THE MORE THINGS CHANGE?

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.