Professor Kevin Waite just completed a workshop at the launch of the American Civil War on Friday morning when a student raised her hand cautiously.
“Can I ask Charlie Kirk about it?” she said in White classroom at the University of Texas University of Dallas.
He said the student wanted to know if the recent incident carries any echoes from the past. The hyperbolic comparison between modern political conflict and the horrific bloodshed from centuries ago is the content of the Apocalypse Prepper thread on Reddit, but this week’s shootings have made it a mainstream topic in conversation.
While warning that the country is far from breaking down as it was when the Civil War broke out, Waite and other scholars say they do see more and more similarities.
“Our current political moment really resonates with the 1850s,” the historian said.
He and other scholars point to similarities between forces deployed to American cities, and the similarities between the widespread disillusionment of the Supreme Court and the spasm of political violence, especially from discontented young people.
“We call it polarization, called partitionism, and in the 1850s it became increasingly clear that parts of the country were being broken up,” said Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson University.
Even before Kirk’s alleged assassin was publicly identified as a 22-year-old assassin, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical left-political violence.”
Conservative influencers amplified the comments, and Trump Ally Laura Loomer posted on X, “If the left is not crushed by the power of the state, it will murder more people.”
Historians warned that in the late 1850s, violence was more organized and common. Members of Congress often broach and pistol each other. The mob quarreled in the streets on the fugitive slave law. Radical abolitionist John Brown and his son killed five people with their swords.
However, some aspects of modern politics are worrying, scholars say.
“It almost scared me that the reaction of violence itself was to it,” White said. “It was paranoid that thought that this violence was unstoppable, which really made the country spin towards the civil war in 1860 and 61.”
Waite’s highest mind was the paramilitary political movement, known as the widespread wake, thousands of torches, black feudal abolitionist youth who were reluctant to be frustrated with Republican representatives.
“Some people think anti-slavery Republicans are not aggressive enough,” White said. He said a large number of people who wake up think: “Slave owners are really pushing their agenda more vigorously, more violently, anti-slavery,” he said. [politicians] Can’t just sit down and accept it. ”
Most Democratic politicians of that era were working to expand slavery to Western territory, to expand federal power to regain those who escaped slavery and to give people the right to travel freely with those in bondage.
The vast awakening shocked them.
“It’s a very terrible wonder for their political opponents,” White said. “Whenever the southern cotton gin burns, they point to the numerous wakes and other more radical anti-slavery northerners and say, ‘This is arson.’”
For Waite, the broad awakening could be compared to the pre-war Antebellum Antifa, while the paramilitaries in the South were more like modern proud boys.
“The South is militarized,” he said. “Every adult white man is part of the local militia. It’s like a social club, so it’s easy to turn these local militias into anti-scholarist defense forces.”
Nevertheless, abolitionists invaded the South were rare. Slave forces were common to enter the north and were often carried out by armed soldiers.
Legal scholars have pointed to similarities between Trump’s use of the military to aid his massive expulsion efforts. The Trump administration has relied on constitutional actions used to enforce the Fugitive Act, a separatist law that authorized slave catchers in the South to arrest in northern states to justify using troops in immigration enforcement.
“I think the fugitive crisis drives the arrival of the civil war than the territorial crisis,” Pusk said. “The resistance in the north actually killed the fugitive’s slave law.
Many northern states passed “personal freedom laws” to prevent black people from being taken away and return to slavery in the south – Waite and others compared with today’s asylum laws across the country.
“Trying to safeguard these personal freedom laws, and at the same time the government’s attempts to adopt these black fugitives led to violence and recognized that the so-called slave forces were invaders,” White said.
By the late 1850s, the Northerners were equally bored by the Supreme Court, in Chief Justice Roger B. Tani.
“The Supreme Court in the 1850s was dominated by Southerners (mostly Southern Democrats), who were slavery,” said Michael J. Birkner of Gettysburg University. “I think Dred Scott’s case and courts are definitely similar to today on one hand.”
Dred Scott’s decision ruled that blacks are not eligible for U.S. citizenship and are widely taught in schools.
But if the Tani Court heard it before the war broke out in 1861, the Americans knew little about the Lemmon case, a legal battle in New York that could effectively legalize slavery in all 50 states.
“The slave owners were eager to bring this case before Taney because that would make slavery,” Watt said.
Despite the similarities, scholars say armed conflict is not inevitable and now the priority is to reduce the political temperature.
“Donald Trump didn’t provide that information with the clarity it needed,” Pinsker said. “He said he was a big Lincoln fan, but now is the moment he remembers what Lincoln represents.”
The historian said that when it is similar to America’s deadliest conflict, “there is only one lesson.”
“We don’t want a civil war again,” Psk said. “This is the only important message.”
