Power and Fear: the Return of the Antebellum Crisis

For a man dead 150 years, 2017 was unexpectedly eventful for Robert E. Lee. The furies in this most turbulent of years clashed most memorably around the Charlottesville statute of Lee, proud, tall, and darkly symbolic of the past and, inevitably, the present. “You will not replace us”, chanted in the torchlit marches surrounding Lee’s statute, was the most apposite mantra of 2017, containing within just five words the purest distillation of far-right demographic dread.

That decades-old Confederate statutes are the most vivid image of our modern American fracture was somehow fitting. The cascading rhythms of white existential terror, increasingly violent clashes, and measured tribalism spilling over of the rims of the political system into the sinkholes of factional excess are new to us. Yet for Lee, and Americans of his generation, the whiff of the all-too familiar would be in the air. The distant echoes of another time — the lead up to the Civil War- — abound in our nation, and our politics today.

The turbulent 1850s began with a congressional compromise over the expansion of slavery, but descended down through partisan warfare in Kansas, John Brown’s raid in Virginia, the Dred Scott decision, and an increasingly angry and hostile schism between union and disunionist elements. Slavery was the precipitating cause, the irreconcilable difference between North and South. That, perhaps, gives some comfort: we are not, today, faced with a public question as vexing as the monstrous moral abyss of racial…