Last night after the ballgames and the draft were over, I found myself perusing American Lion, the Pulitzer Prize-winning bio of Andrew Jackson by Jon Meacham. Writing of Jackson’s fight with South Carolina over nullification in the 1830s, the historian George Bancroft said:

The moral of the great events of those days is this: that the whole human mind, and thefore with it the mind of the nation, has a continuous, ever improving existence; that the appeal from the unjust legislation of today must be made quietly, earnestly, perseveringly, to the more enlightened collective reason of tomorrow; that submission is due to the popular will, in the confidence that the people, when in error, will amend their doings; that in a popular government, injustice is neither to be established by force, nor to be resisted by force; in a word, that the Union which is constituted by consent, must be preserved by love.

From the debate over torture to anti-abortion murders, this thought still applies.

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