The Smoldering American Civil War© of the Twenty-First Century

INCOMPLETE DRAFT

The Smoldering American Civil War© of the Twenty-First Century

Under a pile of forest debris, a fire can linger, quietly and unsuspectedly burning at a low intensity. Smoke might be seen rising up from a few places and animals might avoid the hot spots in the debris, yet no one would think to put out something that was not producing flames. Now turning the analogy in our minds, do we really think a modern political conflict can be “put out” like a campfire? Or does any such smoldering conflict have to burn through its own historic route? Do the very elemental conflicts in human nature and within our shared national values have to burn with all intensity before we realize the epoch we live, and realize its meaning to our shared life as a nation?

The thrust of this article is that the differences between American citizens is not stark, is not lining us up on warring sides. The differences are not so volatile until the political gamesmanship of the Congress, White House, lobbyists, state legislatures, issue-driven groups, journalists and talk show hosts, etc. start jockeying for position, competing to outdo each other over the issues of liberty and community life. When the rhetoric turns hostile under those considerations, and civilians beyond those halls of rhetoric begin internalizing the diametrically opposing views from the media, then we can see people picking up arms against each other. To avoid war, can we find some middle grounds for dialogue, for discussions, for education, for empathy with the fears expressed by others?

Calling our current epoch a Civil War is a way of referring back to the Civil War of 1861 – 1865. That war had a smoldering beginning too. The young nation was learning of its own prosperity and its ability to self-govern without royalty or lords or despots. All of the European principalities and colonists, Russia, the Turkish Empires were watching to see if this American experiment would last or if it would collapse for some reason, offer some proof this democracy was a flash-in-the-pan, destined to fail as it had in the ancient Roman example.

The young nation had serious setbacks too!! The War of Independence had cost them dearly, in treasure, debt, infrastructure, relations with the Mother Country England and lives, valuable lives. Then the new nation tried out their Articles of Confederation (1777) which failed miserably by 1787. A new constitutional convention did convene. They wrote a Constitution based on a great deal of learning and the experiment of the first ten years of running the nation. This Constitution spelled out civil rights for citizens in the ten Bill of Rights, voting and balloting privileges for land-owning men, a census for counting people and counting those enslaved people who were calculated as only three-fifths of a person each. The Constitution set up three branches of government to check and balance out the power between each other. The document also noted that the powers not specifically assigned to the federal government were to be allowed to the states to perform and oversee. This was an experiment, The American Experiment, and we have been living through that experiment ever since, still testing individual liberty within collective progress.

Individually, each land-owning man could feel like a king in these United States. Prosperity was wide spread between the European descendants, and even for some of African descent. The populace agreed in a feeling that their own generation and communities could have improved lifes, better than the previous generation. The American model, the American dream was coming to fruition for countless people, and quickly (relatively speaking). At another time, in more discussions and another space, we should face the truth that much of this prosperity was based on theft from the native people, and enslavement of foreign people. To the privileged of European descent, the prosperity was remarkable and reason enough to be proud and expectant for the economic benefits to only grow.

This was the belief for both sides of the 1860’s Civil War. The Confederates and the Unionists both believed in the prosperity they had earned and deserved. Their views on how that prosperity was generated brought on the schism that led to bloodshed and war. The Unionists held tight to the American experiment, that national strength and common bond allowed for this prosperity in a market based economy. The Confederates agreed to those ideas but they clung to slavery and their perception that very cheap labour was absolutely necessary for the prosperity to continue at the current pace of growth.

Cassius M. Clay, a scion from the same family as the Senator Henry Clay, returned to his Kentucky home after growing his own personal fortune in New England and foresaw a dystopia for the enslaving Southern states of the US. The population of Kentucky and all states south of it were being segmented into three extreme classes: the plantation owners, the skilled craftsmen who were enslaved, and the white poor who were relegated to overseeing the field workers or scraping by on subsistence farming on the least productive land. In Clay’s future-vision, the white poor could not expect to gain anything from education since they could never offer their labour at a lower cost than the enslaved tradesmen. These tradesmen were specializing in leather-work, animal husbandry and veterinary medicine, blacksmithing, musical performances, culinary arts, and all the valuable economic pursuits. All the highly skilled trades would surely be monopolized by the enslaved people unless slavery came to an end. America could be imagined as departing from a market-based economy and returning to serfdom with the vicious attributes of slavery included. So Cassius M. Clay went to studying and searching for the fundamental arguments to support the end of slavery.

He had plenty of examples of moral arguments towards that end in the work of the third political group in the young country, the Abolitionists. To the Unionists and the Confederates, the Abolitionists were a bother and were to be brushed aside. In a nation that believed without remorse in the ideals of white supremacy, the Abolitionist cause was without grounds and without a redeemable (little lone worthwhile) end-goal. Without taking up their cause, and without endorsing their rationales, Clay looked back to the "dead document" called the Declaration of Independence for his legal arguments against slavery. He lectured around the country on the fundamental truths of the Declaration and how its undergirding to our Constitution and to all other laws of the nation and its states obligated us to see all people born on this soil as free and equal by the endowment of their Creator.

In July of 1854, Cassius M. Clay was invited to speak at the Illinois State House. Once he was in town due to growing tensions about his abolitionist messages, he was uninvited. He spoke anyway, outdoors for more than two hours. Abraham Lincoln listened to his lecture and was inspired by the legal arguments along with many other reasons for absolutely opposing the spread of slavery. When Lincoln entered the 1858 campaign for the US Senate and opposed the “Little Giant” Senator Stephen Douglas, he incorporated the arguments from Clay into that series of great debates chronicled between the two candidates. Here are Lincoln’s words that demonstrate his acceptance of white supremacy but also demonstrate his reasons for halting the spread of slavery:

I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. (https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm) 

He did not see any way to end slavery, but instead wanted to stop it from spreading. In other speeches, Lincoln questioned the basis for enslaving one group of people instead of enslaving another group of people. Here Lincoln was also afraid of losing the American Experiment, afraid of departing from the market-based economy and returning to an economy based on serfdom. If the nation were to adopt serfdom with the edge of violent slavery, then who would say what new bases would be adopted by the plantation owners for enslaving more and more groups of people?

July 1, 1854: Fragment on Slavery

Lincoln often encountered views supporting slavery. In this fragment, he countered the arguments that slavery was justified based on color and intellect.

“If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. -- why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?--  You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?--You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.” (https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm)

This was the call that forced the Confederates to secede from the nation after the election of Abraham Lincoln to be President of the United States two years after the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The differences between the Unionists and the Confederates could have been glossed over except for the formulation of political power in the US Congress and in the state legislatures. The Confederate leaders were gaining absolute power in the slave-owning states, and their representatives in Congress knew that to ensure their political power, they had to work for new states (such as Kansas and Nebraska and all the other territories to the west) to allow for enslavement. If the growth of slavery were halted, then Confederates would become the minority in the Congress and lose all future political battles. The Unionists of the northern states were working against that expansion of slavery again largely for their own political benefit, and Abraham Lincoln was the most articulate politician on this cause.

During his train trip in 1861 to Washington DC for his first inauguration he committed himself to ensuring the sanctity of slavery in the states where it was already practiced. Abiding to the interpreted wishes of the Founding Fathers, slavery could not be allowed to spread beyond those established states. He proposed an amendment to the Constitution enshrining slavery where it already existed. That could not have pleased the Confederates who were concerned about their political power in the Congress.

Lincoln did slowly mature in his view of African Americans as equal in every respect to white people. Unfortunately the battles waged and people died in the bloodiest war for the United States while Lincoln contemplated the questions and tried to figure out how to fight this war. His Emancipation Proclamation was a strategic measure to allow for the recruitment of black soldiers by the Union and to take away some economic might from the rebel states. Not until Lincoln came into a friendship with Frederick Douglass and drafted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution did he publicly demonstrate his realization of the equality between the races. Then he maneuvered to pass that Amendment, finally fully adopting the moral code of the Abolitionists. Did he force the nation into accepting equality between the races, and this was well before the self-governing citizens were ready for that social change? Yes, most definitely he and his followers did codify equality too early, too quickly, and without the education necessary to fully accept the change. The nation has continued to struggle in developing the morality and understanding and values necessary to live out the ideals of equality between the races. 

That racial filament runs throughout the culture of the United States, even to the point where some individuals from minority ethnic groups carry and live out racist views about themselves and about others in their own castes. Today, I say the Smoldering Civil War is not about race, and is not about returning to any form of slavery. No. The dividing lines are splitting us between urban and rural (based on voting records). We are allowing greater riffs and gulfs to grow between Republicans and Democrats. Looking at the voting patterns between those counties throughout the states is what worries me. Our divisions may even be understood as lining up the sides between protecting conservative liberty and seeking segmented or fragmentary or factional progress.

Conservative liberty to my mind is a specific type of liberty, a specific view of the liberties that are under threat by the needs of urban life, requiring some historically unusual adaptations to allow for greater density of population. Unregulated gun ownership is highly problematic in a densely populated city, while having less companion concerns in a rural community. On another issue, community efforts which too often become government regulations to curb obesity, caloric intake (i.e. sugary sodas), diabetes, smoking related disease, diseases related to stress, and communicable diseases are of high importance in a city, but less so in rural areas where manual labor can be a daily expectation and open spaces do not result in smog and concentrations of toxins. Yet economic opportunities are disappearing in the rural areas, forcing many of the younger generations to seek livelihoods in the cities, and leaving the rural populations all the more worried about the threats to conservative liberties.

Meanwhile, progressives have uphill battles trying to win over some hoped-for-society that is potential but untried. If greater gender diversity leads to same-sex marriage, what are all the implications for society and future generations. No one can say for sure, and so conservative liberty often sets against that progress for a fragment of the population. With a one-payer system of healthcare, will the pattern for losing the numbers of doctors and medical facilities in the rural areas be stopped, or will rural populations be all the more forced to travel for medical attention? How can progressive advocates reassure those fighting for conservative liberty? The progressive causes can be named and supposed over several pages and hours of discussions. Many progressive campaigns seem to be unrelated to the others. They do not coordinate into any unifying grand vision. In the current political environment then we can understand generally why proponents of conservative liberty oppose the progress, hold fast to the status quo, and are suspect of anyone opposing their traditions and worldview. 

These generalized differences between conservative liberties and factional progress can be pushed to a warring cause when one party holds super majorities in state after state legislature, teamed up with politically aligned governors and court judges who champion the same causes as the elected officials. This sets us to the point of having a Smoldering Civil War.