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I wrote about how this photo captured the divide between who America purports to be and who we have actually been, the gap between our founding promises and our current reality. How so much of our country’s history was reflected in a single image. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/confederates-in-the-capitol/617594/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
The portrait in the background is of Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator and abolitionist who was beaten on the Senate floor by a Mississippi congressman for a speech Sumner gave criticizing slaveholders. Sumner experienced chronic, debilitating pain for the rest of his life.
The portrait behind the man carrying the Confederate Battle flag is one of John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery senator and vice-president to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, who wrote in 1837 that the existence of slavery "is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.”
And it is striking to think about this photo being taken the day after voters in Georgia chose the first Black person and the first Jewish person in the history of that state to serve in the Senate.
*Preston Brooks, the congressman who beat Sumner, was from South Carolina, not Mississippi.
“I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, & distinguished by color...are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good.” https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/
It’s really something that Calhoun’s portrait is hanging in the halls of Congress in the first place.
