'What that image should remind us of is that there's a history of having violent political confrontations in Congress.'Ĭongress met Wednesday for a joint session to certify the electoral-vote count.
'What I find fascinating about that juxtaposition is its connections to violence, because of course was a victim of violence in the Capitol when he was attacked for having had made a speech critical of slavery,' Judith Giesberg, a Civil War historian at Villanova University, told Business Insider. The proximity of the two portraits calls to mind the fractured nature of US civil society in the 1860s - and the recent cleft that has widened in the lead-up and response to the 2020 election. Calhoun, the seventh US vice president, who was a staunch defender of slavery and heavily influenced the ideology that ultimately led to the South's secession. To the man's right is a portrait of Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator who protested slavery. His photo shows a man waving a Confederate battle flag in front of two portraits of Civil War-era figures in the Capitol building. As rioters stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday, a photographer named Saul Loeb managed to encapsulate the siege's dark historical context in a single image.
