American Civil War's Relevance in Today's Politics

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 

Four and a half months after the Civil War's pivotal battle at Gettysburg, a Union victory achieved at a high cost of lives on both sides, President Lincoln came to the battlefield on November 19, 1863, to dedicate a cemetery to those who died there.  His remarks of a little over two minutes are considered to be among the greatest of speeches delivered by an American leader.

When the country marked the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War in 2011, a Pew Research Centre survey found that 56% of Americans still looked on the war as relevant to American politics and political life.  About four-in-ten 39% regarded it as important historically but with little political relevance today.

About half 48% of Americans believe the main cause of the war as mainly about states’ rights, while 38% said it was mainly about slavery.  Another 9% said both were main reasons.

One legacy of the Civil War that had echoed in American politics into this century was the controversy over the display of the Confederate flag.  In South Carolina, the official display of the flag atop the State House was a source of heated political and racial controversy for years.  In 2000, a compromise was reached in which the flag was removed from the capitol and a similar flag was raised at the South Carolina Confederate Soldier Monument on the State House grounds.

Three-in-ten Americans said they had a negative reaction when they saw a Confederate flag displayed while 9% had a positive reaction.  About six-in-ten 58% said they had neither a positive or negative reaction.

Beginning with the famous words “four score and seven years ago,” the Gettysburg Address is the most celebrated speech given by President Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln delivered it November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania following the Battle of Gettysburg July 1 to 3, 1863 where between 46,000 and 51,000 Confederate and Union soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or missing.

Lincoln was not the featured orator at the event, that was Edward Everett who spoke for over two hours.  However, the president’s two-minute, 272-word speech is arguably the most famous and most quoted in United States history.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

There are multiple versions of the Gettysburg Address.  Modern scholars disagree as to its exact wording, and contemporary transcriptions published in newspaper accounts of the event and even handwritten copies by Lincoln himself differ in their wording, punctuation, and structure.  Of these versions, the version presented here, the Bliss version, written well after the speech as a favour for a friend, is viewed by many as the standard text.  Its text differs, however, from the written versions prepared by Lincoln before and after his speech. It is the only version to which Lincoln affixed his signature, and the last he is known to have written.

When John Wilkes Booth killed President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, was he inspired by John Brown, the militant abolitionist whose public execution Booth had witnessed in Virginia six years earlier?

At first glance, the idea seems improbable.  Ideologically, Booth and Brown were light-years apart.  Booth was a Southern white supremacist who detested the notion of freedom and citizenship for black people.  Brown, an antislavery Northerner, wanted America’s four million enslaved people to be emancipated immediately and integrated into mainstream society.  Yet, in spite of this enormous difference, Booth had great admiration for Brown. Why?

It’s an issue that may hold the key to understanding the assassination of Lincoln.  Booth and Brown and, surprisingly enough, Lincoln himself, were conjoined on a deep level by what in that era was called “the higher law.”  They were inclined to follow the dictates of the higher law, moral or religious principle, rather than human law.  Reconsidering Booth’s murder of Lincoln in light of John Brown and the higher law leads to troubling questions.  When is violence in the name of a higher cause justified, and when is it not?  Can we distinguish between bad terrorism and good terrorism?  

Today white supremacist racists politics stems from the burning issues of the Civil War regarding integrating back people into the America's mainstream society.  All forms of suppression and violence against black people by the Police and politicians are coming from descendants of Confederate treasonous sympathisers.   

While running for president, Donald Trump frequently excoriated his predecessor, President Barack Obama, and his chief political opponent, Hillary Clinton, as naive, even gutless, for preferring “violent extremism” to describe the nature of the global and domestic terrorist threat. 

"Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country," Trump said at one campaign speech in Ohio.  During another, in Philadelphia, he drove home the attack.  "We now have an administration and a former secretary of state who refused to say 'radical Islamic terrorism.  "It was a strange place to make his point.  The Islamist terror attack in Pennsylvania over the past 15 years was committed by Edward Archer, a mentally ill man who shot and injured a Police officer in early 2016, later telling investigators that he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.  Far-right episodes of violent extremism were far more common. 

Just two years before Trump's Pennsylvania speech, anti-government radical Eric Matthew Frein ambushed two Police officers in the township of Blooming Grove, killing one and wounding another, then led law-enforcement authorities on a 48-day manhunt in the woods.  He was sentenced to death in April.  

Two months before that, Police discovered that Eric Charles Smith, who ran a white-supremacist church out of his home in the borough of Baldwin, had built a stockpile of some 20 homemade bombs.

And in 2009, white supremacist Richard Poplawski opened fire on Pittsburgh Police officers who had responded to a domestic dispute at his mother's home, killing three and leaving two injured before surrendering.  Poplawski, who was active on the far-right website, said he feared the Police represented a plot by Obama to take away Americans' guns.  

This contrast, between Trump's rhetoric and the reality of domestic terrorism, extended far beyond Pennsylvania.  A database of nine years of domestic terrorism incidents compiled by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has produced a very different picture of the threat than that advance by the current White House.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.  We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."

As a candidate, Trump promised to institute a “shutdown of Muslims.”  As president, he has signed two executive orders barring immigrants and refugees from a list of Muslim-majority nations, both blocked by the courts.  

In testimony before the US Senate in 2012, Daryl, Johnson, the former federal counterterrorism official, observed.  "The threat from domestic terrorism motivated by extremist ideologies is often dismissed and overlooked in the national media and within the US government.  Yet we are currently seeing an upsurge in domestic non-Islamic extremist activity.  Today, the bulk of violent domestic activity emanates from the right wing."  

While federal officials were turning their attention away from the far right, the Southern Poverty Law Centre had noticed something dramatic.  While most such groups had collapsed after 9/11, the law centre noticed an explosion of so-called Patriot groups that began in 2009, the first year of Obama's presidency, and reached a peak in 2012, when the group counted 1,360 active Patriot groups and 1,007 hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, and neo-Nazis. 

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

According to database evidence, during this same period, from 2008 to 2013, terror plots and actions by far-right groups outnumbered Islamist domestic terror cases by more than 2 to 1.  Far-right extremists also inflicted three times as many deaths as Islamists during this period.  It has become apparent that the current administration at the White House, dishonestly, hide, deny and play down incidents of violence and threats from white supremacist domestic terrorism motivated by extremist ideologies of hate, while pretending that terrorism comes only from Islamic extremist.      

"The United States is engaged in a generational fight against terrorists who seek to attack the American people, the country, and their way of life," David Lapan, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.  "We rejected criticism that DHS [the  Department of Homeland Security] is overly focused on any particular group or element as 

we concentrate on all threatens of terrorism to the Homeland."  The FBI declined to respond to interview requests or too detailed written queries.

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Delivered November 19, 1863, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.  We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."