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- I think at the beginning when you look

at when Democratic regimes were first established,

they were very strange things

for the people who were living under them.

Because before you had these democratic regimes,

generally, people lived under monarchies.

And the idea was that the monarch himself

or herself really incarnated the entire nation,

it brought unity to the entire nation,

was not the monarch of one faction or another,

but was the monarch of all the people.

And then when you have a democratic regime,

suddenly you have elections.

And suddenly you have people having to accept

that the people who are ruling

might be not the people they voted for,

might be somebody else.

And that's a very strange thing to have to get used to.

The idea that you should be loyal

to somebody whom you voted against,

who you didn't want as the ruler.

So right from the beginning,

there's a lot of instability built into democracy

for that reason.

- Our revolution was really unique.

The founders of our government said,

"No more kings, no monarchy, no royal families.

We're gonna treat every man."

And it was every man, not women, not Blacks,

not natives yet, but they said,

"We're gonna treat everybody

as if they're politically equal,

as if men have equality in the political community."

And it was revolutionary.

- From the very beginning, the infant nation,

as Washington called it, was in peril.

The North and the South were fighting.

As soon as we stopped fighting

against a common cause, which was the British,

everyone then divided into their own interests.

Our survival always depended upon some sort

of collegiality, agreement, discussion

and union.

A understanding that the good

of the country is more important than regional differences.

The revolution was successful in part

because people put aside their regional differences

and focused on a common enemy, a common goal,

which was the revolution, it was the British Empire,

it was becoming an independent country.

- The Declaration of Independence

and the Constitution do not include the word democracy.

And most of the founders were suspicious

of democracy as they understood it.

So they put into the Constitution barriers

between popular upsurges, popular enthusiasms,

and people in public office.

The President is not elected directly by the people,

he is elected by an electoral college.

The Senate at that time was elected by state legislatures.

The Supreme Court is appointed and serves for life.

All of these are insulated

from popular pressure, popular enthusiasm.

The House of Representatives was to be the democratic body.

And indeed, the most democratic feature

of the Constitution was a provision that,

in elections to the House of Representatives,

states that had more than one qualification

for voting would have to use the most expansive definition

of qualification.

In other words, there were some states where you had

to possess a certain amount

of property to vote, let's say, for the legislature,

and more property to vote for the governor.

But the Constitution, well,

for the House of Representatives,

it's the lower qualification that would be imposed.

But that's the extent of political democracy

in the Constitution.

The fact that there was this embrace

of democracy did not mean

that everybody accepted its functioning.

I mean, the most famous example would be the election

of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

I mean now, Southerners didn't claim

that this was a fraud.

They didn't claim that Lincoln hadn't really won

and had stolen the votes.

No, they just said, "We don't accept this.

Lincoln is opposed to slavery.

We are based on slavery, our states.

We are not gonna stick around and accept the notion

that we are to be governed by a president who is committed,

in the long run, to getting rid of slavery."

And so they left, 11 states seceded,

tried to form the Confederacy, their own nation.

Of course, that was a complete repudiation of democracy,

which is what Lincoln said in the secession crisis.

He said, "I could give in to all their demands

but what would that mean for democracy?"

If you run a campaign on the basis of stopping the expansion

of slavery and then people threaten to leave

and you give up the principle that you were running on,

then there's no democracy in the country.

- The efforts to bring slavery to an end

in the early United States ultimately resulted

in the Civil War.

But even war didn't necessarily mean that slavery would come

to a legal end.

That would take federal legislative action.

Those federal legislative actions began in the later months

of the war and were manifest in the 13th Amendment in 1865,

which historians today see

as the first positive federal law outlawing slavery

and moving the nation toward a more perfect union.

Ending slavery

by federal mandate did not necessarily mean fair treatment

for those who had long been subjected to slavery.

That would take two more amendments

to the federal Constitution.

Taking together the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th,

were the first three positive amendments

to the United States Constitution,

which sounded the death now for slavery

and were intended to positively move the country

along a path toward a more perfect union.