Opinion – Charles M. Blow: Class division in the US harks back to the bloody rebellion of the Civil War

Exactly 160 years ago New York was the scene of one of the most violent rebellions in the history of the United States. It was the Conscription Rebellion of 1863, in the midst of the Civil War.

New York at the time was far from the monolithic liberal stronghold it has since become. Its economy benefited heavily from the slave economy and the cotton it produced. And, although the abolition of slavery in the state took place in 1827, in subsequent decades, as historian Sylviane A. Diouf highlighted, the city came to dominate the illegal slave trade to the South of the USA, Brazil and Cuba.

The mayor of New York at the time, Fernando Wood, was a pro-Southern and pro-slavery Democrat who even proposed that the city secede from the Union in 1861, after South Carolina became the first state to do so. , in the previous year.

Known as copperheads [nome de uma espécie de víbora], conservative Democrats who opposed the Civil War were furious about the war and were outspoken opponents of Abraham Lincoln’s war policies. They viewed abolitionists as agitators and saw their call to abolish slavery as an affront to states’ rights. Many copperheads thought secession was constitutional and war a mistake. That’s because, as historian Jennifer L. Weber explains in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, “the Constitution (as they correctly pointed out) says nothing about the terms of Union membership.”

So the copperheads and their press launched relentless racist campaigns that inflamed poor and working-class white people. They propounded a kind of “great replacement theory” of the time, claiming that once blacks were freed, multitudes of them would flood New York and compete with whites for jobs, threatening the white way of life.

When Lincoln issued the preliminary slave emancipation proclamation in 1862, it reinforced the replacement paranoia. The editor of a Long Island Copperhead newspaper wrote at the time that, “in the name of liberty for the Negroes”, the proclamation “endangers the liberty of white men”.

Then, when the Military Conscription Act of 1863 was passed, instituting the first compulsory national conscription, tensions boiled over into five days of bloody revolt. More than a hundred people died, although some believe that in reality there were hundreds more dead than that.

The rebellion was anti-government because the government was forcing people to participate in a war they were totally opposed to. It was anti-black, because racist phobias had been instilled in the rioters. And it was anti-elitist because another source of tension was the fact that wealthy people could buy their exemption from the draft by paying $300, an amount that was completely out of reach for most working-class men.

Working-class whites had been radicalized by white supremacy, racial tribalism, fear of newcomers, and anti-government fervor.

Much has changed since 1863, but the devices employed to divide and provoke remain – a way of dividing whites from the non-white working class, fueling a combination of grievances against outsiders, the government and the wealthy elites who are said to benefit. their own interests at the expense of those of “ordinary” (ie white) citizens.

For much of American history, the holy grail of liberal politics and activism has been finding a way to bridge these divides, to make poor and working-class people of all races understand that their destiny and their interests are intertwined.

But race was then and still is today a powerful tool to divide the working class. This is not to say that it is not possible to build a coalition or that it has never been done. During the 1930s realignment created by the New Deal, Democrats built a coalition that supported the working class, at least to some extent regardless of race. It wasn’t perfect, of course, because it still fit the interests of the racist Democrats in the South, but it was a coalition.

This coalition began to fracture in the 1960s with the victories of the civil rights movement. Black leaders have since struggled to rebuild the coalition, from the Poor People’s Campaign launched by Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s and from Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition, founded in the 1980s, to the Reverend William Barber’s focus on “merger coalitions” out of his Moral Mondays campaign launched in 2013 to protest the turn far-right legislature in North Carolina.

Liberal politicians have developed another method of coalition building that sometimes works: a cultural bilingualism that seeks to communicate with white working class and highly educated liberals on their own terms and using their respective languages.

But as the forces of intellectualism and what we have come to call “diversity” have gained increasing power in the Democratic Party, uneducated white voters have abandoned the party. As Nate Cohn highlighted in the NYT in 2021, after Joe Biden’s victory: ′′ When John F. Kennedy, a Harvard graduate, won the Presidency by a narrow margin in 1960, he won the support of white non-degree voters but lost by 2 to 1 among white college graduates. The numbers were almost exactly reversed in the case of Biden, who lost 2-1 among white voters without a college degree but won among white college graduates.”

According to an analysis by the newspaper Politico, in 2020 Donald Trump won a staggering 96% of districts where 70% or more of the inhabitants were white and less than 30% had a college degree.

This partisan bifurcation of the white vote has been called “diploma splitting,” but it’s more than that. Often it also represents a fundamental lack of knowledge, something that encourages hostility to the truth, which in turn sets the stage for the spread of conspiracy theories, promotion of hate, extremist radicalization and episodes of terrorism.

I remind you once again that 1863 is part of the distant past. But some themes of that era seep around the edges of conservative discourse, and sometimes not just around the edges: the growing assertion and occasional endorsement of “great replacement” theory. The calls – still peripheral, but growing – for secession or civil war. The fear of the other, whether it takes the form of a freed slave or someone who enters the country by crossing the southern border. The routine vilification of the government and growing distrust of it, and in particular of its efforts to promote racial equality.

There are no anti-black race riots starting to take shape in New York. But an old-fashioned, familiar anger and uneasiness is building, and this is deeply troubling.