Good Monday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions.
With presidents and pundits increasingly raising the specter of civil war, it's an important time to consider how America's first civil war was ignited, and how its lessons can help us avert a similar crisis today.
HANNS BINNENDIJK AND DAVID C. GOMPERT are on the board of directors of the American Civil War Museum, and they see some striking similarities between the conditions that led to America's bloodiest conflict and circumstances today.
The strife of the Civil War escalated through three distinct phases, they argue starting at the nation's birth and the Founding Fathers' refusal to address slavery.
"The Constitution's authors deferred the issue of slavery, believing it would become uneconomical and fade away," they write.
That didn't occur, of course, and a combination of fundamental economic changes, weak presidents and a Supreme Court determined to maintain slavery put the nation on the cusp of conflict.
With Abraham Lincoln's election, the authors write, "Southerners knew that slavery could not survive without expanding and saw secession as their only option. They underestimated Lincoln's resolve, and unimaginable violence ensued."
A similar pattern can be seen today, write Binnendijk and Gompert, who had long careers in the State Department and at the Naval Academy, respectively.
They lay out the three stages of today's national divide, arguing that the election of Donald Trump, the "Big lie" of a stolen 2020 election and the fact that America is awash in firearms are reasons to think another war may be looming.
But the authors end on a hopeful note, noting that "2022 is not 1861, when half the nation chose to leave, and the other half resisted with force. … The first Civil War may have been unavoidable. A second one is not."
Read Binnendijk and Gompert's piece here.
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