Question for any Civil War buffs (1850s)

One difference: things were more evenly split before.

Today, the prog left controls everything; academia, journalism, Hollywood, and their greatest coup, wall st/corporations.*

Another big difference, for those who want another civil war: 1861-5 was regional. Today such a conflict would be local, w/big cities vs suburbs/countryside

*ETA: And they're making huge advances in the military

There were no MSM or social media that could brainwash people. You had local papers and they were mostly written by like minded local journalists.

The industrialized North versus the agricultural South.

There could only be one.

The shift from an agricultural economy to one based on wages and the exchange of goods and services was so much different from the economy of the South.

Southern states were dominated by “states’ righters”—those who believed that the individual states should have the final say in matters of interpreting the Constitution.

The North pushed the conflict.

Some of my statements are sourced by the following link but my conclusions are my own.

sparknotes

Increased immigration.
A controversial Supreme Court ruling
War in Europe involving Russia
John Brown was the George Floyd of the 1850s. Divided America.

Big diff from then to now is less human interaction and technology. Most are behind a keyboard and would be too lazy to take up arms and fight. That's exactly what the radicals want and why they pushed so hard on lockdowns.

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any lessons that need to be learned.

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War is hell. There is nothing going on in today's political, economical or societal climate that justifies Americans killing other Americans.

A lot of people don't know the unofficial start of the Civil War was already occurring on the MO/KS border beginning in 1854....this was going on several years before Fort Sumter. After the end of the Civil War in April of 1865 small bands of MO bushwhackers continued their own personal war of Union harassment by targeting banks and railroads that were associated with the Union, this continued until the 1880's.

It was a time of increasing divide. The fugitive slave act in particular radicalized a lot of northerners who were previously somewhere between indifferent and nominally opposed to slavery but considered it something happening elsewhere. That and the Dred Scott decision gave the abolitionists way more of a voice in the mainstream than they previously had. Additionally, the foresters in the south were looking at the population demographics and becoming increasingly concerned that the south couldn’t control the federal government in the foreseeable future. There were also high profile events throughout the decade and a half preceding the election. Many of the major religious denominations splintered overt slavery, with some saying it’s in the Bible and others arguing that it is incompatible with the Gospels. There was bleeding Kansas and the fact that at the outset it appeared to southerners (and was the case) that northern migrants to the state were being shipped in by wealthy anti-slave interests. There were some riots, and the John Brown murders. Eventually there was a hotly contested state election that the pro-slavery side won through obvious cheating. This caused Stephen Douglas to denounce the pro-slavery forces (the election went against his belief that the constitution was an agreement between white men, and that the issue could be decided on a state by state basis by the inhabitants of that state). This “betrayal” led the fire eaters to run Breckinridge in 1860 on a second Democrat ticket that basically ensured a split vote and helped get Lincoln, who was nominally opposed to slavery and opposed to its extension in the west, elected which created the existential threat to southern power they had been warning about. There was also fighting on the hill in Washington that is unlike anything we have experienced today. Besides the caning of Charles Sumner, there were plenty of congressman coming into work armed in case things popped off. There was also the massacre in Harper’s Ferry and John Brown’s execution which showed a lot of southerner that a lot of people in the North were sympathetic of slave uprisings and that some influential and elite northerners had financed Brown.

As far as I can tell, nothing that is happening now is as divisive as slavery was before the civil war. Slavery was also so instrumental in not only the southern economy of the time, but the national economy that there isn’t anything as centrally important to any one today. What is the right going to secede over? Trump getting indicted? What is the left going to secede over? Access to abortions? I just don’t see it happening.

Also the regional divide before the war was pretty cut and dried. The biggest slave owning states were enthusiastic about secession. Places like Virginia were less so and when Virginia did secede it lost West Virginia and almost lost northern Virginia where people owned a lot less slaves. Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, etc were all slave states that stayed in the Union, but all of them owned far fewer slaves than the Carolinas, Georgia, southern Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. The break down between red and blue right now is comparatively superficial. If you live in a city, you’re blue. If you live in a rural areas you’re red. If you live in a suburbs you’re purple. That’s true if you like in Alabama, and that’s true if you live in Texas, but that’s also true if you live in New York or California. There’s no obvious line to draw a border. And then you have to take into account how interconnected we are economically since prior to the civil war. It’s possible to imagine Texas going and other red states joining it, but Texas might as well just be Texas if that happens and say screw them because they would cost Texas more than they would benefit them, and Texas is close enough to purple anyway that I don’t see that happening.

The best outcome is what the Supreme Court is doing now which is returning control of social policy increasingly over to state authorities so that each state/region can make its own laws. We can turn the US into something like the EU in the 90s where the states economically cooperate but don’t set policy for each other, but I doubt that will make anyone happy

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The disparity was so bad a southern Congressman beat the hell out of a Congressman from the North on the floor of Congress.

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I mean Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner for calling out Andrew Butler over his support of slavery in Kansas and as a reward was sent canes from all over the south. Sumner had called out Stephen Douglas in the same speech, and Douglas was from Illinois, so I think saying slavery had nothing to do with it and that it was because of northern snobbery is wishful thinking