I'm reading a little of Horace Greeley's book "An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859" every time I visit the Johnson County Public Library. The book consists of letters he wrote to friends back East as he travelled across the country. My reading today was from letters he wrote from Kansas. I was struck by this passage.
Topeka was one of the strongholds of the free-state cause throughout the dark days of Kansas. Here assembled the first convention chosen by the people to frame a state constitution as a rallying point for defense and mutual protection against the border-ruffian usurpation of 1855; here the free-state legislature, peacefully assembled in 1856 to devise and adopt measures looking to a redress of the unparalledled wrongs and outrages under which Kansas was then writhing, was dispersed by federal bayonets and cannon; here the guns of the U.S. troops were pointed agains a mass meeting of the people of Kansas, assembled in the open air to devise and adopt measures for the redress of the intolerable grievances, and that meeting compelled to disperse under penalty of military execution. And here I renew my vows of hostility to that federal standing army until it shall have been disbanded. It is utterly at war with the genius and perilous to the existence of Republican institutions. The regular soldier is of necessity the blind, passive, mechanical instrument of power. If ordered to shoot his own father, he must obey or be shot himself.
Of course what I thought of was President Bush's suggestion we modify the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 to be able to use the US military to provide disaster relief here in the United States. This
Washington University Law Quarterly article from the summer of 1997 is a good review of the Act.
And so I'm left with the contrast between Horace Greeley's indignation concerning the use of US troops before the Civil War, and the passage of the PCA in 1878, after the country had endured a military occupation for 13 years, and the modern era's slow forgetting of what earlier generations painfully learned.
