To be clear, this series is about a drift and potential coming separation of regional cultures in America in coming decades.
Two days back, I posted a diary about the religious splits that developed in ante bellum America during the 1830s and 40s and how they were a clear sign of the coming Civil War. Before moving on, I wanted to do a follow-up post correcting some mistakes as pointed out by commentators such as charliehall, as well as including suggestions for informational improvement, like from AndrewMC and mweens. I'll also go a bit more into the background of the early republic, a topic I find myself increasingly interested in.
More below the fold.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the more recent of the two books, Evangelicals and Politics by Richard Carwardine, suggested by commentators in my previous diary, but the contemporary one can be found on Googlebooks here. As a result, while I read through this and continue my reading on ante bellum foreign policy, I'll talk today about the cultural fracturing of American society in ante bellum America and how it potentially relates to today's political situation beginning with a little history overview.
The first generation of Americans during the First Party System were massively affected by the Napoleonic Wars. It helped tie them together, especially in the period between the Jay Treaty of 1794 and the War of 1812, where threats from the British Empire helped keep the newly formed Union together. Following the Napoleonic period, the US began a policy of détente with the British Empire, eventually culminating in the separate announcements by the British Foreign Minister George Canning and the American Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of the policy that became known as the Monroe Doctrine, a term coined by President Polk. The US entered the Napoleonic period controlling land de jure to the Mississippi and de facto to the Appalachian gaps. The Jay Treaty realized most of the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended the Revolutionary War, including the British surrender of most of the forts in the Northwest Territory and allowing the US to expand west, north of the Mason-Dixon line. In the South, a near-genocidal removal of Indians through repeated brush wars commenced, allowing the US to spread west to the eastern bank of the Mississippi.
The year 1803 marked the Louisiana purchase, and the first questions of slavery in this new land, purchased under dubious constitutional authority, arose. A quote attributed to Napoleon upon concluding the retroactive retrocession of Louisiana from the Spanish to the French and from their selling it to the Americans (yes, it was a complicated thing) was, "With one stroke, I have set in motion the destruction of the power of the British navy." It's true, though Napoleon's empire didn't survive to see it. During the War of 1812, the mere fact of American survival presaged its entry as a Power to be reckoned with. The Napoleonic period closed out with the signing of the first Oregon treaty (1818), the Treaty of Adams-Onis (1819), which gave the US claim to its first West Coast ports, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which created the sectional balance and made slavery the number one issue of the next forty years.
We've now concluded the background section, arriving at 1820 in this brief overview of early American history. Over the next twenty years, there was relatively little in the way of tensions, since America had so much empty land that it was just beginning to fill. By the 1830s, these regions were beginning to fill up and request entry to the Union as full-fledged states, with the next states after 1820 entering into the Union in 1836.
First off, what do I mean by cultural fracturing?
Cultural fracturing is the process by which a culture is split into two or more subgroups that increasingly consider the other group with distrust and a lack of mutual understanding. Different idiom and connotations develop through the use of similar words and eventually two groups that were originally one can simply talk past each other due to a complete difference in life experiences and cultural surroundings.
As an example, while we continue to speak the same base language today, no one would argue that British English and American English are two fundamentally different languages. There's still cross-pollination between the two, so they're still the same 'species' of language, but there's a clear gap.
Now that I've tried to define cultural fracturing, let's return to ante bellum America. We see that Congress, much like the 1930s French political class, is paralyzed by a clear division between two nearly equal and mutually opposing forces. In our case, this is a purely regional divide; for the French, it was pretty purely ideological, much like our division today. Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down in June 1940, when the Vichy coup ended official French resistance in WWII.
This balance on sword point lasted for just about 40 years under increasing tension, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 until secession by South Carolina in 1860. During this forty year period, I've already addressed, though poorly, the religious split between the North and the South. Moving somewhat from there, to religious-based language, we see that the North and South were quite split on how to linguistically reference slaves. The North argued for the right to self-determination and that standing on 'free soil' made for 'free men.' The South argued in paternalistic terms, saying that they offered slaves better lives than they'd be able to carve out for themselves in America or in their native countries.
The South, a region dominated primarily by Baptists and Presbyterians, fears grew of a Northern-led or educated free black-led slave revolt, and organized elaborate systems of family separation and 'escaped' slave bounty hunters to prevent and suppress any uprisings. On the other hand, the North, with its earlier religious struggles, was more varied in its political denominations but had a strong Lutheran and Puritan background. This region felt that the wars of the mid-19th Century were for land for the South to expand, which wasn't stopped by the 'Golden Circle' talk or the 'Knights of the Golden Circle,' organized in the South in 1854.
As a result of these views, the religious underpinnings of each region, though non-official, helped to pull the two regions apart during this period.
Why is this relevant today?
Today, we see a massive evangelical movement that, despite some quite recent rumbles about political shifts and fractures, for the past twenty years has been nearly exclusively related to the Republican Party. This party is primarily located in regions with similar demographics, as noted by Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight parameters, though apparently the parameter images in the "Road to 270" series have disappeared.
I additionally argue that there is a gap in language as used by the right and the left that is increasingly disturbing. Part of this is the increasing inclusion of the right to a language of violence, but this is more a non-partisan symptom of cultural isolation and separation, as similarly displayed by groups on the left during the 1960s, like the Weathermen and the post-Days of Rage/Chicago SDS.
To make it clear, I don't think secession on the part of the Right/South is imminent, but increasingly possible; not probable, but still increasingly non-negligible.
Post Script - My apologies for cutting and running after posting my last diary. I'm posting this one earlier in the evening, so I'll be able to stick around in the comments, though not for the next hour or two. Also, Tip Jar, heh. Whoops.
Coming attractions - My next diary will be a bit of a topical jump on looking at the threads of agribusiness like Monsanto, the economic collapse of the Byzantine Empire over several hundred years, and the mechanization of society in the hundred years between the 1830s to the 1930s. I've been bouncing it around for a bit and want to get it out while I go through some more material on this subject. On the one hand, the concentration of farmland into a few wealthy hands has been troubling in the past. On the other, the mechanization of society and the inability of the farmer-citizen to keep up with productivity rises due to that expensive mechanization potentially is an 'out' to repeating history in this fashion. More on this later.
Following this, I hope to put together my next diary on the rise of paramilitary groups like the Wide-Awakes during the decade prior to the Civil War.