After Charlie Kirk, some historians troubled by Civil War parallels

Professor Kevin Waite had just finished a seminar at the perspective of the American civil war on Friday morning when a student cautiously raised his hand.

“Can I ask questions about Charlie Kirk’s situation?” She said in the Waite classroom at the University of Texas in Dallas.

The student, he said, wondered if the recent events brought echoes of the past. The hyperbolic comparisons between modern political conflicts and the horrible bloodshed of past centuries have previously been the fabric of the sons of Prepper Apocalyptics on Reddit, but the shooting of this week made it a subject of consumer conversation.

While warning that the country is far from being as fractured as when the civil war broke out, Waite and other researchers from the time say they see more and more parallels.

“Our current political moment really resonates with the 1850s,” said the historian.

He and other researchers note similarities between the deployment of troops in American cities, general disillusionment with the Supreme Court and the spasms of political violence – in particular disgruntled young men.

“What we call polarization, they called sectionalism, and in the 1850s, there was a growing feeling that the country’s sections separated,” said Matthew Pinsker of the University of Dickinson.

Even before Kirk’s alleged assassin was publicly identified as a 22 -year -old man who left anti -fascist messages, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical political violence”.

Conservative influencers have amplified rhetoric, with Trump Ally Laura Loomer publishing on X, “more people will be murdered if the left is not crushed by the power of the state.”

Violence was much more organized and widespread in the late 1850s, prudent historians. Congress members regularly pulled knives and pistols on top of each other. Crowds have fought in the streets on the law of fleeting slaves. Radical abolitionist John Brown and his sons hacked five men to death with swords.

But some aspects of modern politics are worrying, the researchers said.

“What makes me almost more afraid than violence itself is the reaction,” said Waite. “It was paranoia, the perception that this violence was unstoppable, which really sent the nation in a spiral to the civil war in 1860 and 1961.”

The summit of mind for Waite was the paramilitary political movement known as Wide Awakes, hundreds of thousands of young naked abolitionists who took the street with their republican representatives.

“There was this perception that the Republicans Anti-Esclavagistes had not been sufficiently aggressive,” said Waite. Large awakenings, he said, believed that “it was the slavers who really pushed their program much more with force, much more violently and anti-slavery [politicians] I couldn’t sit anymore and take it more.

Most of the democratic politicians of the time were fighting to extend slavery to the Western territories, to extend the federal power to recover the people who had escaped and developed the rights of slaves to travel freely with those whom they held in the second.

The big alarm clock struck terror in their hearts.

“For their political opponents, it was a truly scary show,” said Waite. “Whenever a cotton gin burned in the south, they highlighted the big awakenings and other anti-slavery residents more radical and said:” It is a criminal fire. “”

For Waite, Wide Awakes can be compared to an anti -illed antifa, while southern paramilitaries looked more like modern proud boys.

“The South was very militarized,” he said. “Each adult white man was part of a local militia. It was like a social club, so it was easy to take these local militias and transform them into anti-abolist defense units. ”

However, the incursions by abolitionists in the south were rare. The incursions by the slave powers in the north were common and regularly applied by armed soldiers.

Legal researchers have already noted the strike similarities between the use by Trump of the military to help their mass expulsion effort. The Trump administration was based on the constitutional maneuvers used to enforce the law on fugitive slaves – a division law which allowed the slave catchers in the South to arrest in the North States – in legal arguments to justify the use of troops in the application of immigration.

“I argue that it is the fleeting crisis, more than the territorial crisis, which led the arrival of the civil war,” said Pinsker. “Resistance in the North has mainly killed the law of fleeting slaves. They violated the application of this law by legal, political and sometimes protest resistance. ”

Many northern states had adopted “laws on personal freedom” to prevent blacks from being torn from the streets and returned to slavery in the south – a Waite movement and others compare to sanctuary laws across the country today.

“The attempt to maintain these laws on personal freedom and simultaneously the government’s attempts to take these black fugitives led to the violence and the perception that the so-called slave was the aggressor,” said Waite.

At the end of the 1850s, the inhabitants of the North also fed up with the Supreme Court, which, under chief judge Roger B. Taney, was considered a rubber stamp for the objectives of the slavery.

“The Supreme Court in the 1850s was dominated by southerners, mainly of the South Democrats, and they were pro-slavery,” said Michael J. Birkner of Gettysburg University. “I think the Dred Scott affair and the court on the one hand are absolutely a parallel today.”

The decision Dred Scott, who judged blacks inadmissible to American citizenship, is largely taught in schools.

But much fewer Americans know the Lemmon affair, a legal battle of New York which could have effectively legalized slavery in the 50 states if the Taney court had heard it before the war in 1861.

“Slawers were impatient to obtain this case before Taney, because it would have nationalized slavery,” said Waite.

Despite the similarities, the researchers say that there is nothing inevitable in armed conflicts and that the imperative is now to lower the political temperature.

“Donald Trump did not offer this message with the clarity she needs,” said Pinsker. “He says he is a big fan of Lincoln, but now is the time for him to remember what Lincoln defended.”

Regarding the parallels with the deadliest conflict in America, “there is only one lesson,” said the historian.

“We don’t want another civil war,” said Pinsker. “This is the only message that counts.”