Daniel McCarthy

January 6 was an alarm bell for America

(Photo: Getty)

If you’re tired of hypochondriac journalists’ takes on January 6, then try Thomas Jefferson’s. He delivered his judgment on events of that sort back in 1787. ‘I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,’ he wrote to James Madison, ‘and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.’

Unlike the riot at the Capitol last year, the rebellion that Jefferson had in mind was a genuine armed insurrection. The Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays and his followers, furious over taxes and debts, forced state courts in Massachusetts to shut down in the late months of 1786. By early 1787, Shays commanded more than 3,000 men, and on January 25 he led a force to storm the federal armoury at Springfield. The armoury fired on them first, killing a handful of Shaysites, and the rest soon retreated. The rebellion quickly fizzled, and most of the insurrectionists received amnesty or pardons, including Shays himself.

‘This uneasiness has produced acts absolutely unjustifiable,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘but I hope they will provoke no severities from their governments.’ He didn’t approve of the insurrection, but he feared how the authorities might respond. ‘Unsuccessful rebellions indeed generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them,’ a fact that ‘should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much.’

The irony of the overreaction to January 6 is that it only exacerbates conditions that led to the invasion of the Capitol in the first place

Were insurrections like this one a threat to democracy? No, they were a concomitant of democracy. Jefferson believed that a government ‘wherein the will of everyone has a just influence’ was subject to certain unavoidable evils, ‘the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject.’

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