In my first essay, I argued that democracy is fundamentally rooted in the people it governs, and that the moment a government stops serving those people or starts excluding them, it has failed at its most basic purpose. I talked about how the United States Constitution gives citizens the explicit power to challenge and change their government, and how that “for the people, by the people” ideology is something that needs to be actively defended, not taken for granted. I also said that democracy is dying, both in the United States and around the world, and that people in power are increasingly finding ways to hold onto that power at the expense of the people they are supposed to serve. Looking back at that essay now, I still think I was right. But I was writing largely from a contemporary perspective, focused on things happening right now. What the historical sources I have since read make clear is that this is not a new problem. The exclusion of certain groups from democratic protection is not a recent development or a sign of democracy declining from some previous golden age. It has been there from the very beginning and understanding that history makes the states of what is happening today feel even higher.
The most eye-opening illustration of this comes from not a written document but from an image. Source 3.2, the 1794 “Plan of a Slave Ship,” shows in brutal detail how enslaved people were packed into ships during the Middle Passage. As I wrote in my other essay, what you are essentially looking at is a stacking algorithm for human beings, a diagram produced by people who looked at other people and saw cargo. As Jamelle Bouie notes in his New York Times op-ed, an estimated 12.5 million people endured this journey, with roughly 10.7 million surviving to reach the Americas. Those are staggering numbers, but the plan of the slave ship forces you to confront what those looked like in practice, bodies arranged in rows with the sole purpose of maximizing profit. This is not a government serving its people. This is a government, and an economy, built on the explicit premise that certain people did not qualify for protection at all.
That premise did not appear out of nowhere. Christopher Columbus’s description of his first encounter with the Taino people in 1492 (Source 1.2) shows where it started. Columbus does not describe human beings with their own cultures and rights. He describes people who “should be good servants,” who could “easily be made Christians,” and whose lands and bodies were available for use. That attitude, I argued in my previous essay, set a precedent. What the subsequent sources make clear is that this precedent did not stay at the level of one explorer’s private prejudice. It got institutionalized, written into law, and enforced by the very democratic structures America would later hold up as its proudest achievement.
The clearest example of this comes from John Ross’s 1836 protest against the Treaty of New Echota (Source 9.10). In my first essay I wrote about how one of the core rights of citizens in a democracy is the ability to petition their representatives, to have their voices heard even when those in power would rather ignore them. Ross’s protest is exactly that, a formal and resoned appeal to the U.S. government from the legitimate leader of the Cherokee Nation, laying out in precise detail why the treaty being imposed on his people was fraudulent and unjust. Ross explains that the treaty was not negotiated by any authorized representative of the Cherokee people, but by a small, unauthorized faction that misrepresented itself to the U.S. government. The real delegation, the one actually appointed by General Council, was bypassed entirely. And when Ross brought this to Congress, when he did exactly what a democratic system is supposed to allow its people to do, nothing changed. The Senate has already ratified the treaty. The president has already approved it. Ross describes the result in terms that are difficult to read: the Cherokee were “despoiled of our private possessions,” “stripped of every attribute of freedom,” and “deprived of membership in the human family.” That is not a government serving its people. That is a government decided that certain people do not count, and using the machinery of democracy to make that decision official.
What strikes me most about Ross’s protest is the specific argument he makes. He points out that the Cherokee had done everything the U.S. government asked of them. They had adopted American institutions, embraced Christianity, built farms and schools, and practiced the principles that Washington and Jefforson, whom Ross calls his people’s “great teachers,” had promoted. And still none of it was enough. Nancy Reece’s 1828 letter from the Brainerd Mission school (Source 9.9) puts a human face on exactly this effort. Reece describes a school where Cherokee children were learning reading, writing, geography, and arithmetic, where girls were being taught domestic skills and boys were learning trades, where the community was actively building the kind of “civilized” life the U.S. government claimed to want for them. And yet Reece herself notes that she does not think “all the people are friends to the Cherokees,” and that the newly elected president seemed to view their way of life as something requiring a “remedy.” The Cherokee were doing everything right, and it still was not going to be enough.
The Cherokee women’s petition of 1919 (Source 9.6) reinforces this from yet another angle. In my first essay I wrote about the right to petition representatives, noting that it seems to have little effect recently. These women were exercising exactly that right, appealing to their National Council to hold firm on their land and their future. Their argument is straightforwardly democratic: we have followed the guidance given to use, we have built a life here, we deserve to be heard. And yet the Council they were petitioning had itself been restructured at American urging in ways that had stripped women of formal political participation. They were petitioning a system that had been deliberately engineered to diminish their voice within it. That pattern, of democratic structures being reshaped to diminish their voice within it. That pattern of democratic structures being reshaped to exclude certain groups while maintaining the appearance of legitimacy, is exactly what I was describing in my first essay when I talked about people in power finding ways to stay in power.
I ended my first essay saying that something must change in how people view their democratic governments, and that people need to remember that the government serves them, not the other way around. I still believe that. But what these sources have added to my thinking is a clearer sense of how long this problem has existed and how deliberately it has been constructed. The slave ship diagram, Columbus’s journals, Ross’s protest, Reece’s letter, the women’s petition; taken together they tell a consistent story about a democracy that was always more selective than its founding language suggested. The groups who suffered most from that gap have consistently been the ones with the leaser power to demand better. That history does not make me less committed to the idea of democracy. If anything it makes me more committed, because it shows exactly what is at state when we stop holding it accountable.