“The very familiarity of crisis — its chronic presence during three decades — had bred contempt for it. So many rumblings had been heard without a sequel that men began to take the frequency of warnings as a reassurance that nothing would ever happen, rather than as an indication that something ultimately must happen.”
Henry Adams wrote a half-century later in his Education that, except for a small minority of secessionists, “not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it”. And so, despite all the frenetic political activity of the 1850s, Americans largely sleepwalked into the maelstrom.

Worth reading:

Is Iowa the next step to civil war?

Disunity can take decades to fester

By: Michael Auslin, UnHerd, January16, 2024:

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In the silence of the Civil War’s Antietam battlefield on a winter day, bucolic hills give way to rows of small, white gravestones in the nearby cemetery. Wandering over the deadliest ground in American history, a melancholy visitor may be excused for wondering if this November’s presidential contest poses the greatest threat to the nation’s future since the election of 1860.

After his victory in Iowa, Donald Trump is the favourite to become the Republican nominee. Leading commentators on the Left warn that, should he get re-elected, he will become a dictator and end democracy. On the Right, meanwhile, the belief is unshakeable that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of fulfilling the duties of president and won’t survive a second term.

These raw emotions are not simply the quadrennial outbursts of partisan feeling that emerge in an election season. Rather, they are portents of a much deeper dislocation in American society. For over two decades now, Americans have been battered by non-stop crises at home and abroad — from the long War on Terror to Covid and the George Floyd protests — leading to what feels like national exhaustion and a deep pessimism about the future of democracy.

Our pessimism has resurrected the once-unthinkable idea of disunion, or in today’s parlance, “national divorce”. In a 2021 poll conducted by the University of Virginia, more than 80% of both Biden and Trump voters stated that elected officials from the opposite party presented “a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Most shockingly, 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters stated that things were so bad, they supported secession from the Union. Two years later those numbers remained essentially the same in an Ipsos poll, with a fifth of Americans strongly wanting to separate.

For those who believe that such concerns are simply hysteria, we should remember that America’s road to the Civil War took decades. In March 1850, southern statesman John C. Calhoun gave a prescient warning to the Senate: “It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bound these States together in one common Union, are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time.”

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It took roughly 40 years — from the first passions unleashed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the shelling of Fort Sumter in April 1861 — for the cords to snap. Since Bush v. Gore in 2000, America is now nearly a quarter-century into a process of delegitimising national elections and demonising our political opponents and fellow citizens. An entire generation has been raised on the cynicism of their elders, fed by social media and sensationalised news media.

The tragic story of the gradual split of North and South offers stark warnings for today. The election of 1860 reflected the culmination of decades of failure to reach an acceptable settlement over the expansion or restriction of slavery in new territories of the West. The 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act all were grand attempts at coming to a stable modus vivendi. Yet they led ultimately to feelings of betrayal and suspicion, as old agreements, such as Missouri, were undone by later manoeuvrings. Worse, each side felt the other was trying to destroy its way of life, especially in the case of southerners, who knew they were falling behind the North economically and demographically, and who saw any attempt to restrict the expansion of slavery as part of a move ultimately to end slavery everywhere in the Union.

That year, Abraham Lincoln was the nominee of a new political party, the Republicans, and an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Though he repeatedly promised to do nothing to threaten slavery where it already was legal, Lincoln nevertheless was labelled as a “Black Republican”, an anti-slavery zealot. Southern activists and leaders all warned that should Lincoln be elected, the South could ensure its survival only by seceding from the Union. Within a month of his victory, South Carolina took the fatal step, followed over the next few months by most of the Lower South. A month after his inauguration, the Civil War erupted with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour.

A century and a half later, what seems to be shaping up as a Biden-Trump rematch will further divide the nation. If we are to avoid a potential repeat of 1860, we must remember the powerful warning of Lincoln, in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

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