When our need to protect the powerful actually preserves division

We treat our divisions like conundrums: unsolvable and eternal. They’re neither. We just need to take their depth more seriously.

Letting the center off of the hook

Northern Democrats had a problem. Southern Whigs did too.

Today we’d think of it as the centrist’s lament: having to make two camps happy at once. Such a reading of the moment is certainly enticing. Just not the whole story.

In the 1840s the increasing division between the North and South wasn’t yet disunity. Nor should we really map the politics as a polarized left and right. Such a model is far too rigid to be truly accurate.

There is a more troubling issue.

Legislators in the north represented people who wanted to bring an end to slavery. While legislators in the south represented people who wanted to expand slavery. The big difference between the two is that only northerners were also expected to compromise with their colleagues.

Two Parties / Six Sides

In that era we had two main political parties: Democrats and Whigs. And while the issues of the day separated people along party lines, the issue of slavery and with it, regional identity, came to supplant it.

And despite our attempts to shoehorn the Civil War into a bothsides frame, there was no pro- or anti-slavery parties. Southern Democrats and Whigs both supported the slaveholders, though perhaps not equally. Northern Whigs were fiercely opposed to slavery, so there was some go along to get along there.

More of the pressure was felt by northern Democrats, who were generally opposed to slavery, but more often than not sought compromise to preserve the union.

During the decades before the Civil War, this dynamic was increasingly tested like a dysfunctional family system. Northerners, particularly those northern Democrats, became increasingly aware their place wasn’t so much in preserving the union, but in being exploited by their southern colleagues to preserve slavery.

Every inch of compromise they offered was eagerly gobbled without reciprocation.

Their fear of disunity through the early part of that era was increasing and blinding. And yet nothing seemed to sate the southern appetite for control.

As the Republican Party rose in the 1850s, stealing northern Democrats and building a true northern party, it did so against an already consolidating bloc of southern interest split between Democrats and Whigs. By comparison, there were virtually no centrists in the south deescalating conflict and seeking compromise with northern leaders.

Those southern leaders were itching to expand slavery in the west and (hopefully) into the north.

Was the Civil War preventable?

Most thought experiments like this have the fatal flaw of pre-supposing opposing parties locked in a death-grip struggle. We jump in halfway through and blame the two parties equally. Perhaps along the lines of the conflicts in Ireland or Israel and Palestine.

We intellectually walk into the middle and go Woah! Woah! Enough with the car bombs! Can’t we all just get along? or we throw up our hands believing the division has always been and must always be.

Or we seek the singular precipitating moment. The spark or the wrong one person did to another. Actually, this is the singular reason why they’ve been fighting for a century!

But what we never do is focus on the infinitesimal actions which preserved imbalance along the way. We don’t focus on the way northern centrists allowed the power imbalance to continue for the sake of ideological purity. As in that ideological purity that we don’t want to stoop to their level, for instance.

By the time Confederates fired on an American military base, centrists had spent 70 years compromising to the south just so they’d play along. Rules of order were written to protect the order for everyone. But they were regularly ignored by southern congressmen and used to corral and manipulate their northern counterparts.

Imbalance of Power

We mustn’t overlook the connection between the imbalance of power and the southern mindset. Because it isn’t a hypothetical advantage of a rhetorical party. It isn’t merely an advantage. It was the means of exploitation and domination.

Southern congressmen used the southern honor code to manipulate and imbalance the congress, superseding rules of order in place of opportunities to compromise.

This imbalance of power is not representative of an equal partnership of two sides seeking a common goal. It was used by the south to achieve a southern goal.

If there was any time to prevent the Civil War from happening, it wasn’t during the self-differentiating 1850s or when Southerners were using the threat of duels to silence their northern “equals” throughout that whole era.

It was every time a northern centrist let the bully in their own party off the hook. And every time the southern centrist let the bully in the other party slide. Because it was the whole of Congress that let its members break the rules of order for decades.

They let one-sided compromise become the norm from the beginning.

Protecting the Imbalance

We certainly can recognize what this power imbalance looks like in our time. But this imbalance only exists when we allow it to.

Think about it.

We can’t have one “side” responsible only for itself and the other responsible for itself and the compromise. It doesn’t work. And the reason for that is simple.

We can’t tell the difference between what part is their ideology and what part is the compromise.

While the north was increasingly interested in abolition, it was often seeking opportunities to protect the south’s culture and economic prosperity. The north wanted to preserve a union which was composed not just of the north, but the north, the south, and the west.

These two priorities of abolition and compromise (or civility) split northern consciousness in a way it didn’t split southern congressmen. Their audacious support for the preservation of slavery in spite of their northern colleagues was persistent throughout the period.

We can see a similar approach today as we attempt to sort in the craziest ways. But this sorting is unworkable.

We can’t have one party support “science.”
Or “the environment.”
Or “the common good.”

These aren’t “sides” or “issues” which divide us.

It’s like having one party which believes a hammer is a useful tool. And the other goes Oh, we don’t use nails here!

We Tolerate the Problem

These divisions in our time aren’t nonsense. Even as they seem insane. They represent a power imbalance we tolerate.

We don’t intend to, of course. We’re trying to be good citizens, supporting our ideals and pushing for our values. We may even believe we are protecting our common heritage.

The problem is not our best intentions.

It’s that constant sense that we need to do the right thing, follow the rules, and protect the dignity of all people.

We recognize that weneed to push for our own values and seek to compromise with our neighbors.

Meanwhile, our neighbors are scheming new ways to trash the place. And we’ve let them bribe all the cops to look the other way.

Not an unworkable situation. Just one in which we need to stop pretending is balanced, equal, and normal.

The rules are there to protect order and the powerless; not the bully from the consequences of their actions.

This is the third 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.

Other reflections include: