When House Republicans dislodged Kevin McCarthy from the speakership last October and then struggled for three weeks to select a replacement, it struck many as entirely aberrational. Without a permanent speaker, the House couldn’t take up legislation, and Congress essentially stalled out like a rickety old truck. That wasn’t how Congress was supposed to work.
Yet in the decade leading to the Civil War, the House experienced three such stall-out crises: one, in December 1849, lasting three weeks; the others in 1855 and 1859, each lasting fully two months. The recurrent difficulty in electing a speaker signaled that the nation was hopelessly split over whether slavery would be allowed in the new southwestern territories acquired through James Polk’s war with Mexico.
“This is a fearful state of things, and may be the beginning of sorrows for our happy country,” lamented the St. Louis Democrat in December 1849. Indeed, American politics throughout the next ten years yielded multiple episodes of governmental dysfunction, waves of civic animosity, bursts of violence, and finally disunion and war.
That poses a question: With America fraught with greater political tension and venomous discourse than the country has seen since the Civil War era, could we be heading into a new time of domestic bloodshed?
Many have suggested as much. Richard Haass, former president of the Council of Foreign Relations, views the situation as “truly dangerous” and says he wouldn’t rule out “widespread political violence or even dissolution.” Robert Kuttner, the liberal writer and Brandeis professor, declares that judicial overreach by conservatives feels like “the run-up to a civil war.” A conservative commentator named Vance Byers, writing in The American Mind, suggests that the unruly political forces of this campaign year “could plausibly lead to violence.” The only questions, he adds, are “the scale of the violence and whether the American union will ultimately survive it.”
Such warnings reflect a growing perception that today’s civic discord echoes the enmity that swirled through the country in the 1850s. A gnawing question for anyone pondering the parallels between then and now is whether that long-ago conflict could have been prevented. Perhaps it could have, but a close study of those years suggests that the sectional conflict became, at some point, inevitable.
Why? In part because the slavery issue at the heart of the conflict became widely viewed by northerners as an issue of the highest moral significance. History suggests that political adjudication becomes extremely difficult, sometimes even impossible, when the central issues of the day are viewed in moral terms.