JULY 4TH: DIVORCE OR DISINTEGRATION?
A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF
In July 4th: Divorce or Disintegration?, Manuel Hinds reflects on the growing political and social polarization in the United States, warning that the country is not heading for a peaceful separation, like a "divorce," but rather toward a dangerous and chaotic "disintegration." Drawing a parallel to the period leading up to the Civil War, Hinds recounts how slavery divided the nation and how Abraham Lincoln's famous "House Divided" speech foresaw that the country could not survive half slave and half free. Today, Hinds argues, the divisions are even more perilous because Americans are physically intermingled—living side by side—and conflict would unfold not across states but across neighborhoods and communities. He warns that hatred and intolerance, fueled by ignorance and political extremism, could lead to civil strife or tyranny unless a collective, civic movement—rooted in patriotism, tolerance, and respect for liberal democracy—emerges to reunite the nation. Ignoring the danger, he cautions, only ensures that what many believe is impossible will, in fact, come to pass.
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“Hey, Jack, people don’t want to see the abyss. Probably, they don’t have time. They’re too busy with other things. They don’t have the patience to remember or learn about their country’s past. They haven’t realized how serious the situation is. They don’t see that the daily injection of hatred is tearing the country apart. Maybe they’ll find some time during the July 4th weekend, motivated by the strange darkness gathering in an incoming storm.
They may recognize the similarities between our times and those that prompted Abraham Lincoln to give his famous speech, 'A House Divided Against Itself.' Seeing these parallels is a sobering experience.
TURNING TO THE PAST
For many years after independence, the political situation of the new country was not favorable for developing a modern society. During the first sixty years, people who identified with or claimed to follow the southern tradition dominated American politics. The Democratic-Republican Party, which believed that American greatness was opposed to industrialization and finance and supported slavery, held executive power for seven consecutive presidential terms from 1801 to 1829.
Southern attitudes toward slavery had a significant counterbalance. For many years after independence, slavery was legal throughout the United States. However, by 1819, slavery had been abolished in eleven states, all in the North, matching exactly the eleven states of the South where slavery remained legal. In that year, Missouri requested admission to the United States as a slave state, which would disrupt the balance in Congress between free and slave states. To maintain this balance, Congress admitted Maine (which separated from New Hampshire) as a free state and drew a boundary between free and slave states along the 36°30’ parallel across the new territories. Except for Missouri, all lands north of this latitude would be free.
From that year onward, the divide between the North and the South grew even wider. These events were manifestations of the rise of the North, which was becoming a modern commercial, financial, and industrial power — the cradle of what became the United States of our times. The South might dominate the halls of Washington, but the North increasingly dominated the markets. This dichotomy was a hopeful sign of the multidimensionality of the United States: the South could not prevent the North and the growing territories and states in the West from reaffirming their horizontal vocation. If Southern politicians had been able to control the economy of the North, the country could have sunk into tyranny and destructiveness. But modernization was also visible, spreading from the North to the new states emerging from the westward migrations.
In 1829, Andrew Jackson established the Democratic Party, built on the old Southern values of agrarianism, opposition to finance, and, implicitly, support for slavery. Jackson’s backing revived these ideas. He gained the support of the South and was elected President.
Though many Democratic-Republicans and Democrats were opposed to slavery, and though the politics of the period were nuanced and complicated, the dominant strain in US politics bent toward the South. It was not that these politicians did not respect the rules of the Constitution and the checks and balances that gave form to American democracy. But throughout these years the political representatives of the South, most of them slaveholders themselves, kept on dominating Washington’s political circles and worked hard at turning the growing territory of the United States into a predominantly slaveholding country, living under the values of the South.
It is not a coincidence that The Prince admires Jackson so much. Jackson also wanted to return the country to an idealized past that was rapidly becoming obsolete.
The political dominance of the South grew under Jackson and his successors. When the Supreme Court’s chief justice, John Marshall, died, President Jackson appointed Roger Brooke Taney as his replacement. Taney, who served as chief justice for thirty years, is mainly remembered for the court’s infamous ruling in the 1857 case of Scott v. Sanford.
SCOTT VS. SANFORD
Sanford had taken two slaves, Dred Scott and his wife, to the free states of Illinois and Wisconsin for extended periods. Scott, the slave, claimed that he and his wife should be granted their freedom because they had lived in these free states for four years. Based on the principle that “once free, always free,” which had been applied by judges for twenty-eight years, a judge decided for Scott and his wife. Sanford appealed. When the case reached the Supreme Court, it ruled that any person descended from Africans, whether slave of free, was not a citizen of the United States and therefore could not possess the legal standing required to bring suit in a federal court. That is, the children of people who had not been legally American were not Americans even if they had been born in the United States. I am sure you have seen this idea echoed in our times by The Prince and MAGA, applied to the descendants of illegal immigrants, even if they are now protected by the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment.
Taney justified his court’s sentence, arguing that the Fifth Amendment prohibited Congress from depriving individuals of their private property without due process. The Scotts were the private property of their owners, who could take them anywhere in the United States without impairing their ownership.
The decision not only defeated the efforts of Scott and his wife but also killed the principle that states could decide to forbid slavery in their territories. It also nullified the Missouri Compromise, federal legislation passed to ensure that slavery would not be adopted by new states in the West. Taney’s decision declared this legislation unconstitutional, opening the door for the continued expansion of slavery.
This decision was the ultimate turn of the screw for resistance to change. The forces of slavery had been able to command the strongest of the institutional checks and balances and pervert the meaning of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery. The decision signaled a sinister destiny for the nation.
A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF
Abraham Lincoln saw it clearly: the country would have to go one way or the other, and he trembled at the prospect of the entire country debased by slavery. On June 16, 1858, the delegates to the Illinois Republican Party chose Lincoln as their candidate for the Senate, running against Democrat Stephen Douglas, author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed western states south of the Missouri Compromise line to decide whether they wanted to be slave or free states.
On that occasion, Lincoln delivered a speech that clearly spelled out his concern that slavery would destroy what the country had stood for in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He pointed to the increasing agitation for slavery, warned about the approaching crisis that such agitation would bring about, and, with amazing clarity, passed judgment on the slaveholders’ invocation of self-government to enslave a minority. In the most famous part of the speech he predicted what would happen to the United States if this process continued:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the House to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Ether the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all states, oldas well as new, North as well as South.[i]
WHAT WILL HAPPEN?
Reading Lincoln’s A House Divided speech superficially, many think that he was saying that the country would split, as the South wanted to do by seceding from the United States and creating the Confederate States of America. That is, they believe that he was warning against a divorce. Many historians believe that he fought the upcoming war to prevent such a divorce. But no. Read it carefully and notice he said, “I do not expect the House to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
He feared that the prevalence of the idea of slavery in one part of the country would corrupt the entire country. Read it again. He saw that the country was entering a fight of all or nothing.
Lincoln believed it even if the circumstances of the conflict were different from today. At that time, the fighting parts were split geographically, in such a way that each part could walk away from the other and live independently. He did not expect the Union to be dissolved. He believed that people were already bonded, at the personal and local levels, in ways that would prevent this from happening. For this reason, he thought that the entire country would be damned or saved as a result of the conflict.
Today, the dissolution of the conflicting parts is practically impossible because it would imply the separation of people now living in the same county, in the same block, in neighboring houses. People could start shooting each other, half of the country against the other half, separated by interspersed gardens or sharing the elevators. This would not be a divorce but a disintegration.
Thus, Lincoln’s words come back. Eventually, the country will fall under a single national order, “it will become all one thing, or all of the other…all states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
There are two ways in which this could happen. The first is through the imposition of a tyranny, which can be established immediately or following a devastating civil war. The second is through a national civic effort to reunite under the principles of tolerance and patriotism (expressed in the support of the community that gives shape to the country), which could take place as a result of a collective effort of all civic forces (the Democrats, the Republicans who still believe in the Liberal Democratic foundations of the United States, the civil society, individuals) to recover the united in the United States…or of the same effort but after a terribly cruel period of civil conflict or war.
Incredibly, many still believe that merely considering these possibilities demonstrates a complete ignorance of American politics, where, they claim, everyone knows this can't happen. However, these are the same people who, just a year ago, dismissed with contempt the idea that one hundredth of what has already occurred would take place.
This is a confirmation of the Ancient Greek belief that the gods turn blind those whom they want to be defeated.
If you believe that this cannot happen, you will not feel the need to find a way to restore the tolerance and the respect for the individual rights that have been, up to today, the foundation of the American nation. By turning your back on this reality, you are ensuring that what you believe cannot happen in the United States will occur.
As Lincoln said,
“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the House to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Tyranny or liberal democracy.
No intermediate solution.
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Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He has worked in 35 countries as a division chief and then as a consultant to the World Bank. He was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His website is manuelhinds.com
[i] Emphasis by Abraham Lincoln, Available in http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm