“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other – Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, – 6/16/1858
…. If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” – Pastor Robert Jeffress, – (re-tweeted by President Trump, 9/29/2019)
A War over Slavery
In the 1850’s the United States became irrevocably divided over slavery. The Southern economy was based on growing cotton. The problem: growing cotton drained the soil of nutrients and after decades of growth fields would no longer produce good crops. To continue to profit from cotton, growers had to move to new ground.
The Southern “model” of cotton growing was based on massive amounts of manual labor. In the 1850’s South, that meant enslaved black people. So for the South it was simple: cotton growers needed to expand into new territories, and they needed to take slavery with them.
In the North there were Abolitionists who demanded that slavery end. But the vast majority of Northerners weren’t that radical. They were more interested in slavery staying in the South, and not expanding into the new territories opening up in Kansas, Nebraska, and the rest of the West.
So the argument for the majority of the nation wasn’t Slave or Free, but rather expand slavery or not.
The Law Takes a Side
The South maintained a fierce balance of votes in the United States Senate. That power enabled the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, a law requiring all citizens, including those in the North, to support efforts to capture runaway slaves and return them to their owners. This forced Northerners to directly participate in slavery, essentially expanding the rights of slavers into the North.
In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was a novel about the conditions of enslaved people, and their frustrated attempts to escape. Even though it was fiction, the book caught on as a “gospel” description of slave life. The South saw it as Abolitionist propaganda (what we would call Fake News today) and multiple “Anti-Tom” books were published lauding the “gentle plantation life.” To the North, that was Fake News as well.
The United States was further polarized by the violence in Kansas between Free and Slave forces, and literally hundreds of newspapers espousing their particular side. Radical Abolitionists took extreme actions, with John Brown attempting to arm the enslaved people. The US Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people were property, with no civil rights, even in Free states. There was no room for compromise, and with the election of a “no-expansion” Republican candidate in Lincoln, war became inevitable.
History Rhymes
It all should sound vaguely familiar to the “Trump World” of today. A United States Senate and US Supreme Court that stand as bastions of conservative power. Information published as “news” but with little relationship to “facts.” People picking their “news” based on their political views, rather than sharing a common basis of knowledge.
And now, a President placed under impeachment inquiry, actually suggesting that his removal might cause a Civil War.
We are a nation divided. Are we on the brink of a division, a civil war?
Red and Blue
A civil war wouldn’t be as simple in 2020 as it was in 1860. While we are a nation divided, we are not split in convenient geographic patterns. Free and Slave in 1860 was pretty clear, but Red and Blue today are not. Ohio is a Red state, but in 2016 almost 44% of the state voted Blue. Massachusetts is a solid Blue state, but 31% voted Red.
We are a nation divided, but we are urban, suburban, exurban and rural rather than North and South. And, of course, we are a nation divided by race and ethnicity as well. Part of our current great divide is the “browning” of America. “White people” will no longer be a majority in the next twenty years. Many of them feel incredibly threatened by that fact.
Reality today is that Donald Trump may be impeached, but unless there is a sea-change in public sentiment, the Senate will never reach a two-thirds vote to remove him. And even if he were removed, Mike Pence, a perhaps even more conservative Republican, would become President for the short time remaining until the 2021 inauguration. Would there be a civil war over that?
The real question is, could the divide created by Donald Trump turn into some form of physical violence? Much like John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, there likely will be some who determine that if Trump doesn’t remain President, somehow the Constitution was thwarted. That will be true even if actual Constitutional processes: impeachment and removal, or election, are followed. But most will recognize the legitimacy of the Constitution. Even if their “news sources” screams something different, they will stand with the red, white and blue of the United States, not the Red or Blue of ideology.
I hope.
