I read Orson Scott Card's Empire a few months back, and I've been mulling it over in my head since then. It's an interesting story, positing a left-right ideological abortive civil war that may or may not have been engineered by someone trying to create an "Augustus" situation to transition the US from Republic to Empire. Well, better that than an 'Augustulus' situation, where you transition from Empire (if you squint just right) to 'Dark Ages'... Really, the most important part of the book was the afterword, where Card referred to the power of words to define a conversation and where the line between words and actions lie.
This afterword, which specifically referenced today's political conversation between the left and the right in the US, got me thinking: what are the ties that keep a society together? More importantly, how did these ties fray and eventually snap in 1861? Even more importantly, what were the tensions that led to the fraying in the first place? Are we at risk today of being in the run up to another Civil War?
One (relatively) often hears about the dissolution of the main political parties of the time, the Whigs and the Democrats, both of which essentially ceased to exist in their contemporary forms in the run up to the Civil War. Less often is the self-segregation and division of religion in America, which began developing in the 1830s. Of course, this is a reflection of the differences in culture between the ante bellum South and the more industrialized North.
The problem is there just aren't many macroscopic studies of the topic available. I've read in scattered sources over the years about this cultural and religious division, but nothing authoritative seems to be available. Most history classes teach about the nativist movements, culminating in the American, or Know-Nothing, Party in the 1840s as a force of anti-Catholicism, anti-slavery, anti-Masons, anti-Irish, anti-immigration... you get the picture. There's a lot less about the religious traditions in different regions, however.
I'll make a few hypotheses, and post future research and thoughts on the topic here in the future. First, in the mid-Atlantic region, specifically what is now known as Appalachia, there were a large number of immigrants of Scottish descent, who came from a mostly Calvinist population. The Southerns were more likely to be English, so were probably Anglicans. The North was, through early religious struggles, probably the most varied, but had strong Lutheran and Puritain traditions (as an aside, each of these had strong influences on the education system that developed in each region, but I'll leave that for another time). Catholicism in one form or another provided a shared language between the regions, which was aided by the United States' culture explicitly rejecting the European wars of religion that had ravaged that continent for the previous three centuries.
In time, each of these regional religions and associated cultures developed separately to the point where they were speaking different dialects with (here's the important part) different cultural mores reflected in various connotations and cultural idiom. The end result: each group seeing the other as, well, the Other. Once each side felt that there was no understanding or compromise, the fuse was set, just waiting for a spark to cause guns to be taken up. The South felt that President Lincoln would crush them by force, so they struck first. As a result, the North took up arms too. The Border States, knowing both cultures well, were stuck in the middle. And 600,000 lives were lost.
On the one hand, there were thirty years' worth of cultural and national institutions that failed one by one before catastrophe was reached. On the other, you've seen posts lately about how the Republicans are becoming a regional party; you've seen Gov. Perry of Texas and others talk about secession. If political matters keep drifting as they have been in fits and starts since 1960 (how many people said, "Ike: Not MY President," after all), what forces are still pushing back towards partisan equilibrium?
Post Script - Some links to be added tomorrow