And over coffee Nov. 2 in the Wittenberg University student center, he pointed out a paragraph in that day’s entry:
“In 1920, white mobs rampaged through the Florida citrus town of Ocoe, setting fire to Black-owned homes and businesses after a Black man, Mose Norman, showed up at the polls to vote on Election Day; some historians estimate as many as 60 were killed.”
That didn’t surprise Kinnison. Nor would it have surprised Samuel Shellabarger, the Springfield Civil War Era congressman who forecast the violent future of the Jim Crow South a scant four years after the Civil War ended.
Kinnison’s recently released biography, “Samuel Shellabarger’s War: 1817-1876,” shows the man wasn’t consulting tea leaves when making his predictions.
He saw the future plain as day in the fine print of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution.
Once called “The Lawyer of the House (of Representatives)” for his keen legal mind, Shellabarger argued that the amendment’s failure to explicitly ban poll taxes, literacy tests and other measures that would prevent Blacks from voting gave the former Confederate states the wiggle room they needed to impose them.
During the 1869 debate on the Amendment, Shellabarger made that plain as day.
“The colored race cannot now read because we have for centuries shut them from the light; they are poor because we have during these centuries stolen their property. You may forever in the future, as you have in the past, keep away from these people both knowledge and property, by keeping away from them from the ballot.”
This political compromise that comprised the future of freed slaves disillusioned Shellabarger, whom Kinnison portrays as one of the 19th Century Americans who dedicated their lives to fulfilling the vision of equality the Founding Fathers had suggested.
Nor, he reminds us, were Shellabarger and his political reformers alone in their desire to finish the unfinished business of the Founding Fathers in cause of freedom.
“That era of reform from 1830 to 1860 has been badly neglected by historians,” Kinnison said.
“They wanted to change the marriage tradition, they wanted to change the way farming was done. Also – and central to Shellbarger’s life – was his time’s quest to harmonize the growing influence and promise of science with the religious tradition the culture had long embraced.
The Civil War and its suffering virtually smothered the hopeful spirit of reform, Kinnison argues, citing as evidence the use of a single word.
“Before the war everybody relished in being called a radical” – someone dedicated to fixing “all these things that had been neglected” during the nation’s founding, he says.
After the war, he said, only abolitionists embraced the title.
For Kinnison, releasing the biography completes a project that began 1966, when he published a brief sketch of Shellabarger at the urging of the Clark County Historical Society.
A Wittenberg graduate who went on to study history at the University of Wisconsin, then educational administration at Ohio State University, his career led him away from the study of history and into president’s office at Wittenberg. That, in turn, led to related leadership responsibilities during a time of turmoil in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
While those are now years behind him, he credits the isolation imposed by COVID for providing opportunity he needed to finish the Shellabarger biography “and finally get him out of the house.”
Even now, though, the 19th Century and its struggles are with him – and, he thinks, with the rest of us.
For Shellabarger, the postwar injustices meant that what was right had failed, something that shook his belief in God’s providence – a force for good that present time believers describe as the moral arc of history.
The decades-long descent into segregation also tested Shellabarger’s faith in democracy by demonstrating the sovereign majority – like any ultimate political authority — “can vote in the wrong direction.”
Kinnison said all this transpired in a century was in which the belief in the power of reason was giving way to the realization that human decisions may be driven instead by emotion, the force political and commercial advertising campaigns appeal to in an effort change our behaviors, if not our minds.
Call it brand loyalty.
In the history of 19th Century thought, Kinnison says, “only the Scottish Enlightenment,” embraced a view that something called “common sense” could balance the rational with the emotional.
That very line of thought helped Kinnison to make sense of a part of Shellabarger’s life story that long puzzled him.
“I didn’t know in the beginning what to do about this periodic poetizing that he did. I didn’t realize how central it was to his character.”
In a man “so devoted to being rational,” he said, poetry seemed out of place.
But the historian in him came to believe that it allowed Shellabarger’s mind to restore balance expressed on paper in “far fewer words” than his often-lengthy Congressional speeches.
With his mind in the 19th Century, Kinnison also remarked on the way 19th Century Europeans managed to end the institutional racism of the slave trade by understanding its mechanisms.
They realized it was embedded in an international trade system. Ships filled with rum sailed from New England to West Africa, where the rum was downloaded and traded for slaves. This “cargo” was then shipped to the West Indies, where the slaves were traded for money and molasses, the latter of which was then shipped in barrels to the rum makers of New England.
And like those in business at any time, the people involved learned to make a profit at every turn.
Many know that the hero of that battle, British member of parliament William Force, lives on road signs that lead to the Greene County town and university named for him, and so remains with us today.
Those who find that interesting just may someday find themselves enjoying coffee with a habitual historian.
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