It is probably fair to say that this nation has not been as divided as it is today since before the Civil War, so, if it’s true that those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it, it is more than advisable to look at the history of that very divided time.
This is all by way of getting around to a bit of a book review.
I just read a book The Field of Blood, by Yale professor Joanne Freeman. My second born, the professor, gave it to me for Christmas, at which time it joined the pile of books I am slowly working my way through during this plague period. I highly recommend it, and if the following bores or irritates you, that is no reason not to read it.
Anyone with a more than passing familiarity with the antebellum period is aware of the infamous caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks, an incident that took place on the floor of the Senate. Brooks, a Southern Congressman, had taken umbrage at an anti-slavery speech delivered by Sumner. It was a premeditated assault, in which Brooks was assisted by a couple of other Southern Congressmen, who held off any would be Sumner rescuers at gunpoint.
What is not generally known, but which Freeman documents at length, is that the Sumner caning was not an isolated incident. Violence between and among Congressman was quite common. She documents multiple examples of actual or threatened violence in the 1830s through 1850s, including the duel that killed Jonathan Cilley (see next paragraph). Overwhelmingly, the violence was perpetrated or threatened by Southerners against Northerners. The Southerners, among other things, were able to take advantage of their “code of honor” which sanctioned dueling, while the more civilized North frowned upon such activities. Southerners used the threat of violence as one way to keep Northern politicians in line; i.e., to keep them from resisting the slave power.
I’ll digress here a bit. Freeman’s primary source for this book is the diary of Benjamin Brown French, a New Hampshire Democrat who was the clerk of the House of Representatives for many years and was a first hand observer of many of the events described in his diary. He, in turn, was a friend of three characters who have major roles in the book, each of whom was an alum of my Alma Mater, Bowdoin College. Jonathan Cilley was a representative from Maine, who was killed in a duel in which he felt he must participate in order to defend his and his region’s honor. John Parker Hale, was a New Hampshire man who, like Brown, transitioned from being a Southern appeasing Democrat (Democrats were the bad guys then) to a Republican (hard to believe, but the good guys) and who, I suspect was a relative of my best friend from Bowdoin, who shared his last name. Finally, we come to Franklin Pearce, arguably the worst president in history until the current president, though W and Buchanan are still very much in the running for second place. Hawthorne and Longfellow, also classmates of the other three, make brief cameo appearances.
To get back to the main point, Southerners were able, through threats of violence and actual violence, to bully Northern “dough faces” in Congress into bending to their will. It is not an exaggeration to say that until the Lincoln administration came along, the South was able to control all the levers of government almost all the time. You might say that Southern politicians, both Democrats and Whigs, kept their Northern counterparts in a defensive crouch through much of the antebellum period. It was one way to make sure that the various “compromises” became more and more advantageous to the South, leading to such outrages as the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The story is a complicated one in many ways. Congressional doings were, for instance, greatly affected by changes in media. For years Congress was covered by what one might almost call in-house newspapers. That changed with the telegraph and the rise of cheap newspapers. What once took weeks to find it’s way to a Congressman’s constituents, weeks during which said Congressman could shape the story to please himself, now took minutes to be reported by newspapers largely free of any obligation to please the legislator, although reporters too, were subjected to violence and threats of violence. I hardly need to point out that we have been going through a similar change in how news is distributed, one which makes the spread of disinformation far easier than it was just a few years ago.
Okay, so here’s where we contrast and compare with our current situation. We in our times are quite familiar with political parties, hereafter “Democrats”, that operate from a defensive crouch. They’re not afraid of violence anymore; we’ve put that behind us. Among other things, they’re afraid of words. Words like “socialism”, “liberal”, “deficits”. They’re afraid of being perceived as “political”, so they cave when wrongly accused of engaging in the same political tactics in which Republicans actually engage without shame and for which they pay no price. A short but by no means exhaustive list: massive deficits incurred in order to advantage their base, both by giving tax cuts to the rich and blue state money to the red states; armed demonstrators; routine filibuster of Democratic judicial nominations, of which the Merrick Garland affair is only the most prominent; intentional spreading of disinformation, aided and abetted by an affiliated television network and a foreign nation. All while whining about their own victimhood. The same playbook utilized by the slaveocracy, brought up to date to take advantage of today’s techonology.
In the mid 1850s the Republican Party came along and, among other things, it eschewed the defensive crouch. It fought back, both rhetorically and physically. In large part this was impelled by a political base that had itself had enough of Southern bullying, and demanded that its representatives fight back. Republicans promised to do that, and they did.
Life is confusing. The Republican Party of the 1850s has morphed into the analog of Southern politicians of that era. The Democrats, who by and large were the bullies of that era, are now the party of the defensive crouch. Even when they briefly emerge from that crouch, as in the impeachment of the criminal living in the White House, they hasten back to that crouch as quickly as they can. After Trump’s “acquittal”, which we all knew would happen, they decided that they’d made their point and further investigations and exposure of his criminality were unnecessary. The Republicans would never have done that. Even now, with a plague taking place, the most effective attacks on Trump have come from the Lincoln Project, a bunch of disaffected Republicans who are just fine with all the other abuses.
In the 1850s the Republic had arrived at a point where the slave states were intent not only on preserving slavery where it existed, but in spreading it through the entire nation. The Supreme Court (see, Dred Scott) was on their side. Had the North not emerged from its defensive crouch that’s what would have happened.
Today we’re facing a different threat. If the Republicans get their way, they will transform this country into an autocracy/kleptocracy that preserves the forms of democracy while rigging it so that they remain in permanent power. The Supreme Court is on their side, as it was with the slaveholders.
If we don’t fight back now, the modern day slaveocracy will get its way. We are past the point where we can afford to eschew punching back by insisting that we alone must occupy the moral high ground. I admire Obama, but we can see from his experience what happens to a guy who tries to work with the Republican Party. I said then that when he entered office, with majorities in both houses, he should have stomped on them and shoved effective stuff through, instead of, for example, settling for the half measure he got by luring Susan Collins into allowing that she just might vote for his bailout bill if he converted it to mostly tax cuts. Parenthetically, she also insisted that they take out pandemic preparedness funds.
Of course, there’s a downside to all this. We don’t know how things will turn out. In the 1850s the Republican strategy of fighting back worked, but it took a Civil War to finalize what turned out to be a temporary victory, since they soon handed the South back to the traitors who they beat in the war. In our case, there won’t be a civil war. That’s not feasible anymore. We have to win in the next election. It really is our last chance. If we do win, we have to take on the courts, which have been stuffed full of right wing ideologues. We also have to push through legislation that will really bring the economy back, not just prevent it from getting worse. People will actually have to want to keep Democrats in office because they perceive them as giving them a government that works. That will mean losing our fear of words like “socialism”, “deficits”, and “liberal” and, when the Republicans start throwing them at us, politely respond: Go F*** Yourselves.
Postscript: I think this is my longest rant in ages.
