There’s been deserved praise for the House Jan. 6 committee’s production values, yet the two leading players in these hearings are just as riveting: one descended from enslaved Black people, the other from a Puritan property owner in 1640 Massachusetts. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., each have centuries of wildly divergent family history in the United States, which makes them the most inspirational of partners.
Last fall I watched Cheney speak in Manchester, New Hampshire. She is a lawyer with a crisp delivery and the job she’s contemplated since she was an undergrad at Colorado College: representing Wyoming in the House — like her father, who later became vice president. Cheney’s political career was, and is, in peril, but on this day, she wanted to discuss her visit to the Eliot Burying Ground in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, which dates to 1630. Fifteen Cheneys are buried there.
William Cheney, the 1640 property owner and Liz Cheney’s ancestor, was an Englishman in search of religious freedom. Her great-great grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney enlisted with Gen. William T. Sherman’s army in 1861 and spent four years fighting for the Union, including Sherman’s 60,000-soldier March to the Sea in 1864. “They knew the price of freedom,” Cheney said. “They knew that it had to be fought for and defended. And they knew that they were the ones who had to do it.”
