On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as the 16th president of the United States. He closed his inaugural speech with these memorable words: “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
By the 1830s the United States was showing increasing signs of disunion, exacerbated by the huge expanses of territory opened in 1848 following the Mexican War. The argument over which territories would be free states or slave states evolved mostly (but not exclusively) along sectional lines, with New England and New York on one side and the states of the Deep South on the other. The border states and the Midwest were more fractured in their politics. (READ MORE: The Divide of 2025: Saving the Union By Loosening the Union)
With the demise of the Whig Party and the rise of the new Republican Party, politics became even more polarized. In effect, the Republican Party was a sectional northern party, with no constituency south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Democratic Party also ceased being truly national when it split into northern and southern factions in the mid-1850s, facilitating the electoral triumph of the Republicans in 1860 when Lincoln received under 40 percent of the popular vote.
One is struck by evidence of increasing vehemence, rising anger, and dehumanization of political foes when reading Congress’ public statements, newspaper headlines, and editorials in the 20 years leading up to the Civil War, which are paralleled by expressions of sadness, regret, and caution. As we know, extreme rhetoric opened the door to vigilante violence in Kansas and Missouri and culminated in John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in October 1859. In one sense, the Civil War had already begun — a year before secession and a year and a half before Sumter.
Nearly all of the contemporary accounts are imbued with an immense sense of loss, anguish, self-recrimination, and profound regret. Few from either faction foresaw the staggering cost of the war — the unprecedented loss of life, the physical destruction, or the suspension of civil liberties. In hindsight, they asked, could we have taken a different route?
The choices facing the leadership in antebellum America seemed inevitable, but when revisiting the speeches given in the well of the Senate, or the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, it’s obvious that something was missed. Instead, they are an excellent example of the insidious way people get carried away with their own rhetoric, convinced of their moral superiority, discrediting the other side. (READ MORE: The Kansas Prelude to America’s Deadliest War)
We are left with several nagging questions. Would slavery have been abolished through gradual emancipation as evidenced by the subsequent histories of Cuba and Brazil? Or, would the plantation system of the South tenaciously persist for decades more? Had Southern leaders not been threatened by the increasing demographic majorities in the North, influencing votes and the balance of power in the House of Representatives, would they have succumbed to the siren song of secession when they did? Had radical Republicans been less vituperative in their insults and threats to the Southern States, could the situation have been brought under control?
All of us know we are living through the most contentious dis-unified time of our lives. Yes, as a child of the 60s I remember the protests of the Vietnam War era, the Civil Rights marches, the political assassinations, the burning cities. They were traumatic times. But one rarely felt that the country was falling apart and that we could not relate to our fellow citizens. Did we doubt we would get through it together? (READ MORE: Nikki Haley Passes the History Test)
What we are witnessing now is a collapse of faith in our own country, in our institutions, and, worst of all, in our fellow countrymen. We are so myopically focused on our political opponents that we can no longer see or recognize the real and present dangers posed by hostile foreign powers, principally Russia and China. We’ve been tricked into believing our neighbors are our enemies; deluded into wishful thinking, that we can ignore the invasion in Ukraine — it’s far away, and who cares anyway? Ronald Reagan knew better, but for many in generations younger than my own, Reagan is ancient history and his wise courageous leadership is forgotten.
If we are to save ourselves from ourselves, we have to take stock of our behavior. As Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “The line between good and evil runs across every human heart.” Are we still capable of rising to the better angels of our nature, refraining from insult, dehumanization, from extreme rhetoric, from willingly embracing and spreading every wacky conspiracy theory fed into the internet? Can we listen to one another, with open hearts and open minds?
We have the tragic example of the 1860s to remind us of the alternative.
Ron Maxwell wrote and directed the movies Gettysburg, Gods & Generals, and Copperhead.
