Preview: The Irrepressible Conflict - The “Demon of Unrest” From Fort Sumter Lives In MAGA Today.
The emotions driving the attack in 1860 have resurfaced
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“How on earth did South Carolina, a primitive, scantily populated state in economic decline, become the fulcrum for America’s greatest tragedy?”
“And even more bewildering , what malignant magic brought Americans on both sides of the Mason - Dixon Line to the point where they could actually imagine the wholesale killing of one another?”
So asks Erik Larson, one of America’s best narrators of historical provenance, in his book “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.”
He responds by noting that the same forces that drew him to the setting of the opening shots of the Civil War, were reprised in the terrifyingly close attempt to overthrow the government on January 6th, 2021 - 160 years later.
There is a thread of radical unrest that has burned pure in the ‘Christian’ radical right wing, undiminished by all the progress since then.
It ran so deep that long-haired radical Edmund Ruffin argued that the South was even more oppressed by the North than the early colonists had been by the British before the American Revolution. He was right, in way: the Christian nation that Ruffin and company envision for America is totally against the principles in the constitution of the nation’s Founders. To that extent, British rule was more acceptable to Christian nationalists than that of revolutionary America. It is a claim being made by MAGA today about the persecution of the demi-god Trump. And in the amplification of emotions in today’s America of hyper-polarization, MAGA supporters are much more likely to see their opponents as “enemies” than as political rivals.
But back in the day, Charleston was a central hub in the domestic slave trade, which in the wake of a fifty-year-old federal ban on international trading, thrived and accounted for much of the city’s wealth. The “Slave Schedule” of the 1860 US Census listed 440 South Carolina planters and each held one hundred or more enslaved Blacks within a single district - this when the average number owned per slaveholding household nationwide was 10. In 1860, the South as a whole had 3.95 million slaves. The 1860 census found that the state had 111,000 more enslaved people than it did whites; it was, moreover, one of only two states where this kind of imbalance existed, the other being Mississippi.
Together these planters constituted a kind of aristocracy and saw themselves as such. They called themselves “the chivalry.”
They devoured chivalric novels, held jousting competitions, gave themselves military titles and favored elaborate uniforms. Their South Carolina standard-bearer, novelist William Gilmore Simms, wrote eighty-two novels in which chivalry and honor were central themes.
But to outsiders, South Carolina seemed to have fallen out of step with the nation’s great march into what many called the Railroad Age…
The Census Bureau’s tally of occupations counted 364 “railroad men” in the state as of 1860; in New York, by contrast, there were 6,272. In 1800, Charleston was the fifth-largest city in the United States; by 1860, the twenty-second. The mechanical age, feared the South, was a demon of unrest that was a sole disturber of the land. Jilted at the altar of the Railroad Age, South Carolina retreated into its own world of indolence and myth.
This resurfaces in today’s electorate, where a lack of education is a marker for MAGA support. If you are a white man without a college degree living in the rural South you are a poster-boy for a MAGA supporter. Education is your enemy.
For such Southern conservatives 160 years ago, the election that led up to the attack on Sumter was doubly disturbing. Lincoln was so hated as a candidate that ten Deep South states did not even include him on the ballot.
On top of that, news about the early electoral returns arrived by telegraph – a very symbol of the age that the South distrusted.
This chattering skein of wires — fifty thousand miles of it by 1860 — had transformed communications. Although telegraphic communication was efficient, the messages carried were themselves questioned, their credibility dependent on the technical novelty of the medium. The same emotional flaw comes through with MAGA today, in its campaigns against early “convenience” voting by machine or mail, which is somehow seen as being anti-conservative.
The message from the telegraphs was plain, however: Lincoln won more of the popular vote than any candidate, more in fact than any president had ever won — nearly 1,866,000 votes — but this was only 40 percent of the national total.
The Republican Party was America’s first successful sectional political party. Its members living almost exclusively in the North. Lincoln took only 2% of his vote from the South…
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