Domestic Enemies - The Founding Fathers' Fight Against the Left

Using a disease outbreak to change voting rules and rig an election isn’t a new idea. Two hundred years ago, the father of the Democratic urban political machine used the fear of a virus to stuff the voting rolls, win an election, change the course of history, and nearly become the president of the United States n the spring of 1793, the nation’s first president had taken his second oath of office in Congress Hall. By the fall, the new country’s government and much of Philadelphia’s population had fled the city’s yellow fever epidemic.  In a letter to James Madison, President George Washington, who had joined the Philadelphia exodus of 1793, discussed convening Congress somewhere else: “If cool weather accompanied with rain does not put a stop to the Malady, distressing indeed must be the condition of that City—now almost depopulated by removals & deaths.”  The federal government—which had only recently moved to Philadelphia—fell apart, as Washington returned to ...

An engagement between an American and French ship during the 'Quasi-War' In Lower Manhattan, near the ports, a mob was shouting “Down with King Washington!” and singing the French national anthem. In the National Gazette, associated with the faction that would become the Democrats, the popular Veritas letter directed to Washington warned him against opposing French demands.  "The first magistrate of a country, whether he be called a king or a president, seldom knows the real state of the nation,” the missive threatened. “The spirit of 1776 is again roused; and soon…the enemies of American as well as French liberty, be taught that American whigs of 1776, will not suffer French patriots of 1792, to be vilified with impunity.” Some cartoons depicted Washington being led to the guillotine. “A Funeral Dirge for George Washington,” put the image into words and drove Washington to declare that “he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world." Meanw...

In the winter of 1825, the Father of British Socialism delivered an address in Congress. At least two presidents, along with senators and representatives, listened to him lay out his vision for the future for three hours in the House of Representatives.  The socialist leader told his audience that he came to “introduce into these States, and through them to the world at large, a new social system” that would provide “perfect” equality, resolve the “inequality of wealth,” eliminate the “trading system,” and replace it with socialism. Robert Owen’s lecture was billed as a “Discourse on a New System of Society” as delivered “in the presence of the President of the United States, the President Elect” and “Members of Congress,” meaning that both President James Monroe and newly elected President John Quincy Adams were there. The man who would later be dubbed the Father of British Socialism claimed that he had achieved “the greatest discovery that man has made for the universa...

The year before John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln, he spent time with George Sanders. Heavyset, sporting a dramatic beard with bushy eyebrows overshadowing his fierce gaze: Sanders had a compulsive habit of writing angry letters to major newspapers and courting leftist European radicals who he believed shared his obsession with a revolution—anywhere. In 1854, Sanders, appointed as President Pierce’s consul-general in London, had hosted a Washington’s Birthday dinner where then-Ambassador James Buchanan—a few years away from becoming president— rubbed shoulders with European revolutionaries, assassins, nationalists, and socialists. Alongside a future president of the United States were Garibaldi and Mazzini, along with Arnold Ruge, one of the Young Hegelians who had briefly collaborated with Karl Marx, and Felice Orsini, the Carbonari leader who would later bring down the British government over his assassination attempt on Napoleon III. And at least one of the Confederate cons...

America’s first constitutional crisis was caused by its smallest state.  With the first republic created by the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union on the verge of falling apart, Founding Fathers, soldiers, statesmen, and patriots gathered together in a desperate effort to unite the thirteen states under one great Constitution—or see it all end.   But one radical state almost stopped the Constitution in its tracks, risk ing a civil war.   The first secessionists were not Southerners; they were New England radicals. And the Founding Fathers had to decide whether the new Constitution would unite only twelve states or whether to take on the socialist class warriors who had seized power in Rhode Island.   The crisis that almost undid the Constitution was not slavery: it was money. “Nothing can exceed the wickedness and folly which continue to reign there,” Madison had written well before the Constitutional Convention had even opened. “A...

“I have just taken a piece of artillery intended for the use of the rebels. It lies corner of Fifty-second Street and North River. What disposition shall I make of it?” a telegraph sent from Captain Shelley U.S.A. read. “Use it against the enemy,” was the reply. The rebel artillery had been seized in Manhattan where luxury cruise liners of the White Star and Cunard Lines, including the Lusitania—whose sinking would bring America into World War I—would sail forty years later.  “The papers are filled with accounts of mobs, riots, burnings, and murders in New York,” Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles wrote.  On a fiery July night, Winston Churchill’s grandfather manned a Gatling gun in the New York Times building. The then-Republican paper was likely to be one of the first targets. The Ochs Sulzberger family, which included Democrats and Confederate sympathizers, would only take over the paper a generation later and help to mold it into a bastion of Democratic Party politi...