Introduction

Summary

Late in the evening of January 6, 2021, in the aftermath of an armed attack on the US Capitol building, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham addressed a hastily reconvened joint session of Congress. In the wake of a violent effort by right-wing nationalist and white supremacist groups to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election, Graham offered an odd and meandering history lesson on the contested election of 1876:

1876, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida sent two slates of electors – they had two governments by the way – and we didn’t know what to do … to hold the country hostage to end Reconstruction. It worked. The commission was 8 to 7. It didn’t work. Nobody accepted it … The rest is history. It led to Jim Crow. You’re looking for historical guidance, this is not the one to pick.

This invocation of 1876 was remarkable on several fronts. On the one hand, Graham begrudgingly acknowledged his state’s complicity with the anti-democratic forces of voter suppression and disavowed the ugly history of political compromise that led, beginning in 1877, to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the ascendency of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow segregation. In the very same breath, by calling up the specter of an election that saw widespread fraud and violent disenfranchisement, Graham gave subtle credence to claims of fraud in the 2020 election, implicitly aligning the day’s (mostly white) armed right-wing extremist groups with (mostly Black) marginalized voters of 1876. In this sense, he rehearsed the very logic of white political victimhood and outrage that undergirded the reaction to radical Reconstruction, and that continues to animate a significant faction of contemporary US politics.