It is hard to picture what 51,000 dead and wounded soldiers look like. The scene came in the third year of the US Civil War at a crossroads town in Pennsylvania. When Robert E. Lee’s Rebel Army of Northern Virginia fled the battlefield at Gettysburg on July 4 1863 he left behind the conflict’s bloodiest tragedy, and the Southern cause was over. Now one hundred and sixty years later some Americans are calling for a civil war anew.

Scholars debate the reasons for the 1861-1865 US Civil War. Northern factories challenged the Southern farming way of life, but the threat to Southern landowners’ rights forced eleven states to break away and form a Confederacy. Indeed, the Southern belief in a right to secede from any federation that no longer served it set the spark, but the Southern belief in a right to own Black slaves lay the fuse.

The first time you see the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC its enormity strikes you. Step after step you climb to a clearly marked spot where Martin Luther King Jr told the world in 1963 that he had a dream. What captures your attention as you near its columned top is the ever-growing presence of a statue within. It is a man settled on a chair. The National Park Service tells us that his left hand is clenched in “a determination to see the Civil War through” and his right hand rests opened with “compassion”. Both lay on armrests in the form of bundles of rods that in Roman times were called fasces. They represent the “Union’s might”. The man of course is Abraham Lincoln, and in this powerful homage he gazes out over Luther’s plaque placed forty years after his statue and into the heart of the Capitol beyond.

Despite tourists swarming those steps, the Lincoln Memorial is a favourite place of mine for contemplation. To Lincoln’s right on a towering wall of marble are ten sentences two-hundred-and-seventy-one words long etched in gold. They are a speech written by Lincoln in a cadence that Winston Churchill would one day adopt. The world knows it as the Gettysburg Address, and I read it aloud whenever I am there.

Last week on June 29 2023 the US Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional to consider the inequalities of race when allocating student admissions at “two of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States” Harvard College and the University of North Carolina. Six-to-three, almost a year to the date that they overturned a woman’s right to an abortion, the court ruled that Affirmative Action for Blacks had run its course.

To commemorate the Soldiers National Cemetery at the Gettysburg battlefield on November 19 1863 Lincoln began his Address drawing on the birth of America: “Four score and seven years ago,” he said, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

At that time, the US Constitution only specified that “Free Persons” or White men were equal or “whole”. Therefore, Lincoln changed the war’s tenor with an Emancipation Declaration months before Gettysburg announcing that “all persons held as slaves within any State … shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”. It still took an amendment after the war in 1868 to deem “all people” whole for the purposes of the census.

His Address ended with an urging that: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced … that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

The US Supreme Court killed that resolve on the 29th of June.

Oh, how the US has changed since the terror attacks against it on September 11 2001, its strategic defeats in the Global War on Terror over the twenty years following, and the fraud it engineered in the Global Financial Crisis. Its self-confidence is broken. Rather than honouring the Union dead of Gettysburg a storm of hatred blowing under both MAGA and Trump banners is calling for the resumption of hostilities where Black lives do not matter and those who break with the values of Old Testament Christian Evangelism must never be considered equal.

Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the Affirmative Action case: “The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society”. Which is another way of saying that after a difficult half a century championing Black rights the Supreme Court had just set the stage for a crisis of the Union again.

When asked in 1994 whether the US Civil War could have been avoided, its most renowned modern-day chronicler of PBS fame and Southerner Shelby Foote unwittingly theorised that the same underlying tensions today were aflame then.

In a C-Span 2 interview he said: “I think the problem was there … An irrepressible conflict … All these splits were going on. The Whigs [a coalition of small government interests that would become the Republican Party] were dissolving or had dissolved. There were issues that were so bitter between the abolitionists in New England and the fire eaters in South Carolina and various other places in the South. I’m almost willing to believe that with all our genius for compromise there still wasn’t any way to settle this thing except by fighting.”

We remember that Lincoln was a Republican. We also know that today’s setting is much more complex than White versus Black.

Like the Whigs, the Republican Party is fragmenting. While exacerbated by the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 the roots of Republican division sprouted long before he became a political thought. The question is do we trace the ramp up of hate to women’s rights and abortion, to AIDS and gay pride, to anti-Semitism and the banks, to Islamophobia and open borders, to the fear broadcast 24-7 by media both mainstream and social? Is it simply that today’s education system has left Americans vulnerable to gaslighting and grift? Never doubt that there is money to be made from hate.

Hate most definitely crescendoed in the response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020-2021. The New York Times called BLM “possibly the largest movement in US history”. There could not be a label more certain to rattle a Conservative White’s milieu.

The June 2020 George Floyd protests in Washington DC in the final months of the Trump administration gave MAGA its poster moment as ludicrous as it turned out to be. There was Trump holding a closed bible outside a barricaded St John’s Church in Lafayette Square having pushed through the smoke and carnage left by riot police who had tear gassed demonstrators in the presence of army generals.

While doubtful logistically in an age where warfare ranges across land, sea, air and space the threat of a Second US Civil War remains electorally legitimate and is overshadowing the run up to the 2024 Presidential Primaries.

Something has changed in the American people who once saw their nation as a land of innovation and opportunity. We find it in their Covid-19 denialism and in their repudiation of science. We see it in their blatant stacking of the US Supreme Court along Traditional Values lines.

At its ugliest we see it in the rise of once obscure and localised right wing militias since given presidential endorsement and now flying swastikas and Rebel flags as the ensigns of a New American Way. We see it in a Christian Evangelism that has lost its mind in a love for dollars while laying down the fear of God’s wrath just the same. In response to a newly vocal transexual lobby intolerance is now manifesting itself in the restriction of homosexuality and the banning of books. None of which could have had legitimacy without the mouthpieces of News Corp and Fox News behind it. MAGA seditionists could not have attempted the overthrow of the US Constitution and Congress on January 6 2021 without Rupert Murdoch and the huge reach of his podcast mirrors.

How is it that after decades of calmness, the hatred of the 1860s US Civil War still looms large in the American heart? “I honestly believe that it’s in all our subconsciouses,” Shelby Foote said. “This country was into its adolescence at the time of the Civil War, it really was. It hadn’t formulated itself really as an adult nation. And the Civil War did that. And like all traumatic experiences that you might have had in your adolescence, it stays with you the rest of your life. Certainly, in your subconscious, most likely in your conscious too.”

As for the ultimate meaning of the Civil War for Americans then: “Anybody who’s looked into it at all, realises that it truly is the outstanding event in American history in so far as making us what we are. The kind of country we are emerged from the Civil War not from the Revolution. The Revolution provided us with a constitution, it broke us loose from England, made us free, it made us men. But the Civil War really defined us. It said what we are going to be. It said what we are not going to be. It drifted away from the Southern, mostly Virginian influence, up into the New England and Middle Western influence and we would tame that kind of nation instead of the other kind of nation.”

Except detritus drifts only so long.

Estimates of the US Civil War put its death toll at 620,000 or roughly two percent of the American population at the time. The Civil War accounts for half the deaths in all wars that the US has fought. Gettysburg by far was its deadliest engagement.

Is the US ready for this carnage again? Given its public health response to Covid-19 and widespread Covid minimalism resulting in an ongoing tally of 1.2 million American deaths the answer is undeniably yes. At the time of writing, the Gun Violence Archive reported over 22,000 gun-related deaths, nearly 10,000 gun-related homicides, and 371 mass shootings in the US just this year. Hatred in the US is boiling over and those who have raked in millions of dollars engendering it are seen as heroes rather than sociopaths.

Can a US Civil War happen again? Alongside the ranks of White MAGA Conservatives are Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos and Asians. They apparently do not know that in their pursuit of grift the world of Evangelical Christian extremism was not made for them. At what point do the other gaslit and robbed Americans take up arms, overthrow their current Trumpian masters, and anoint a true führer?

As in the 1860s that will be determined state by state. The difference today is the complexity of federal funding and infrastructure on which these states rely. Foreign interference, however, makes this proposition less threatening. How much independence are Americans willing to sell to reign White supreme?

© 2023 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: © 2023 Adam Parker.