I'm reading Catton's Civil War. It's the same country of course and I always see parallels to today, which I suppose one would. Presently I am up to the Spring of 1862 and Abraham Lincoln has just presented his cabinet with the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General, has raised a concern: "Might we not lose the border states?" he asks (the E.P. freed slaves in states and areas under rebellion, not in loyalist states such as Missouri). Too late, Lincoln says. Chase then chimes in. Yes, too late. Secession was insanity for the slaveholders. If they had just been rational about their desiderata and stayed in the Union they could have kept their peculiar institution with full constitutional and legal protection. They did the one thing that assured, in time, that they would lose it. They went too far. 

We live in these times and are maybe too close to know for sure but I wonder if the modern-day slaveholders have not gone too far. Heller, Reagan, Cruz, Trump, the Supreme Court, Jan. 6, Dobbs--We have handed out military weaponry to private citizens and taken away control over their bodies. Some influential people are talking about the "junk" of separation of church and state, of vitiating substantive due process. Some are openly anti-democratic. Violence is in the American DNA. America seems to need revolution. As a cleansing mechanism, to violently wrench ourselves forward, I don't know, to need it for something. The 2024 presidential election I can see as being the modern equivalent of the 1860 election, an event that starts a civil war.