"Bleeding Kansas" Again?

I am fascinated by a book I’m reading, “The Fourth Turning Is Here : What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End” by Neil Howe. In it, the author postulates that history occurs in repetitive cycles. We can liken them to the four seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) and they are listed as four “turnings:” The High, The Awakening, The Unraveling, and The Crisis. By the title alone, Howe states we are in the Fourth Turning: The Crisis.

This is from the Books-A-Million (linked above) overview:

Thirty years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal and World War II, the Civil War, or the American Revolution.

Now, right on schedule, our own fourth turning has arrived…and Neil Howe has returned with an extraordinary new prediction. What we see all around us—the polarization, the growing threat of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even bringing on America’s next golden age. Every generation alive today will play a vital role in determining how this crisis is resolved, for good or ill.

Of the four, the Awakening and the Crisis play more significant parts. Even if you prefer to think of history as being simply chaotic, or as the religionists have it, linear, it’s a fascinating read.

But that’s not what I’m writing about. I mention this because as it’s been said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” If one backtracks through the “turnings” we find ourselves at the late 1840s, early 1850s: This would be the height of the Unraveling turning. The beginning of the Crisis era, which as we know, culminated with the American Civil War (1860).

The “War Between the States,” as it was sometimes called, didn’t spring up overnight. Most casual histories use the event of the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. But the decade preceding the onset of actual hostilities was full of strife and violence. This was the Unraveling turning.

Despite attempts to revise history to claim that the war was all about states’ rights, the history of events suggests otherwise. Beginning with the “Missouri Compromise” (1820) which admitted Missouri and Maine to the union, the first as a slave state, the latter as a free state. It also banned slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel in the Louisiana Territory. This kept the balance in the Senate even, but tensions between slave owners and abolitionists continued. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California to the union, and it also enacted a stricter Fugitive Slave Act, which also angered many in the north.

Then, Stephen A. Douglas (D-IL), who was to become Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the 1860 election, drafted the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 which allowed settlers in Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise. And the violence began. The “small civil war” that ensued has been called “Bleeding Kansas (1854-1859).”

The horrid Dred Scot Decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 ruled that African Americans were not citizens and that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories. Oops. Get out the clubs, knuckle-dusters and guns.

Reacting to the Democrat/Confederate insistence on keeping slaves, an abolitionist named John Brown staged a raid on Harper’s Ferry, WV in 1859, hoping to start a slave uprising. It failed, Brown was captured and hanged.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 as the first Republican president, the powder keg was lit. Fearing his policies would negatively impact the slave states, they seceded. And the fuse was lit. Thus began Howe’s Fourth Turning.

Can we see parallels today? Howe states that we are in the Crisis Turning of our age, and I find it hard to argue. The violence is growing, as the Democrat/Confederates find their slave “ownership” once again threatened. Oh sure, they try to couch it in other terms, but “indentured servitude” by “immigrants” who run from authorities is simply slavery in another suit of clothes*. Every day it seems the reports of violence against people and institutions of authority are growing. Attacks against border police and immigration officials are notably growing, and they often result in death and destruction. These are not the acts of over-educated and pampered Ivy Leaguers but are more and more appearing to be organized paramilitary operations. Will there be another Fort Sumter? And when? And where?

Is Donald Trump the Abraham Lincoln of our time? The violence both literal and figurative against him has reached new levels. I can’t honestly say. What Howe tells me though, is that we have some rough times ahead of us for the next six to eight years before we reach the next “turning.” I suspect we are on the brink of the next “Bleeding Kansas.” All we can hope to do is live through it.

*On more than one occasion I have heard the claim that “immigrants” do the work Americans won’t. I recall pumping gas, cleaning windshields, jerking sodas, mowing lawns and as a “common laborer” (during college). I’m not afraid of work; maybe the young people of today should get introduced to it?