Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation [the United States], or any nation so conceived [in liberty] and so dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal], can long endure.
Among the many things on which the South disagreed with Abraham Lincoln was the term “civil war.” Confederates termed it “the war of Union aggression,” doing the kind of up-is-down expression of reality—there was, after all, that attack on Fort Sumter—that Donald Trump routinely practices. But in the war’s aftermath, Southern writers and politicos began calling it “the War Between the States,” which elided the reality that theirs was a war against the United States.
But a war between the states is a pretty fair description of the last couple of weeks in the business of redistricting. Because no nonpartisan national commission exists to redistrict our federal legislature, as is the case in France and the U.K.; because our 18th-century constitution vests this national power in individual states; and because the profound political differences that defined our nation before the Civil War remain with us to this very day, red states and blue are now battling over the composition of the next Congress, not through elections but through line-redrawing.
Texas Republicans are endeavoring to stage a 21st-century version of the attack on Fort Sumter; California Democrats are vowing to retaliate in kind. And a growing number of other states are on the periphery, poised to strike if the generals give the order.
It goes without saying that Trump is no Lincoln. What must be said is that he’s more the resurrection of Jefferson Davis, who ordered the bombardment of Sumter, much as Trump has ordered his Texas MAGAnauts to initiate the seizure of House seats by redistricting. For that matter, instigating the January 6th insurrection was more in the spirit of Davis than that of any former president of the United States.
The current redistricting offensive is hardly the only Republican echo of the politics of the slaveocracy, of course. The ICE seizures in and deportations from American cities have borne a striking resemblance to the slaveholders’ seizures in Northern cities of former slaves, under the authority of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Just as Bostonians in the decade before the Civil War rallied to defend Blacks who’d escaped to the North, and sought to obstruct the men the slaveholders sent to recapture them, so Angelenos have rallied to obstruct the ICE agents who’ve been sundering families and disrupting communities in Los Angeles. And just as the escaped slaves had violated no federal law save the Fugitive Slave Act, so the clear majority of ICE detainees and deportees have violated no law save that of unlawful entry to the United States, which is not classified as a felony.
During the first two years of the Civil War, the South had hoped to win diplomatic recognition from the two dominant European nations: France and, chiefly, Britain. The British clothing and textile industry relied overwhelmingly on cotton from the South. But by late 1862, once the war to preserve the Union was clearly transforming into the war to end American slavery, Britain and France were compelled to abandon any thought of recognizing the Confederacy.
Would that Europe had adhered to an anti-neo-Confederate perspective in recent decades. Instead, a host of major European companies have opened their U.S.-based plants exclusively in right-to-work Southern states and (except for Volkswagen) opposed all efforts of the workers in those plants to unionize. As such, they’ve sided with Southern Republicans who’ve viewed with horror the prospect of their workers gaining democratic rights and, just maybe, more Democratic-aligned politics. In a sense, those European companies’ perspective has been that of the British textile magnates of 1861, but there’s been no effective counterforce to that “bottom line über alles” viewpoint this time around.
Trump has expressed a desire to have his likeness added to those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. Where he really belongs is on Stone Mountain in Georgia, where the likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis look down on a South that still seeks to weaken popular rule and is far from convinced that all men are created equal.