“Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it - when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, "Cornerstone Address, March 21, 1861 " in The Rebellion Record: (New York: O.P. Putnam, 1862), pp. 44-46.

American history has more twists than the proverbial “dog’s hind leg.” It occurred to me that the current standoff in US Capitol politics following the recent 2024 election has echoes of a much earlier Civil War era (1861 – 1865). At that time, a not so covert white supremist point of view was represented by the Democratic pro-slavery Party and on the other hand, a more humanitarian racial view represented by the anti-slavery Republican Party.

Drawing a parallel is difficult due to the dramatic shift and complete reversal of the two major party’s positions on this central issue. In 1860 it was Confederate Democrats who contested Republican Abraham Lincoln’s rise to the Presidency. The Democratic Party split into southern and northern variants and ran competing candidates thereby guaranteeing that Lincoln and the Republicans would win the 1860 election on a promise not to extend slavery into the newer Western US states.

In turn the southern states ceded from the Union and the American Civil War (referred to by Stonewall Jackson as the “second war for independence”) was on. By 1862 the war was at a standstill and Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation more for tactical reasons than any moral principle. 

Many of the male slaves immediately joined the US Coloured Troop, which consisted of 175 regiments of 178,000 freed enslaved people who fought the last two years of the Civil War in segregated units. Following the end of the war, Reconstruction was attempted following Lincoln’s assassination under the guidance of former VP Andrew Johnson—a slave owning southern Democrat who escaped impeachment in the Senate by one vote in 1868 for his pro-slavery views and lenient policy towards ex-Confederates. 

Successive attempts to reform the southern Confederate states failed and the Ku Klux Klan became an active militia force. Jim Crow laws and Democratic Party control of the Southern states ensured that the status quo would remain for many generations, right up to the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum.

D.W. Griffith adapted Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) and directed The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was a recruiting poster for the KKK. By the 1920s membership in the Klan was estimated to be in the millions when Klan delegates participated in the 1924 Democratic National Convention at New York City. 

During the first half of the 20^th century, white supremacy was not some fringe, shadowy right-wing conspiracy but a well-developed “privilege” which was taken for granted by the majority white population of the United States, exemplified by racial segregation primarily in the southern states. Neo-Confederate groups promoted a positive image of the legacy of the Confederate States of America through the erection of monuments, plaques, museums, and publications. 

I can recommend Boston academic and journalist Dick Lehr’s Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights (2017), and the PBS documentary based on the book. In the publication, Lehr explores the conflict between film director D. W. Griffith and Monroe Trotter, a Boston crusading African American newspaper editor who campaigned to prevent the screening of the feature film in his city and across the country. While a valiant effort was made by the editor and the NAACP organizations to prevent the exhibition of The Birth of a Nation, the film was seen by 25 million Americans and influenced public opinion for the next fifty years.

A political policy issue again split the Democratic Party in 1948 when Democratic President Truman ordered the integration of the U.S. military following WWII where two million Black soldiers fought in segregated regiments. The southern Democrats organized the “States’ Rights Party,” nicknamed the “Dixiecrats” to oppose racial integration and support Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. White southern Democrats began to rethink their party affiliation following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under the Kennedy/Johnson administrations.

Governor George Wallace of Alabama was the most visible manifestation of the southern Democratic Party, and is vividly remembered for this image of him physically blocking Black students from entering the University of Alabama in June 1963. 

By 1965, the “Solid South” white voters shifted their support from the Democratic Party and began affiliating and registering with the “Grand Old” Republican Party largely due to the national Democratic Party’s reinvention of itself by embracing a liberal stance on race and equality for all Americans. While the South realigned from Democrats to Republicans, the Northeast states, the Great Lakes states, California, and the Pacific Northwest states became the de facto home turf of the Democrats.

Republican politicians like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon applied a “Southern Strategy.” In the 1960s and 1970s they began supporting “states’ rights,” which became a code word for opposition to federal government enforcement of civil rights and interventions such as voter rights and desegregation.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan campaigned in Mississippi on a platform supporting “states’ rights.” This new Republican strategy used coded language by making attacks on the “welfare state” and slamming “welfare queens, busing and affirmative action.” The slogan “Make America Great Again” originated with the Reagan campaign, and it didn’t take much imagination to translate this past phrase into “Make America White Again.”

Columnist Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times: "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."

Zoom ahead to the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections when Donald Trump and the Rump of the GOP party used coded phrases, the Reagan MAGA slogan, and “silent dog whistle” tactics to incite the “base” into violent marches at Charlottesville, NC, and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Racist police officers were emboldened to kill unarmed black civilians on city streets on a weekly basis leading to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the middle of a pandemic. 

Let’s face it: the United States of America is now dominated by Confederate Republican politicians. They control the Presidency, Congress, and many state legislatures and thereby have the privilege of gerrymandering election boundaries in concert with Republican governors like Ron Desantos of Florida. The name of the game is disenfranchising Black voters just as Jeb Bush did when he was Governor of the same state during the 2000 election of his brother George W. Bush. Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Trump have encouraged militia groups like the KKK (1865), Aryan Nations (1970), Michigan Militia (1994), Oath Keepers (2009), Proud Boys (2016), and Wolverine Watchmen (2019). Donald Trump suggested during a 2016 presidential debate “Proud Boys, stand back and standby.” You recall that one of President Trump’s first “executive orders” in his second term was to pardon most of the January 6^th insurrectionists by insisting that they were “political prisoners.”

Hopefully a Second American Civil War is not necessary to resolve the issue of race and civil rights throughout the entire country. The US population has never been this polarized since the 1860 election of Republican President Abraham Lincoln.