More than half of all U.S. states have passed laws directly or indirectly requiring the delivery of a patriotic education which steers students away from discussing systemic racism. It’s considered divisive. Systemic problems imply systemic solutions, which can threaten power dynamics and vested interests. As a result, an unresolved racial past that drives social dysfunction and degrades quality of life remains unexamined by conservative segments of society who are vital participants in any national conversation producing pragmatic solutions. America needs them at the table if quality of life is to improve.
I’d like to share something about my own “patriotic education” to suggest that it is possible to examine an unresolved, tragic racial past and not feel shame or contempt for America. On the contrary, the better I understood our racial caste system—and a family member’s key role in shaping it—the more deeply American I felt in a positive sense.
In the political cartoon above, four White men work together to force a Black man down the throat of a much larger White man who’s tied down to a wooden platform labeled “Kansas.” The man in the foreground on the right is my first cousin, four generations removed. His name is Lewis Cass. My parents named me in honor of him, and he’s the foundation of my “patriotic education” of the sort a twenty-something German might identify with. Today, German citizens balk at the notion they’re responsible for their country’s Nazi past. Many, however, grasp the relevance of taking responsibility for understanding a tragic past to shape a better future.
This cartoon appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1856 when Harper’s was the most widely read journal in the country. Illustrator John L. Magee titled his drawing, “Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler.” The cartoon expresses outrage over Congress’s passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This legislation was intended to address the single most volatile, divisive question facing the nation, namely, how to accommodate Southern demands to expand slavery into new territories. Instead, it triggered the creation of the Republican Party and put the country on the path to civil war. The map below shows what was at stake regarding the degree to which slavery or freedom would expand westward at the time Harpers published Magee’s illustration.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was based upon what is known as the “Cass Doctrine” which is why Senator Lewis Cass is featured in the cartoon’s foreground, along with Senator Stephen Douglas, who created the legislation. All we need to understand at this point is that America’s most widely read journal was blaming Cass, Douglas, an American president named Franklin Pierce, and his successor (James Buchannan) for expanding slavery westward in America.
When my parents gave me the middle name, Cass, they had a favorable view of my cousin. As a young man, Lewis Cass fought the British in the War of 1812, rising to the rank of general by age thirty. He served as governor of the Michigan Territory, ambassador to France, U.S. senator, and Secretary of State. In 1848, he was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, narrowly losing the election to Zachary Taylor. The image of Lewis Cass that my parents held in their minds was in keeping with the campaign poster below titled, “The Presidents of the United States Lewis Cass, Democratic candidate for 12th president.”

My parents’ view of Lewis was shaped by a Cass family history written by my great-grandmother and read aloud at family reunions through the First World War. In this history, she describes Lewis’s accomplishments on the national stage and shares a few personal anecdotes that shed light on his moral character and his “kindly feeling for humanity.” This material was part of my parents’ patriotic education.

Much of this family history focuses on my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Cass, Lewis’s first cousin. Their fathers were brothers and had both moved from New Hampshire to Ohio in the early 1800s.

It’s at this point in my lineage where time is compressed and Lewis Cass’s part in shaping systemic forces feels close at hand. Joseph Cass (above) had four sons who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Their younger brother Chester is my great-grandfather. He was twelve when war broke out in 1861 and would grow up to become the doctor who delivered my father into this world. When my grandmother went into labor with my father in 1915, a 67-year-old Chester Cass was the doctor on call that night. My father, shown below with my great-grandfather and grandmother, would later become a highly decorated combat pilot during the Second World War.

The photograph above of my grandmother was taken in 1907 when she was twenty-five years old. Below is a photo of her and me taken in 1964 when she was 82 years old. Our extended family had the immense pleasure of her company until she died peacefully at age 91.

The photograph of my family below was taken 59 years later, in December 2023. Given that I have a grandmother (Nellie Cass) born in 1882, and a great-grandfather (Chester Cass) born in 1848, the fact I’m not older may seem odd. This is a function of my father, grandmother, and great-grandfather all having children later in life than the average for the time. My father’s second marriage to a younger woman (my mother) explains why I’m the youngest of Nellie’s grandchildren.

This collection of photographs tells me that our unresolved racial history is not some distant past. Below is a photograph of my father (sitting lower right), my other uncles, and three female cousins (one of whom is not happy about having her picture taken). In the middle, you see again my great-grandfather, Dr. Chester Cass. He lived until 1928, the year my father turned thirteen. The stern look on his face is in keeping with stories passed on to me. He was kind but had a dour intensity about him, befitting a man with a Puritan heritage who lost three of four older brothers who fought in the Civil War.

Below are photos of each of my great granduncles who served in Union (Ohio) regiments. William (top left) fought at Gettysburg and died the following year at 22. Lewis (top center) fought at Antietam and died after the war also at age 22. Milton (top right) was severely maimed in the Shenandoah Valley fighting Stonewall Jackson’s troops and died an invalid at age 30. Only Samuel (below center) survived to have a family and live to old age.

When our family photo was taken, our oldest son (dark brown hair) was the same age as William and Lewis when they died. I can’t imagine losing my sons to war and its aftermath, as my great-great-grandfather had to endure. In recent years, I’ve thought a lot about his sons, why they fought, what they sacrificed, what’s changed in our country, and what has not.
Re-reading my Cass family history I find a poignant example of how the stories we tell ourselves regarding American goodness can bear little resemblance to the historical record. Before clarifying Senator Lewis Cass’s role in fomenting a civil war that devastated his own extended family, some context is in order.
Historians make an important point when they say the United States was, in a literal sense, a slaveholding republic. In 1790, one year after the Constitution was officially adopted, nearly one out of every five people in the United States was enslaved.[i] During America’s first eighty-five years as a nation, slavery, and federal policy—both foreign and domestic—were deeply intertwined, with all three branches of government supporting slavery’s existence and expansion.
Most presidents preceding Lincoln were slave owners. When Zachary Taylor narrowly defeated Lewis Cass in 1848, America got its tenth slaveholding president—out of its first twelve.[ii] Had Cass won, the count would have still been ten because he had owned a slave when governor of the Michigan Territory.
Throughout this time, slave-based cotton production was proving an ever more profitable and brutal enterprise which, by the 1850s, produced three-quarters of the world’s cotton output. American capitalism would certainly have developed in the absence of slavery, but it didn’t. American capitalism was built on slavery, and slavery was its defining economic characteristic by the time Lewis Cass was running for president in 1848. Throughout this period, a perverse set of values rooted in degradation, brutality, and seeing people as “other” was shaping American society in ways both obvious and unseen.

The most pressing question Lewis Cass grappled with during his presidential campaign was, to what extent would the United States expand slavery into new places where it made economic sense to do so? Since the nation’s founding, Southerners believed the Constitution authorized the federal government to protect their right to enslave people in new territories. Many Northerners claimed the federal government had the authority to deny this right. Both sides believed they had congressional precedent to justify their position which considerably exacerbated tensions.[i]
To secure the Democratic nomination as a northerner from Michigan in 1848, Lewis Cass articulated a different approach, arguing that the people in the territories themselves had the inherent right to determine whether Whites could enslave Blacks. In this way, he reasoned, this increasingly contentious debate would be removed from the halls of Congress and decided by the people themselves in their territorial legislature when applying for statehood.
Referred to as both “popular sovereignty” and the “Cass Doctrine,” the underlying ideas were not his alone, but Cass became the nation’s leading spokesman for what amounted to a racial policy designed to appease slaveholding interests determined to shape American society in their image.
The increasing tensions Cass sought to eliminate with popular sovereignty were sectional (i.e., North vs. South) rather than political. Support for slavery existed in each of the two major political parties of the time, the Whigs and Democrats. This said, northern Whigs and Democrats opposing slavery repeatedly found themselves in conflict with southern Whigs and Democrats who argued for slavery’s expansion. Cass was one of a handful of prominent Northern Democrats who accommodated Southerner’s demands to expand slavery because he believed it a prerequisite to keeping the Union intact. For Cass, slavery was a political rather than moral issue.
The bitterness of these disagreements becomes more apparent when you consider that after 1830, there were over seventy separate incidents in Congress involving beatings, stabbings, and duels between congressmen in the years leading to civil war.[ii] Sectionalism was an issue long before political parties realigned to amplify hatreds and animosities. This is the backdrop against which Kansas-Nebraska came about.
The most prominent beating took place in May 1856 when slaveowner and South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks took issue with an incisive anti-slavery speech delivered by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner titled The Crime Against Kansas. Two days later, Brooks approached Sumner from behind in the Senate chamber and then began smashing a metal-topped cane into his head, producing a traumatic brain injury that kept him out of the Senate for three years.

Reflecting Lewis Cass’s importance to the South, newspapers such as the Weekly North Carolina Standard, and the Carolina Spartan reported that Cass denounced Sumners’s speech as the “most un-American speech he had ever heard.” Congress then had Cass lead a special committee to investigate the incident. The investigation went nowhere, and conservative Democratic lawmakers prevented the House from even censuring Brooks.
Three months before the attack, Charles Sumner wrote to a friend, expressing frustration over the lack of support in Congress for bringing Kansas into the Union as a free state. Sumner was a founding member of a small but growing Republican Party and the foremost advocate in the Senate for civil and human rights for Blacks.
In that letter (below), Sumner notes the weakness of this new Republican party in Congress and calls out Cass and Douglas as being two men from whom “nothing can be expected.” The note reflects Cass and Douglas’s importance among free-state Senators regarding matters relating to Kansas, implicitly noting their alignment with slaveholding interests.

To Understand Kansas-Nebraska, Follow the Money
Understanding why Kansas-Nebraska unfolded as it did is a matter of following the money. While Lewis Cass was selling his racial doctrine to the American people in 1848, Stephen Douglas was serving his first year as a United States senator representing the state of Illinois. That year, Douglas also became a land speculator and began buying up 160 acres in what is today the South Side of Chicago near 31st Street and College Grove Avenue.[i] Like any good speculator, Douglas wanted to increase the value of his assets, and what better way to do so than to make your property the terminus of a yet-to-be-constructed transcontinental railroad?
The problem was that a route between his land and the Pacific coast would require the railroad to run through a large swath of ungoverned land between Iowa and present-day Utah. As a practical matter, the federal government could not involve itself in what amounted to a large public-private partnership with two different railroad companies until that land was organized into one or more territories governed by law. To make that happen, Douglas needed the support of Southerners in Congress who wanted the transcontinental railroad built in the South. So, what could Stephen Douglas offer conservative Southerners that they didn’t already have in exchange for their support?
His bargaining chip was, in a literal sense, human freedom. Going into 1854, there was a law on the books that disallowed slavery west of Missouri on land that sat above a line of latitude defined by Missouri’s southern border. Douglas reasoned that he could do away with this law and replace it with one based on the Cass doctrine. In this way, Southerners might realize an opportunity to enslave people in two new territories called Kansas and Nebraska—land that had previously and begrudgingly been considered off-limits to enslavers. Southerners would profit from enslaving people in new territories. Douglas would profit from inflated land values after establishing territorial governance and constructing a transcontinental railroad. Everybody who mattered won.
After President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law, it proved to be a perverse solution to an equally perverse problem. Settlers supportive of enslavement streamed in from slaveholding states to expand their way of life. Free-state settlers streamed in from the North and established separate communities and territorial legislatures. Pro-slavery elements attacked and intimidated free-state settlers with sufficient regularity that northern newspapers began writing blistering articles about “Bleeding Kansas.” Implementing the Cass Doctrine gave the country a preview of the large-scale violence that would envelop the country in 1861.

Kansas-Nebraska threatened and outraged most northerners, compelling anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs to leave their respective political parties and create a new one to oppose slavery’s westward expansion. They called themselves “Republicans” and their arrival on the political scene in 1854 marked the start of intense political polarization that led to our civil war.
Although not every new Republican sought racial justice like Senator Sumner, if you were a socially liberal progressive politician living in the Northeast in 1854, you were a Republican. If you were a conservative who was either tolerant or outright supportive of enslaving humans, then you called yourself a Democrat.
Most Republicans did not oppose slavery’s expansion out of a sense of humanitarianism. They opposed it for economic reasons, as they did not want slavery to compete even further with paid labor than it already did in America. More broadly, newly minted Republicans did not want to live in a country where political power perpetually resided in the hands of slaveholding states. Unfortunately for them, this was where the country appeared to be heading in 1854.
Revisiting Magee’s Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler
Returning to Magee’s Forcing slavery down the throat of a freesoiler, I’d like to consider its relevance to political polarization and quality of life in the present day.
Magee published the illustration during the 1856 presidential campaign as an expression of Republican anger over a conservative Democratic party platform and the positions of its leaders. That platform emphasized states’ rights as it pertained exclusively to slavery, mirroring the central points made in secession papers drafted by the eleven Confederate states four years later. Reading that platform, you learn it threatens “civil war” and “disunion” if “sectional parties” (i.e., Republicans) interfere with slavery’s expansion in the territories.
Magee’s captive freesoiler is a Republican forced to endure the consequences of living with this platform. Behind him, a fire rages and a man hangs from a noose in a tree, communicating that, by 1856, the Cass doctrine had failed miserably in Kansas. The name “Cuba” appears on the platform, reminding us that Democrats were taking steps to expand America’s slave empire into the Caribbean.

We see two other Lilliputian characters assisting Douglas and Cass with their crime. President Pierce (who signed Kansas-Nebraska into law) kneels on the other side of Douglas, yanking the freesoiler’s beard down to open his mouth. Pierce’s presidential successor, Democrat James Buchanan, stands on the far side of Cass to assist with forcing back the victim’s head. The scene is one of national tragedy.
Magee’s illustration depicts a deeply conservative, pro-slavery Democratic party led by four self-serving northerners whom Republicans held in contempt for accommodating slaveholding interests to hold on to political power. Although Buchanan would win the presidency in 1856, he’d do it with little support from northern states. For the first time in American history, people living in the North and South were expressing fundamentally incompatible outlooks on issues at the polls. Four years later, political polarization intensified further, giving way to our brutal civil war.
We tell ourselves we’re a different nation now. Our civil war changed us and made us better. The war transformed a collection of states into a single nation, a more perfect union with the expectation that we’d continue to improve our condition and serve as a beacon for humankind. It’s a compelling narrative, but one that is both incomplete and inaccurate. Magee’s illustration focused on political leadership and a Democratic party platform that were ephemeral—core elements of a slaveholding republic that did not survive our civil war. What did survive were vestiges of the slaveholding republic’s characteristics and values. They influence what is possible and what is not in the present day, with implications for quality of life.
An Accurate Accounting of History Strengthens Rather Than Weakens Democracy
Systemic forces in America have saddled us with the vestiges of a racial caste system that influences where and how we live, who we fear, and who we hate. Critical Race Theory encourages Americans to analyze these systemic forces both to better understand dysfunction today and to develop solutions to improve people’s lives.
Seeing racism as being the product of systemic forces vexes influential conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars. As mentioned, systemic problems imply systemic solutions, which can threaten people benefiting from the status quo. In response, conservative organizations have taken steps to eradicate Critical Race Theory from the educational landscape and demonize its aims with language such as this:
Critical race theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims. It is a philosophy that is infecting everything from politics and education to the workplace and the military.
Heritage Foundation
Millions agree with this assessment, including legislators in 28 states who have passed laws controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. In recent years, Americans have purged libraries, restricted subject matter, and threatened or pursued legal action against teachers.
Tennessee-based teacher Mike Stein has noted it’s become difficult “to adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement.” In referring to the Trail of Tears, Stein is pointing out that at least some teachers would feel uneasy talking with students about my own family history.
As Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War, Lewis Cass had overall responsibility for the forced relocation of all native peoples east of the Mississippi River. Historians refer to this example of structural violence as the “Trail of Tears.”
The year before joining Jackson’s cabinet in 1831, Cass had written a 59-page article titled “Removal of the Indians” which was published in the nation’s oldest literary magazine. Although his ideas were controversial, they helped influence enough lawmakers in Congress to narrowly pass the Indian Removal Act of 1831. Columbia University’s Michael Witgen has called Lewis Cass the “intellectual genius behind” and “architect of Indian removal.” Cass subsequently implemented the legislation’s provisions with all the resources of the War Department at his disposal (i.e., the U.S. Army).
It gets worse. Indian removal in the 1830s opened up millions of acres of land for enslavement paid for by a new form of financing that operated like mortgage financing works today (described in detail by Edward Baptist). And like the financial crash in 2008, rampant speculation and the absence of regulation produced a comparable financial panic.
Little more than a decade later, the U.S. Census Bureau released a publication titled Manufactures of the United States in 1860, whose first sentence reads:
The growth of the culture and manufacture of cotton in the United States constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial history of the past fifty years.
U.S. Census Bureau
Cotton’s overwhelming dominance in America was the product of systemic forces of a sort that many in America say do not exist. These are the forces put into play by Lewis Cass and others at the helm of the slaveholding republic. These systems drove the forced migration of nearly one million Blacks from Virginia and Maryland to the Cotton South financed not only by mortgage financing, but also by direct loans made by the Second Bank of the United States.
By the time Harper’s Weekly published Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler in 1856, it was becoming increasingly clear that disagreement of slavery’s continued expansion could lead to disunion and bloodshed. A year later, newly elected President Buchannan appointed Lewis Cass as U.S. Secretary of State (standing, second from left below), which, is ironic for reasons that will become apparent.

In the 19th century, the State Department’s responsibilities included not only promoting and protecting interests abroad but also establishing governance structures for U.S. territories and integrating them into the United States. As Secretary of State, therefore, Cass served as the administration’s point man regarding events in Kansas. In this role, he’d get to see firsthand how the “Cass doctrine” would push the nation toward civil war.
This doctrine said that residents of a territory had the right to form a territorial legislature that would decide whether Whites could enslave Blacks. The doctrine did not, however, allow for the possibility that pro-slavery and free-state settlers might establish separate, competing legislatures, which was exactly what happened.
Pro-slavery elements in Kansas engaged in voter intimidation, violence, and fraud to produce a proposed constitution for Kansas that enshrined enslavement. Both President Buchanan and his Secretary of State were aware of the fraud and Buchanan tacitly approved of whatever it took to bring Kansas into the Union as a state. Cass essentially served as his “yes man.”
Throughout all of this, Cass, as Secretary of State, was the government official responsible for communicating directly with a succession of six presidentially appointed territorial governors. Volatility, violence, and politics contributed to truncated terms in office. For nine months in 1857, Cass dealt with a capable former Mississippi senator and slaveholder named Robert J. Walker. As shown below, correspondence between Cass and Walker was frequent.

Below is the opening of a letter from Cass to Governor Walker illustrating how Cass, as much as anybody in America, was well aware that a “disastrous civil war” had become a real possibility.

These letters reveal how Lewis Cass was willing and able to abandon the Cass doctrine when it failed to produce the desired result, namely, to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state. For the letters to make sense, we need a bit more context.
In 1857, a pro-slavery minority in Kansas successfully suppressed an anti-slavery majority and submitted a pro-slavery constitution to President Buchanan. The president, who was committed to making Kansas a slave state regardless, knowingly accepted this fraudulent constitution, submitted it to Congress, and lobbied forcefully for its approval. In 1858, Republicans in the House prevented it from being ratified, but throughout Walker’s tenure in 1857, the likelihood Kansas would become a slave state grew each passing month.
Below is the opening of a lengthy, biting resignation Walker sent to Cass in December 1857. By this time, Walker understood Buchanan had every intention of bringing Kansas into the Union as a slave state regardless of what Kansas voters said. In this letter, Walker—who again was a slaveholder and Mississippi Senator—schools the “father of popular sovereignty” about the central importance of allowing the “sovereign people” living in Kansas to exercise their “inalienable” right to decide whether to enslave Blacks.
In response, Cass says that duty “forbids” him from engaging with “subordinate officers who may disapprove of the President’s policy.” Essentially, he’s telling Walker that the Cass doctrine was a useful political device until it wasn’t. Reading these letters, you become aware that a slaveholder from Mississippi had more integrity than Cass in regard to popular sovereignty’s application.

I’m left with a rather large contradiction between my family history and what the historical record reveals. My great-grandmother portrays Lewis Cass (who is her father-in-law’s cousin) as a national leader who was “beloved and respected”, a godly man who appreciated literature and a fiery holy sermon. In reality, an arguably twisted morality guided Cass’s public life. As a central figure in both Indian removal and slavery’s expansion, he exhibited a callous indifference to entire segments of American society.
Today, we live with the downstream consequences of decisions Cass and his peers made throughout the nine decades America operated as a slaveholding republic. I’m aware of the protestations of those who believe the roots of American social dysfunction are found in the 1960s. They are not. Key pathologies in American life remained unresolved after our civil war and established the foundation of systemic forces whose vestiges plague us today.
The classroom can be a starting point for helping us to understand how an unresolved racial past shapes the present. In learning what I have about Lewis Cass, I’ve experienced neither shame nor guilt. I found that sorting through the contradictions within my family to be an affirming exercise. The more I understood, the more invested I felt, leading to a deeper appreciation for my own Americanness in a positive sense. It’s a process I believe conservative compatriots need not fear. Many, I think, can agree that, on an individual level, our problems cannot be solved until they are well understood. The same holds true for a nation.
[i] See “American Political Prints 1766-1876.” Harp Week.com, accessed March 3, 2020. https://loc.harpweek.com/LCPoliticalCartoons/DisplayCartoonLarge.asp?MaxID=&UniqueID=9&Year=1856&YearMark=1856