Slavery ought not be equated directly with police brutality against African Americans in our own time. But what fugitive slaves, as well as many free blacks and their white allies endured then—the depths of fear and distrust in institutions; the denials of their dignity, of their humanity, of the idea that they possessed natural rights before God and law; and the near impossibility of self-defense in the face of some police action—is akin to what many protesters are experiencing now.
In examining America’s road to disunion and Civil War in the 1850s, we must take great care with analogies. The issue of slavery broke apart the American political party system: The old Whig Party died, and the antislavery coalition then known as the Republican Party emerged nearly overnight amid the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, an attempted compromise that opened the American West to the possible expansion of slavery and inspired a slow political revolution across the North on behalf of free labor.
Next came “Bleeding Kansas,” a brutal vigilante war over whether the new territory would become “pro-slavery” or “free soil.” Millions of white northerners did not as much possess a sense of brotherhood with blacks as they did fear slavery as a labor system that would denigrate or even destroy their hopes for land and livelihood in the West, which inspired the American immigrant’s sense of a future. Both the rhetoric and the reality of violence began to tear apart any center in American politics. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857 effectively ended moderation in political life—the ruling seemed to open all American territories to slavery’s expansion and, more important, it declared that black people had “no rights” that white people or their governments were bound to respect, and no future as American citizens.
The Republican Party became a coalition of remarkably different political persuasions—old abolitionists of varying degrees of radicalism, former Democrats who were racist yet opposed to slavery’s expansion, and nativists who had launched a powerful movement to restrict immigration and especially Catholicism. But what drew these disparate people together was the struggle to imagine an American future without racial slavery and its stranglehold on labor, the economic system, and the levers of power in every branch of government. The Republican Party’s legacy, sullied by today’s version of the organization—which bears little trace of the egalitarian impulses of its origins—teaches us the great lesson of coalitions. Divergent coalitions, held together by a large common enemy, a shared faith in some essential creeds or goals, and a profound will to win despite the levels of tolerance required to sustain internal unity, are the way to power and great change in America.
We do not want our current shuddering troubles to end as the 1850s ended—in disunion and civil war. We need a “Never again” mentality about that history. But we need to understand the portents of disunion. In the 1850s, in three consecutive general elections, American voters went to the polls in the largest turnouts in our history. As much as 75 or 80 percent of the eligible male voters cast ballots in a still largely rural society. Slavery and its related issues and power drove them to vote, as did a thriving level of hard-nosed partisanship. One lesson of 1850s partisanship—which eventually pitted Republicans and Democrats (who then made up the pro-slavery party) against each other—is that it can be leveraged for power, and used to change the world. Our current distaste for partisanship is understandable, but polarization can be a means to power and for good or for evil. If this be partisanship, make the most of it.