Written by tom kando   

More than anything else, 19th century American history is the history of the North-South face-off:
The South was wedded to slavery and to States’ Rights, in Virginia’s Jeffersonian tradition. The North was increasingly repulsed by slavery, and it was more federalist, in New York’s Hamiltonian tradition.

During the first half of the 19th century, the young republic experienced crisis upon crisis. For example, the Nullification Crisis in 1832, when South Carolina claimed that States’ Rights superseded Federal law. This was already a precursor to the Civil War, thirty years later.

The issue of slavery was dealt with through a series of compromises, crafted by wise men such as Henry Clay. There was the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and Clay’s Grand Compromise of 1850.
Such compromises all aimed to satisfy both sides, i.e. to extend slavery westward in some ways and in some territories, so as to satisfy the South, while prohibiting it in other ways in other territories, to satisfy the North. Thus, major conflict was averted for many decades.

Of course, there were firebrands on both sides. For example the abolitionist John Brown (whom some would call a terrorist today) and South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks, who assaulted and mutilated Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts.

Eventually, the firebrands prevailed. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. In the new territories, slavery would henceforth be determined by the settlers’ popular vote. This pointed the country towards Civil War.
In 1856, Kansas experienced a mini-civil war of its own, clearly a preview of the catastrophe to follow five years later.

From then on, there came increasing polarization, no more compromises. Threatened by a North which was leaving the agrarian and feudal South in the dust, both industrially and demographically, the South became increasingly intransigent. In December of 1860, the South (again spearheaded by South Carolina) began to carry out its longstanding threat: Secession.

* * * * *
Today’s firebrand secessionists are the members of the Tea Party. They are utterly unamenable to compromise. They plan to secede from the Federal Compact which has sustained this country for a century. They wish to abolish Social Security, Medicare, Public Health and other federal services.
To them, the federal government has no legitimacy.

For the time being, they are winning. They won in California, in Minnesota, in Wisconsin, and it looks like they are going to win in Washington D.C. on August 2.

The irony is that in 1860, it was the Republican Party - today’s Party of Reaction - which was on the good side of history in the days of Abraham Lincoln.