In the decades running up to the Civil War, there was a lot of fighting in Congress. Actual fistfights, threats, and weapons were drawn. Few of us actually learn about this in school.
This violence served a generally unspoken purpose: to preserve southern power.
Acts and threats of violence intensified in the years before the Civil War, which is no surprise. And the rise of violence seemed to intersect with the election of Andrew Jackson. Though he was by no means the cause.
It doesn’t start because of Jackson. And it didn’t come from nowhere.
During that era, it became increasingly clear that Washington D.C. was far from the arbiter of political neutrality. It was indeed, a capital S Southern city.
And being a Southern city, it afforded the southerner certain benefits.
Until it didn’t.
Things changed when northerners stood up to southern bullying.
In the early part of the 19th Century, northern congressmen were politicly stuck.
- They had a constituency which didn’t like the southern custom of dueling. Something southern congressmen delighted in exploiting.
- They had a constituency which demanded compromise. Southern congressmen had no such pressure.
- And, for both the Whigs and Democrats, the people were increasingly seeking the abolition of slavery.
The political divide was uneven. But not only in the theoretical sense. It was uneven in the exercising of power.
Northern congressmen were caught between an electorate that wanted them to be “the adults in the room” and southerners who were constantly bullying them into submission.
For many, the pressure became too great. The risk of not standing up became too great. They needed to stand up for their cause as their colleagues did. But they also needed to stand up to them.
For many northern Democrats
Family systems theory calls this self-differentiation.
The existing balance of power was only theoretically equal.
History and practice had developed a pattern of abuse which shielded southern congressmen from the House’s rules of order. Southerners could threaten and violently attack their northern colleagues without rebuke, which crippled the northern congressman’s ability to influence the country.
This imbalance also gave the south great leverage, so they rarely needed to think of compromise. On the other hand, they demanded northerners compromise so as not to offend a southerner in any way (under the threat of violence).
Southern Democrats and Whigs both used House rules which protect decorum as means of activating the southern honor code. The rules to protect Congressmen from verbal abuse became the very vehicle of abuse.
Standing up for one’s self in the midst of an abusive system takes on new dangers. Not because it is in any way the victim’s fault, but because the abuser will never accept a new arrangement.
We shouldn’t be surprised when an otherwise loving person lashes out.
It may seem uncharacteristic of them but is typical of family systems.
We may be confused to see the loving mother or father who lashes out when a child gets healthy or makes different life choices. Their love and support often turns to outrage and hurt, often rejecting the “good news” shared with them. It can be disturbing and confusing. But it is completely predictable.
A spouse who becomes sober may find their partner frustrated with them because they’ve become dependable! Why? The previously dependable one has come to enjoy their power and independence! Their identity as
Or a child will find their supportive mother impeding their career because it would take them to the other side of the country. Perhaps because they’ve become dependent on their child’s presence.
These responses aren’t actually rational. Nor are they truly reflective of an honest reaction to the situation. And most importantly, they aren’t fair.
People often freak out when anything disturbs their family’s delicate balance. And those who benefit from the status quo often seek to reestablish the balance. Even if it means hurting the person they love most.
We all have some experience with this. But the problem isn’t as simple as “we fear change.” It’s that many people will actively punish and destroy people who self-differentiate. Even (especially) when it is for the better.
In other words, good people will turn into monsters to protect the status quo for themselves.
This is why the conflicts in the 1830s-‘50s escalated to war.
The South wanted a fair system as long as it protected Southern dominance.
The South liked things the way they were. Because they got exactly what they wanted. Intellectual arguments about rights were great – as long as they preserved southern dominance.
To protect their power, they’d “leverage their advantage” in two ways: bullying and destroying the rules to protect their rules.
They sought to protect the current slavery system by expanding it westward. Even as this act would break the fragile agreement with the north. They would expand slavery into new
And bullying the north would make it happen.
Through these two acts, the South went about using its power. But once the North threatened that dominance by resisting rather than cowering, the South threatened the whole family system itself.
These situations are messy. Protection mixes with aggression. Defense comes to mean lashing out and striking first. Our judgment gets confused.
In this way, southerners wrote the disinformation playbook later generations would follow. They intentionally mixed the way we understand both protection and expansion. They would call Northern self-defense aggression. And they would call their own destabilizing of the country’s laws “defense”.
This shouldn’t confuse us. Stop accepting the usual way we frame these conflicts!
We often allow a bully to argue self-defense. They convince us to see a person who self-differentiates as an “aggressor” to an accepted norm. And this allows the one with power in the system to respond defensively. They shook things up! they’ll say. Then it becomes justifiable to hurt them in response. To put them back in their place in an unfair system.
It is dishonest to label an escape from violence as an act of aggression.
Nor would we honestly call children staging an intervention with an alcoholic parent “stirring things up.” Such acts invite all the members of the system to reflect on the imbalance of the system.
And yet, the abuser will chase down their victim and threaten their lives. Or the alcoholic parent will refuse to show empathy for how their actions affect their children. Often, those in the place of power will continue to abuse that power to protect the system as it is.
Or worse, many of those at the table will hate the abuse and the intervention alike. They want the fighting to just go away. Much like Martin Luther King’s “white moderate,” they’d rather protect the abuse than deal with the conflict.
Sometimes sibling relationships are the hardest to deal with. We wrestle with siblings who degrade the one who “abandons the family” when they move to another part of the country. Perhaps we resent the one who refuses to get tangled up in family politics. Or when we gather at holidays, we witness adult children fall back into the roles they played as small children. We can never seem to help ourselves!
Messing with the balance, even when it is totally unfair, inappropriate, and abusive often feels like a justifiable moment to defend the status quo. Even one we might not even like.
But we must remember:
Self-differentiation is not an act of aggression.
This is why the politics before the Civil War, just like the politics of times like these are uncannily problematic. Not because we inherently disagree. Or we somehow lack the ability to be civil with one another. But because we falsely equalize the self-differentiated with the powerful forces pulling them back into a dysfunctional system.
We allow abusers to pretend they are taking a defensive posture. They are protecting their culture/family/country/community/way of life. In other words, they are protecting the status quo: one that allows the existing holder of power to keep it, even when someone else has won it fairly. [Look at the recent actions of North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin for instance.]
And they are free to wield the power over the other, rather than alongside them.
There is no ethical way we can treat the self-differentiation of the abused as morally equal to the aggressive defense of the status quo by the abuser. And yet we do. Over and over.
Why?
Because we’re afraid we could be as bad as they are.
It isn’t rational. But it is entirely intellectual.
When we encounter, an unbalanced arrangement in the midst of social unrest, many of us focus only on part of the issue. Our focus turns away from the subjective matters of power and political difference. It’s much easier to focus on semantics.
We don’t want to be as bad as they are. Don’t make that mistake!
So we allow ourselves to think the power is balanced. It soothes our moral guilt.
And we internalize the threats leveled against us. Because we think it necessary to maintain that imaginary balance. We must be moral arbiters of fairness!
But we can never be that. That would require a truly balanced power system. It would require self-differentiation of every member of the family. That would require our all starting from the same exact place.
This is our fantasy of a fake peace.
So we seek to keep our own fantasy going. We allow threats of abuse and destabilization to silence us into collusion! Or we allow ourselves to be
Either way, we become allies with the abuser.
But when we realize the abuser will never come to grips with their abuse, never compromise, never even see their actions as abusive, it becomes even more ridiculous to help them defend a status quo which will always be one-sided. For the virtuous sake of hypothetical fairness, it will maintain a system which is fundamentally unfair.
And supporting such dysfunction becomes its own problem.
This is the first of several reflections on The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman focusing on what this period could teach us about today. In the next few
- How our present moment is like a dysfunctional family system
- Seduced by Inequality