Quote:
Originally Posted by Torplexed
In explaining why the North and South went to war in 1861, historian Shelby Foote argued that “the genius of American politics is compromise.” He was referring, of course, to the compromises that made the writing and adoption of the Constitution possible in 1787, of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that quieted the debate over slavery for a generation, and of the Compromise of 1850 that briefly silenced the dispute over the expansion of slavery in the territories won from Mexico during the Mexican-American War.
However, I think it's safe to say that once again the political center, where compromises are fashioned, no longer exists. Are we drifting back to the climate of 1860?
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Good point.
Unfortunately though compromise is rarely a permanent answer to anything. The Missouri Compromise for example might have delayed the civil war but it did not solve the underlying issues that caused the war to eventually break out.
Indeed had the 1820 compromise not happened the war might have been fought before the introduction of modern weapons (like the rifled musket) that made civil war battlefields so particularly bloody.
As to whether we're drifting back to the climate of 1860, you may be right, but a key difference is that the polarization is not concentrated into definable geographic areas. In a new civil war
every state would be a "Bleeding Kansas" or "Bloody Missouri".
As Thomas Jefferson put it:
"...but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper."