I have been time-traveling this week. History and historians allow all of us the privilege of looking back from where we came as a country and as a people. Thomas Jefferson has just been elected president and the Federalists are “barking” about it. Isn’t it true that the Federalists have always been a political scourge on the nation?

Thomas Jefferson in history.

Jefferson, our third president, wasn’t a perfect man. Is any leader without blemish or fault? History does inform us that his election represented a “victory for non-elites,” those non-Founders who represented the majority of Americans in the fledgling republic. Those damned Federalists once again were lamenting Jefferson and how his election represented a “slide down into the mire of democracy.”

Jefferson’s election was a “victory for non-elites. For Federalists, a slide “down into the mire of democracy.” He embraced “the politics of the masses.” He sought to convince the country that government answered directly to the people—this would lead to unity (national cohesion/union), not division (anarchy).

The victory of Jefferson in 1801 heralded for many the defeat of Federalism and allowing greater direct control of government by the citizenry.

In addition to the development of core Republican ideals, the 19th century also represented a nation’s look westward, and its subsequent expansion. Manifest destiny also meant the removal of indigenous people and the appropriation of their culture.

During the fall of 2016, I was reading Roxanne Dunbar–Ortiz’s book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. The book resonated with me, offering me a deeper insight into our past and our nation’s practices of genocide.

In an interview with Dunbar-Ortiz, she talked about the rich (ancient) agricultural civilization that the white Europeans stepped into when they left the Mayflower.

“The Europeans appropriated it and then created agribusiness, capitalized, monetized the land, created real estate. The land is the body of the native people. The land as a body is monetized, capitalized. As is the African body. Not just African labor. That’s only half of it. It’s the human body. Land conquest and chattel slavery are so interlinked that if you separate them, you end up with a distorted story. And that interlink has to be at the core of a complete revision of U.S. history.”

The U.S. is many things, but did you hear Dunbar-Ortiz? She wants you to remember that the twins of our history as Americans is informed by “chattel slavery and land conquest.” There’s no getting around this, or denying it.

Here’s the point I want to make for today.

I didn’t know back in the fall of 2016, while Mark was out walking (and we were moving from the house where we had lived for 26 years) that 26 months later, I’d be sitting in a history class at USM, studying some of the very same things I was reflecting on back then. I wrote about some of that in a blog post I called “Dadtalk,” after Mark was killed.

I wish I could talk to him this weekend about my excitement about history and my HTY 122 class, and the way that I think my professor is going to present his narrative of the 19th century. But that won’t be possible.