A Blog Exploring American History and Politics
December 7, 1860 A false dichotomy, or false dilemma, is a situation where a person is choosing from two options and believes that there are no other options available. The worst kind of false dichotomy occurs where there are not only other options but false information matriculating into the public discourse and creeping into the […]
MoreSpringfield, Illinois December 15, 1860 The outgoing president, James Buchanan, had delivered his lukewarm message of unity to the country. South Carolina wasn’t swayed; she continued her efforts to secede. The incoming president, Abraham Lincoln, had the opportunity to send to the country his own statement. Perhaps he still could save the Union without a […]
MoreNew-York Packet February 1, 1788 James Madison, under the pseudonym Publius, wrote about the system of checks and balances housed in the draft Constitution—and how fragile they are. Those checks and balances are “a mere demarkation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments”—those departments being the legislative, executive, and judicial. And the […]
MoreNashville, Tennessee December 5, 1860 J.D.B. DeBow had run into a friend on the street and talked with him about how, in the South, even non-slaveholders benefitted from the region’s slave labor system. Then, promising to expand on what he said, he wrote this friend a letter, setting out in detail—in ten points—those benefits. As […]
MoreDecember 1860 Politicians walk a tightrope when they choose their positions on political issues, especially when it’s a thorny issue. And when critics attempt to pigeonhole a politician as an extremist, those critics often achieve exactly the opposite: that politician then essentially has license to choose any position except an extreme one—defying the critics and […]
MoreNovember 29, 1860 Knoxville, Tennessee When the United States faced the prospect of disunion, in the fall of 1860, there was virtually no precedent to which Americans could look. This wasn’t a matter of policy differences: states were debating whether to leave the Union. And many felt that it was inherently wrong and tried to […]
MoreNew York Journal January 31, 1788 The Constitution’s creation of the Supreme Court raised many questions about how such a court would operate. But an anonymous author, Brutus, laid out what was likely to come from the Court, and this author described—much of it with remarkable precision—what would indeed happen to the Court in the […]
More
