The more things seem to stay the same.
Excerpt from The Coming Fury. The first of Bruce Catton's Two trilogies on the Civil War. Amrica's political parties have chosen their nominees. Choices been made or not made that will end in Fort Sumter, Antietam, Gettysburg, the massacre at Fort Pillow where African American troops fighting for the Union were cut down because they were African American.
Change the names of the countries where our newest immigrants are coming from and it seems that nothing mch has changed. Except for the Cubans, most of those immigrants are walking to America. For many of them it takes almost as long to walk as some of my ancestors spent aboard a sailing ship.
The biggest difference? All but one of America's immigrant populations were here because they wanted to be here. Wanted to be here.
"Men's motives (to repeat) are mixed and obscure, and none of the many separate
decisions which brought war to America in 1861 is wholly explicable. It is quite
possible that the choice which was made at these conventions in 1860 came at
least in part out of a general, unreasoned resentment against immigration and the
immigrant.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans both
North and South could see that something cherished and
familiar was being lost.
Looking back only a few years, it
was easy to see a society where (if the glaze of years could be trusted) everyone
thought, spoke, and acted more or less
alike, living harmoniously by a common tradition. That
society, in retrospect, seemed to have been singularly uncomplicated and
unworried—a loose amalgam of small cities, quiet towns, and peaceful farms,
slow in movement, lacking railroads and telegraph lines and owning no factories
of consequence, simple and self-sustaining, owing the outside world no more
than casual acknowledgment—a society stirred by perfectionist impulses,
perhaps, but nevertheless living to itself alone.
But this fragment of the golden age was growing dimmer as years passed.
Revolutionary change was taking place everywhere, or was visibly ready to take
place, and people who liked things as they had been found the change
abhorrent.
2 Furthermore, it seemed possible that newcomers were at least partly
responsible for the change. People whose background touched neither
Jamestown nor Plymouth Rock were arriving by the thousands—Germans, Irish,
French, Italians, men of new tongues and new creeds and new folk ways, cut
adrift from Europe by famine, by revolution, or by simple restless hope, crossing
the ocean to make this new land their own. It was easy to feel that they were
corrupting the old America.
So there was a sudden flare-up of bitter nativist
feeling. A whole political party dedicated to curbing the immigrant arose, elected
Congressmen and governors, even aspired (without success) to take control of
the Federal government; the American, or Know-Nothing, party, which stained
generations of American life with the indelible hue of its own intolerant yearning
for a simple age. As a political movement it did not live long. A country where
every citizen was the descendant of immigrants could not for very long ascribe
to the immigrant all of the disturbing problems that were coming as the
inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. So Know-Nothingism died,
even though its lingering existence was one reason why Mr. Seward was not
blessed with the Republican nomination at Chicago; but the mere fact that it had
risen so quickly and spread so widely testified to a changing nation's profound
unease in the presence of change.
To fear change meant to fear the alien—the man who looked and talked and
acted differently, and who therefore was probably dangerous. And of all the
groups whose migration to America had caused strain, the largest of all, and the
one whose presence seemed to be the most disturbing, was one racially
homogenous bloc which, to men of that day, seemed to be entirely beyond
assimilation. Its members had been coming in for the better part of two
centuries. When they arrived they did not fan out across the land, dispersing and
mingling and losing clear-cut identity among people already stamped with
Americanism, as most immigrants did. These, instead, settled in large groups,
congregating in some states until they actually constituted a majority of the
population, going to other states hardly at all, clinging with pathetic tenacity to
their own customs and folk ways. Of all the immigrant groups these were the
most distinctive—in language, in appearance, in culture— and although they
were among the most peaceful, easygoing, and uncomplaining people the world
has ever seen, their mere presence frightened native Americans almost beyond
endurance. Because this was so, the navy patrolled the seas to see that no more
of these people took ship for America, and in the states where they settled there
were strict laws, rigidly enforced, for their control.
These people, of course, were the Negroes, who had come from Africa—mostly
from the enormous, ill-omened bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, from the
steaming concentration camps which had been set up for them on those
pestilential shores as depots of embarkation. That they had emigrated from their
native lands through no desire of their own made no difference; they had come
from beyond the seas and now they were here, and a bewildered country that
was inclined to give all immigrants some of the blame for its unresolved
problems had become so exasperated by the mere presence of these Africans that
in 1860 it could discuss its present difficulties and its future way out of them
only in terms of this one specific group."
Change the names may change but the politics don't seem to change. The same resistance to change. The same resistance to change. Well, change is coming whether you like it or not.
