“Slave owners and white racists were afraid that the world they had always known was slipping away from them. Fear was a great motivator—fear of change, fear of losing power, fear being that they were wrong. The roots of white anxiety over threats to enslavement and to legalize white supremacy ran deep.”

John Meacham, And There was Light. Random House, 2022, page 55.

Reading this passage last night stunned me. A myriad of thoughts rushed at once, promptly crystallizing into one central truth; racial dynamics in America have not changed. Not. One. Bit.

Meacham’s book, a biography of Lincoln, focuses on the shaping events that made Lincoln arguably America’s greatest President. However, those same circumstances left the Southern slave power deeply offended, and lethally dangerous. This metastasizing rancor ultimately exploded into Civil War, and to Lincoln’s 1865 murder.

The Missouri Compromise triggered the first alarm below the Mason-Dixon Line. That slavery could be limited through any federal legislative act left slavers touchy and suspicious. Sensitive to any criticism Southern owners  (as Mr. Meacham pointed out), viewed any outside opposition to their standing as a dishonorable insult.

Congressmen and Senators frequently squared off years before the thunder of gunfire and clash of steel. A Massachusetts Senator, Charles Sumner endured a severe beating on the Senate floor for a fiery anti-slavery address. So volatile became the rhetoric that the House chamber adopted a “gag rule” that prohibited any mention of slavery in any form. Any abolitionists tracts, or books, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin quickly landed in the trash bin, tossed out by local Southern postal officials.

As Northern abolitionists grew more strident, Southerners grew more militant. The right to oppress and engage in human trafficking an unquestioned prerogative of the planter class.

A flash of arms became only a matter of time.

The politics of race entered houses of worship where politicized clergy twisted the Bible inside out to condemn or justify the right to own another person. Today the Southern Methodist and Southern Baptists churches are enduring examples of the ecclesiastical war before the war.

After four bloody years when the guns finally silenced, the era of Reconstruction began in hope. Newly emancipated freedmen protected by Yankee occupiers exercised the vote, entered into marriage legally, attended schools through the Freedman’s Bureau, all protected by Federal law. Simmering, outraged and unrepentant Southern whites didn’t acquiesce easily. A broad campaign of terror and intimidation to suppress former slaves emerged. The Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and the White League galloped through the night, masked and menacing. These former Confederates spread fear and committed murder against any person of color who dared claim the blessings of American Liberty. 

Contrasting the 21st Century to the 19th provides strikingly similar dynamics.

In 2008 Barack Obama became 44th President of the United States, and white power interests again lost their minds.

Though at first it appeared that America had turned a positive corner in race relations, Senator Mitch McConnell quickly reacted decreeing the GOP would not work with the new president. Soon after the Congressional Republicans sunsetted a clause in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, the act protected black voters from discrimination at the polls. McConnell’s handy work placed the onus on the voter to prove they were illegally denied. (Much like the old poll tax and literacy tests days.)

Once again white supremacist perceive their alpha-position slipping away, and they, too, are suspicious and lethally dangerous. The hate group names have changed, but not the mission. Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, neo-Nazi’s, MAGA, and Christian Nationalists gallop now through the internet on the dark web, surfacing to attack as was done on January 6th, 2021.

The signs are all there, fear of a changing America, fear of being wrong, and fearful of losing control.

Those who witnessed the dissolution of the Union believed their blood-soaked sacrifice had settled for all time the issue of race in America. But that is clearly false.

But then is now. Now is then. Eras are intricately and forever intertwined. This nation has remembered nothing and again defaulted to the same old norms of hate and boastful ignorance.

And though those same feelings run deep, and they are still wrong.

The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know. Harry Truman

Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir, River of January, and River of January: Figure Eight. She has penned two stage plays, “Clay,” exploring the life of Henry Clay, “Wolf By the Ears,” a study of racism in America, and “Peer Review,” where 47 is confronted by four past presidents.