North Wind Picture Archives
Alexander Hamilton (right), one of the US “founding parents”, was mortally shot by his rival Aaron Burr during a duel, 1804.
Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Charlie Kirk. These are not episodes, it is a standard: political violence has always been part of America’s history.
The day after the conservative activist Charlie Kirkshot dead while speaking at Utah Valley University, several US commentators repeated a familiar chorus: “This is not who we are while Americans. ”
Others have manifested themselves in the same tone. Whoopi Goldbergin the program “”, said that Americans solve their political differences peacefully: “This is not how we do things”.
However, Other terrible episodes immediately appear to memory.
62 years ago, on November 22, 1963, the then president John F. Kennedy he was . More recently, on June 14, 2025, Melissa Hortmanformer mayor of Minnesota representatives, was the home shot, along with her husband and her Golden Retriever.
As a historian of the beginning of the US republic, Maurizio Valsania believe that It is a mistake to see this violence us United States as “episodes”Isolated. In fact, They reflect a recurring patternsays the professor of American history at the University of Torino, in an article no.
American politics There has long been personalizing violencesays Valsania.
Probably probably since Alexander Hamiltonthe “founding father” killed in a duel for his rival Aaron Burr, that the advance of the story was imagined as depending on silence or eliminate a single figure The rival transformed into supreme and despicable enemy.
Therefore, to say that these shootings betray “who we are” is to forget that the United States themselves were founded, and for a long time sustainedfor this same form of political violence.
Revolutionary violence as a political theater
The years of the American Revolution were incubated in violence. One of the most abominable practices applied to political opponents was the “tarring and feathering”(Tar and penalties), a punishment imported from Europe and popularized in the late 1760s by the sounds of liberty, colonial activists who resisted the British rule.
In port cities such as Boston and New York, crowds undressed political enemies, usually suspected of being “lealists” (defenders of the British domain) or King’s employees, They covered us with hot tarthey rolled in feathers and showed them through the streets.
The effects on bodies were devastating. When removing the tar, pieces of meat were clinging. The victims survived, but were marked for a lifetime.
In the late 1770s, the revolution in the so-called intermediate colonies had become a brutal civil war. In New York and New Jersey, patriotic militias, lealist guerrillas and British troops crossed the boundaries of the counties, attacking Thursdays and neighbors.
When the patriotic forces captured irregular lealist, often called “Tories” or “refugees”rarely treated them as prisoners of war: they were considered traitors and executed immediatelyusually by hanging.
In September 1779, six lealists were captured near Hackensack, New Jersey, and hanged without judgment by a patriotic militia.
Similarly, in October 1779, two alleged “Tories” spies captured in Hudson Highlands were shot deadand the execution justified as a punishment for betrayal.
For the patriots, These murders were deterrent; For the lealists, they were homicides. Anyway, they were unequivocally political acts, eliminating enemies whose “crime” was loyalty on the wrong side.
Pistols at dawn: the duel as a policy
Even after independence, American politics continued to sit in a logic of violence against opponents.
For national leaders, The pistol duel It was not summed up to personal honor. He normalized a political culture where the shot itself was viewed as part of the debate.
The most famous duel It was, of course, that of Aaron Burr, who in 1804 killed the brilliant statesman, politician and economist Alexander Hamiltonfounder of the current US financial system and, a by of Thomas Jeffersonone of the most prominent founding parents of the United States.
In the tragic duel that took his life, Hamilton, Naiveas the label sent. Burr, your rival in politics, fired to kill. The life of the American politician is portrayed in a Broadway scene for 11 years and has been available in streaming at Disney+.
But Dozens of less known confrontations punctuated the previous decade.
Em 1798, Henry Brockholst Livingstonwhich would later become a judge of the US Supreme Court, killed James Jones in a duel. Far from being discredited, it was considered to have acting honorable.
In the young republic, even the murder could be absorbed by politics when wrapped in ritual. Ironically, Livingston had survived to an attempted murder in 1785.
Em 1802, Another shameful show took place: The New York Republican Democrats Dewitt Clinton E John Swartwout They faced each other in Weehawken, New Jersey. They fired at least five times before their helpers intervene, leaving both injured.
In this case, the conflict It had nothing to do with political principles; Both were republicans, but with Clientism disputes. Still, he ended up in gunfire, showing how armed violence was normalized as a way to solve disputes.
It is tempting to rule out political violence as a remnant of a “primitive” or “border” phase of American history, when politicians and their supporters are supposedly They lacked containment or moral standards higher. But that is not the case.
Since before the revolutionphysical punishments, or even murder, were ways of imposing belonging, marking the border between those in the inside and the outside, and deciding Who had the right to rule.
The mark of violence in US politics is also notorious, as ZAP here remembered a year ago, in that of US presidents.
Abraham LincolnJames A. Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy: Four US Presidents were murdered. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald ReaganTheodore Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, George W. Bush, and finally the current president, at the time candidate: seven presidents survived murder attempts.
Violence It has never been a distortion of American politics. It was one of its recurring characteristics; not an aberration, but a persistent, destructive and, in a way, strangely creativeproducing new borders and new regimes.
The dynamics only deepened with the expansion of weapons. In the nineteenth century, industrial armament production and aggressive federal contracts put more weapons into circulation.
Os Punishment Rituals Of those who had “wrong” loyalty then expressed themselves in the mass production revolver and later in the automatic shotgun.
These most modern weapons have become not only practical war, crime or self-defense tools, but also symbolic objects in themselves.
Incorporated authority, carried cultural meaning, and gave their bearers the feeling that The legitimacy itself could be claimed through pipe.
That’s why the phrase “This is not who we are” sounds false. Political violence has always been part of America’s history, not as a passing deviation, not as an isolated episode.
To deny it is to leave the defenseless Americans before her. Just facing this front story can start imagining a policy that is not defined by the weapon, concludes Valsania.
