Civil War: 150 Years On

The U.S. was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

--Abraham Lincoln (1863)

"This is the most important event in American history. . .Everything today has a connection to the Civil War: How we're configured, racial issues, social issues, political issues. We're debating the role of government now — the Civil War saw our first big federal government."

-- Ken Burns, “Civil War” filmmaker

"too much pluribus, and not enough unum."

-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, via Ken Burns

150 years ago, on April 12, 1861, the Civil War began when Confederate forces under Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard bombarded the Federal garrison at Ft. Sumter, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. 1861 was one of the two most important years in U.S. history between our founding and the present. The other was 1929, when the Wall Street crash brought an end to unfettered capitalism. Both the Civil War and the Great Depression transformed the American political landscape; Republicans running the North and the nation between 1861 and 1929, and Democrats taking over after 1929.

50 years ago, the nation relived the Civil War on its 100th Anniversary and simultaneously realized how little the American Negro’s lot had improved in the century since. A new ground-shifting political struggle began. A Northern elite that incorporated the two components of our mixed economy—Republican business on one hand, and the Federal government including related support groups nurtured by New Deal Democrats on the other—then ruled America. We lived the “Blue Model”.

Over the next decade, America’s ruling class worked to grant blacks the equality the Civil War had promised them (see Lincoln, above), bring true equality to women and other minorities, and in the process forfeited Democratic control of the South. In the eyes of Ken Burns, and by implication, the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the still-unfolding struggle unleashed in the 1960s resumed the Civil War, except that now, the Democrats not the Republicans dominate the national elite, the North(east), California, and the Federal government, and Republicans, not Democrats, now rule the South and fight for state rights against an intrusive Federal government.

Democrats have peacefully sought to make right the bloody Civil War of a century earlier. Yet this new struggle for equal rights has generated the sharpest divisions the country had seen since the Civil War. It pitted the North against the Southern segregationist way of life, then with forced busing to integrate Northern schools and fair housing laws, it pitted elite liberals against the Northern working class, then with court-forced legalized abortion and affirmative action for women and minorities, it set progressive values against our traditional culture. Finally, rejection of U.S. involvement in Vietnam bonded the ruling class to the Democratic Party, eventually sending “neoconservative” defenders of the war into the Republican fold.

Burns claims the Civil War high ground of a noble quest for equality under the leadership of a strong Federal government, and Burns (quoting Schlesinger) mourns America’s unnecessary division, resting as it does on no-longer-legitimate white male supremacy. But Burns and fellow Democrats fail to appreciate that Federal government control over our economy and lives, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, is no longer the solution; it has instead become the problem.

What will be the new key date in U.S. history, the date to set alongside 1861 and 1929, the date we step back from the big government launched in 1929 and thereby empower the people to rule their own lives?

That’s the date we end our current civil war.