth-century attacks on democratic institutions in the United States are clear: American democracy is fragile, has been frequently under assault by people who wish to deny power or legitimacy to minority groups, and can be overthrown or sharply curtailed by popular violence or by supposedly innocuous election regulations. In several momentous instances in the 1800s, a critical mass of Americans proved willing to set aside the Constitution when they did not get their way, particularly when they felt challenged by the political participation of people they saw as outsiders or unworthy and when they felt their party’s success was at stake. Sometimes, Americans’ anti-democratic, anti-constitutional actions took the form of direct attacks, including assaults on legislative buildings and assassinations of individual political organizers and leaders. Other times, efforts to undermine democracy appeared peaceful, as states adopted laws that excluded people from political participation. In these instances, those who felt aggrieved exerted power without resorting to explicit force.

By the late nineteenth century, after a remarkable period of innovation, the United States was in the midst of a massive retreat from democracy. Political leaders and self-styled reformers advanced largely fabricated claims that electoral fraud and political corruption were rampant, particularly in areas with large Black and immigrant populations. Spurred by these false or exaggerated claims, state and local officials passed a wave of innovative, devastating election laws that turned the United States from a global paragon of democracy to a country that continues to trail many of its peers in democratic participation. These antidemocratic reforms were possible in part because so many American leaders rejected the basic vision of a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. These leaders did not believe that Black, brown, and immigrant Americans were equally entitled to a voice in how their communities and the nation were governed. In short, the aim of the devastating reforms was not to fix real flaws in American political processes but to restrict democracy in ways that benefited the white and the wealthy.

As Congress contemplates its response to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and to related political violence, restrictions on voting, and efforts to place election processes in the hands of partisan bodies, we urge members to consider a bleak historical reminder: the damage done to democracy in our own time may take a full human lifetime to undo, if indeed it is undone at all. Although Americans often profess a belief that the American system of government is a “machine that will go of itself,” the history of the 1800s reminds us that democracy must be defended if it is to be preserved, much less perfected.[1] Many American politicians resisted the anti-democratic violence of secession and, for a time, the guerrilla insurgency against emancipation and Reconstruction. By the 1890s, however, politicians did not or could not stop the anti-democratic actions of the disenfranchisers. The anti-democratic order consolidated around 1900 was not overthrown until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a full human lifetime later.

We write as scholars of the nineteenth-century United States, with particular specializations in the histories of emancipation and Reconstruction. Together we edit the Journal of the Civil War Era, the leading scholarly publication on the period, and we have co-written the National Park Service’s National Historic Landmarks Theme Study on Reconstruction, assisted with the National Park Service’s handbook on Reconstruction, and also co-edited a scholarly volume on Reconstruction. Individually we have published a total of five books of History, as well as many essays, articles, and op-eds. We write with an awareness of the deep contextual differences between historical moments and of the problems with easy analogies. But we also write with an understanding of the false optimism that convinced many nineteenth-century Americans to ignore or downplay the importance of attacks on American democracy. In those crucial moments around the turn of the twentieth century, too many Americans accepted widespread disenfranchisement. Some believed the country should be governed mainly by elite white men; some blamed attacks on democracy on partisanship and hoped for a bipartisan solution that could not come; and some were unwilling to contemplate the actions that would have saved democracy. We write in hopes that the committee may learn from those mistakes and take seriously the fragility of American democratic institutions and the necessity of protecting them against both anti-democratic violence and assaults upon their legitimacy.

Americans are justly proud of our long-lived Constitution and our traditions of peaceful transitions of power. But other, less laudable impulses have also characterized American political history. The secessionist movement that caused the Civil War is the largest and probably the most consequential example of an American faction’s willingness to flout the Constitution and turn to violence when faced with political changes that would diminish its power, the power of its political party, and the power of white supremacy. Secession began in earnest after the election in 1860 of President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican. The election was hard-fought, with four candidates in serious contention. Lincoln clearly prevailed. He won the popular vote, garnering more than 1.9 million votes, significantly more than his nearest rival, Stephen Douglas, who had 1.4 million. More important, Lincoln won the Electoral College decisively, with 180 electoral votes, greater than the combined total of his three rivals.[2]

The rise of the Republican Party in the second half of the 1850s, culminating with Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860, terrified many white southerners, particularly those who belonged to the slave-owning elite. Many had long understood that demographic changes threatened to undermine the power that slaveowners had wielded in national politics. In the 1840s and 1850s, the northern states, where slavery was outlawed, gained population at a much faster rate than the southern ones. Many white southerners, especially southern Democrats, feared that if politics aligned along sectional lines, theirs would be the smaller, less powerful section, their influence particularly diminished in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. The Republican Party, which began to form in 1854, embodied that threat. A new and potentially powerful force in American politics, the party coalesced around a shared commitment to banning slavery from the federal territories.[3]

In November 1860, white southerners’ fears became reality. The Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected with virtually no support in the slave states. Indeed, in many southern states Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot. The Republicans also took control of the U.S. House. For many members of the southern elite, Lincoln’s election appeared an existential threat. As generations of historians have shown, secessionist leaders’ primary concern was that Republicans would use the power of the U.S. government to weaken and eventually perhaps destroy slavery. Secessionists worried not only that the Lincoln administration would not allow slavery to extend beyond its current boundaries, but also that it would put antislavery appointees on the ground in the slave states and refuse to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. For all these reasons, Lincoln’s election triggered an effort by white southerners to declare that their states were no longer part of the constitutional order and that they wanted to form a new nation.[4]

Southern leaders made a choice. They could have acknowledged their election loss and continued to advance their own interests within the structure established by the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they rejected the Constitution and turned to armed struggle. An extensive historical record demonstrates that secessionists’ actions were guided by their belief that the Republicans posed a threat to slavery and white supremacy. The evidence is clear in the secession conventions held in Deep South states in December 1860 and the first months of 1861. The Texas convention, for example, resolved that with Lincoln’s election, the country was under control of “a great sectional party . . . . proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the quality of all men, irrespective of race and color.” The Mississippi convention predicted, “Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. . . . We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union.”[5] The Mississippi convention and the others refused to “submit,” even though the election had been conducted fairly, according to the conventions of the time.

In an organized effort to promote rebellion, Deep South states dispatched “commissioners” to persuade other slave states to join the secessionist movement. In an acclaimed study, historian Charles B. Dew demonstrated that although the secession commissioners of 1860-1861 did talk about states’ rights, their central preoccupation was the protection of slavery and white supremacy. (In fact, many secessionists and Confederates had supported the vast expansion of federal authority over state law in the Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850.) One commissioner from South Carolina argued that white southerners’ only acceptable option was to rebel against an administration that threatened “degradation and annihilation.” The secession commissioners tapped into white southerners’ fears that if slavery were not allowed to expand into new territories, anti-slavery northerners, especially Republicans, would gain even more political power, and white southerners who did not own enslaved people would depart for the free states. Then, they feared, white southerners would be overrun, attacked, and perhaps even conquered by enslaved people. The commissioners called on white men to protect white women and children. Some used grotesque racism. Alabama commissioner Stephen Hale argued, for example, that Lincoln’s election was “nothing less than an open declaration of war” that would lead to uprisings of enslaved people and would consign white “wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.”[6] The commissioners made it sound as if the Lincoln administration was so vile and dangerous that the only real choice was to rise up in rebellion.

Even within their own states, leaders of the secession movement often turned to coercion rather than allowing others to freely express their political views and engage in open debate. In most southern states, white populations were significantly divided between those who wanted to leave the Union during the fall and winter of 1860-61 and those who did not see Lincoln’s election as a signal that they must immediately separate. In South Carolina, where white residents favored secession more widely than anywhere else, secessionist leaders nonetheless resorted to intimidation to squelch public debate. As one resident of the Low Country wrote, in previous years, “men could speak their sentiments . . . freely and fought about it.”  By 1860, however, a man “with a public reputation for unionism . . . would not have been allowed to live here.”[7]

In some southern states, secession proceeded through established channels led by elected officials (governors, state legislatures, and secession........

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