Read a History Book, Tim Walz

As I’ve now noted repeatedly, Democrats are playing with some highly combustible materials in deploying the rhetoric and posture of state insurrection against federal authority. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have been the chief arsonists. Now, Walz is saying the quiet part out loud:

Walz worries that the violence in his state could produce a national rupture. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” he mused today in an interview in his office at the state capitol. The island fortification near Charleston, South Carolina, is where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861. Now it’s federal forces that are risking a breach. “It’s a physical assault,” Walz told me. “It’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens.” He let his question about Fort Sumter hang without an answer. . . .

This looks to Walz like an all-out federal assault on his state. When I asked him explicitly if he thought the United States was barreling toward an armed internal struggle, he hedged. “Well, I don’t want to alarm people,” he said. He switched into the third person, saying that some of his constituents think “Governor Walz should call in the National Guard and arrest ICE”. . . . After invoking Fort Sumter, he brought up John Brown, the abolitionist who stormed a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859, fueling violent conflict over slavery that erupted in the Civil War. “Guns pointed, American at American,” he said, “is certainly not where we want to go.”

If Walz knew his history, he’d see clearly that he’s not Abe Lincoln in this scenario, he’s Francis Pickens, the South Carolina governor who led the first state out of the Union and precipitated the crisis by demanding that federal authorities evacuate his state. Pickens and his supporters and allies, much like Walz and Frey and theirs, cited John Brown’s raid in order to insist that they were not the ones firing the first shot. Major Robert Anderson, like Tom Homan and Greg Bovino today, was left besieged by an infuriated and radicalized state.

At bottom, South Carolina’s grievance, and that of the other six states that followed it out of the Union before Fort Sumter, was that a new Republican president was entering office determined to uphold federal law, and they saw that demographic shifts in the Electoral College and Congress were running against their power base, creating a sense of urgency. Lincoln and the Republicans of 1860–61 weren’t even proposing to abolish slavery (at the moment of crisis, they even came close to passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing slavery’s permanence). But they aimed to close off slavery’s internal expansion into the territories and halt its external expansion through the acquisition of new slave-friendly territories.

And — this is the part that most immediately alarmed Pickens and his ilk, and drove them to the conclusion that a fight with the federal government couldn’t wait — Lincoln’s gaining control of the federal civil service meant that Democrats could no longer use control of the executive workforce to thwart the Constitution and obtain by executive policy what they could not get passed through Congress. In 1836, in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun proposed a flagrantly unconstitutional law to ban the post office from delivering any newspaper, pamphlet, or other written matter “touching the subject of slavery” in a state where it would be illegal to circulate. (Many Southern states had such laws, at a time when the First Amendment didn’t apply to the states.) Calhoun’s bill was backed by President Andrew Jackson and Senator James Buchanan, who was president when South Carolina seceded in 1860. It was defeated by Henry Clay, and adding insult to injury, the House then passed a rider to a post office bill that made it illegal for postmasters to interdict delivery of newspapers or other mail, or to give preference to mail expressing some viewpoints over others. Needing to pass the bill, the Senate and Jackson relented.

The House rider, while it became federal law and enforced a policy required by the First Amendment, in practice went unenforced. Even under Whig administrations, which needed to compromise with the Southern pro-slavery elements of Clay’s party, it was informally understood that Southern postmasters could simply remove abolitionist literature from the mail. Whigs, who had objected vociferously to Jackson’s spoils-system view of unitary executive control of civil-service employment, were also ambivalent about fighting a bureaucratic war to the knife over postmasters. But Lincoln’s Republicans were not so constrained, either by ideology or by their coalition. The prospect that Republican postmasters would actually enforce federal law and deliver abolitionist tracts was one of the most urgent of the Southern grievances, and goes far to explaining why secession — which had often been threatened before — happened in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s election, but before Lincoln could begin putting Republican federal officials in place.

Secessionists had their own theories and rhetoric, of course: that Brown’s raid and the circulation of abolitionist speech would lead to slave insurrections and Southerners being murdered in their beds, and that merely resupplying the federal garrison inside Fort Sumter (which hadn’t even been completed yet) was a provocation. But then as now, it came down to the fact that they couldn’t tolerate a Republican president controlling the executive branch and enforcing the same laws in their state that applied throughout the nation.