Our Second Civil War
During the first Civil War, it was relatively easy to tell the two sides apart.
There was the famous Mason-Dixon Line to separate the pro- and anti-unionists. Back then, men on both sides tried to cool the rhetoric. No such luck in today’s world. It seems we are tumbling toward a violent confrontation where neither side will be able to stop the coming civil war.
The first war had the seeds planted all the way back in 1619 when the first Africans hit Anglo-Saxon Virginia shores. This time around, there are many of the same resentments and attitudes of inferiority, superiority, racial, and ethnic ill-will as there were in 1860 only more and they are less nuanced.
Until Pennsylvania passed a law in 1780 for gradual emancipation, slavery existed in every colony and state. In the North, the institution petered out because it did not make sense economically. There were no plantations, just yeoman farmers. As industrialization occurred, it was cheaper to hire workers than own and house slaves.
Different economic systems evolved. Most White Northerners had no love for the Black man. It was the rare person who considered a Black person their equal. As wave upon wave of European immigration continued, most went to the Northern states where they could find jobs. Industrialists found immigrants cheaper to hire than any slave would be to keep or for that matter any native born American to pay. A forever fact was established at the dawn of the industrial revolution and as far as the latter is still true.
It wasn’t as if White slavery wasn’t tried. Those pale Europeans just couldn’t put up with the brutality of Southern culture towards the “help” or hot climate. White people died or ran away before they could serve out their terms of indenture. At first Blacks were treated as indentured servants but by the mid-1600s their indentures became permanent.
Into this mix of immigrants, Americans, and slaves were the lowest of the low…the indigenous people. For the most part, we just eliminated them whenever possible. Once a critical mass of Americans of all colors and origins showed up, the slaughter of the “Red Man” began. Europeans fought Native Americans for 250 years until, if not eliminated, they were relegated to ghettos called reservations.
Americans needed to pick a system mostly economic but also cultural and religious. Except for Southern cities like Charleston and New Orleans, the South was rural, agrarian, and White. There were few immigrants and non-Protestant Christians.
The North had evolved into a manufacturing, trading powerhouse. Immigrants mostly from Northern Europe were pouring in to work in the factories and move westward for farms of their own. Catholicism was growing and internal fissures were erupting along those lines. It wasn’t till the 1960s that White Protestants considered White Catholics equal.
While Northern expansion westward was for farms worked by families, in the South theirs was for the spread of plantations. White overseers and slave owners with their Black field hands and house servants were on the move. North and South…one nation with very different ideas about how their civilizations should be built.
Men like Webster and Clay forged compromise after compromise to keep the union as one. There were men such as Calhoun who argued for nullification and the right of states to leave the union. Was the United States a collection of individual states that were supreme or was it the other way around.
By the battle of Fort Sumter, there was no alternative but to fight it out. The outcome was that the North won but what had really changed? Blacks may not have been relegated to legal slavery in the South, but they were in economic slavery. The fighting may have been over but not the war.
It simmered for years. A Southerner, Lyndon Johnson, began to take apart economic slavery in the 1960s, a century after the fighting stopped. Throughout that entire period Jim Crow, lynchings, and segregation did what whips and chains had once done.
Political allegiances changed with the New Deal and Great Society. Where Blacks were once staunch Republicans, they became even stauncher Democrats. White Southerners did the opposite with each madder than hell at the parties they had once belonged to for betraying them.
The White immigrant communities that were dyed in the wool Democrats when they were in the big cities moved to the new suburbs after World War II leaving both the Blacks and Democratic clubhouses behind. The Republicans were the Americans against the new foreigners with darker complexions than the newly educated and Middle-Class prosperous descendants of ditchdiggers and parlor maids. (Trump’s immigrant mother was one of those.)
While the Democrats became the party of the poor and bleeding hearts, the Republicans promised to protect the new White Americans from the ravishing mob. As drugs became more and more a problem for all Americans, crime went up to feed the people’s increasing habit. It didn’t matter what color you were…a junkie is a junkie.
White suburban drug use skyrocketed, but most of it was known as recreational. The suppliers were the poor people of the cities. During the 1970s and 80s, the inner city became drug markets and then war zones between rival gangs to keep the drug users supplied. Prices fell and demand soared. Relations with other nations soured in many instances. America told those supplying nations to do something about those drug gangs even though the reason for the gangs were to supply the American user most of which were just recreating.
The rural Red South became more urbanized with millions moving from the cold to the sun. Places like Florida said, “come on down” and the orange groves and cattle ranches became subdivisions. As Southern states grew, they became redder with Northern expats fleeing the Libs. Except for the Pacific Coast states of California, Washington, and Oregon, the once progressive West turned increasingly Republican Red.
With each passing year Americans self-segregate by politics. Populists led by MAGA have greenlit the idea of prejudice as acceptable. They fight woke by changing history, politics, and geography. If you are a Republican, move to a Republican state and Dems do the same.
Two generations ago, parents were against their children marrying outside of their religion or ethnicity. My father married a non-Catholic, non-Italian to the consternation of the family. Today that is no big deal. Recent polls show most American parents would hate to see a mixed marriage of Red and Blue.
The terms conservative and liberal mean very little today. The Trump movement is anything but conservative. While Democrats are still espousing the things that contributed toward the Republicans gains.
And now we may be engaged in another great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. (paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address and Declaration of Independence)
The nation’s seat of government is now being occupied by men in masks and the National Guard. Supposedly it is being done to curtail a crime wave that doesn’t seem to exist except in the mind of our president. 80% of DC residents want the army and masked men gone.
The entire sorry D.C. episode for our nation has now turned into a giant Stephen Miller net to sweep deliverymen, landscapers, and dishwashers off to the Gulag. Justification is in the eyes of the beholder. Fairly soon Grubhub may be out of business. Then Miller’s and Trump’s travelling road show can play in Chicago or Baltimore.
Mississippi and Louisiana have sent troops to DC to help fight crime. In their own state capitals of Jackson and Baton Rouge the crime rate is worse. Perhaps Illinois and Maryland should send their guards to occupy those cities.
Congress cut a billion dollars from Washington’s budget, some of it to fund increased police and homeless welfare. The president has not appointed the judges to the city’s court to try cases. Instead, he has a made for TV personality prosecutor who never resided in Washington along with his other law enforcement officials masquerading as the real thing.
A Democrat and Black city are now occupied by forces from the deep south. The second civil war is about to begin. Or more likely the last one was only observing a 160-year truce while the great great great grandchildren sorted themselves out in their new home states before resuming battle.
