Congress passed the second Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, requiring law enforcement to “arrest people suspected of escaping enslavement on as little as a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership.” Proposed by southern slaveholders, the Act was widely opposed in the North.
Protesters who chose to assist slaves who had escaped to a free state were “subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months.” For context, that would be “about three years income.”
As Heather Cox Richardson noted, “white southerners insisted that the federal government must use its power not to enforce the will of the majority, but rather to protect their state systems.”
Sanctuary cities share the ethos of the Underground Railroad that “helped fugitive slaves escape slavery beginning in the late 1700s until the end of the Civil War in 1865.”
Just as today with immigration, a minority was imposing its immoral will on the majority.
The law was on the books, and President Lincoln “felt his duty to the Constitution overrode the dictates of natural law, at least until the Civil War let him bend the Constitution to conform to natural law (emphasis added).” Frederick Douglas argued that “[n]atural law required the ‘preservation of the rights, and the security, and the happiness of the race’.”
In 1860, 10 years later, South Carolina seceded following Lincoln’s re-election, followed rapidly by other slave states. Lincoln chose to fight to preserve the union.
Rather than seek to preserve the union, as Lincoln did, Donald Trump is tearing it apart as he engages in retribution against (blue) sanctuary cities that voted for his opponent in the 2024 election. Leaders of those cities and states have stood firm that immigrants living in their domain will be treated fairly by the law.
“We will not tolerate ICE agents violating our residents’ constitutional rights, nor will we allow the federal government to disregard our local authority,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) said Monday. He announced an executive order barring ICE from using city property after reports the agency had used a school parking lot as a staging area.
It’s no surprise, then, that nearly 8-in-10 American voters believe we are in a political crisis. Why?
- Trump’s deployment of ICE and National Guard troops to Los Angeles, CA, and Washington, DC.
- Trump’s attempted deployment of California National Guard to Oregon, in stark rebellion against a ruling of the federal courts.
- Trump’s tacit if not explicit approval for ICE engaging Blackhawk helicopters and flash bangs, as though they were in Iraq, while bombarding a Chicago apartment complex.
- Trump’s sending the Texas National Guard to Chicago.
- Trump’s threatening to send the US military into US cities as “training grounds” to fight “the enemy within” (Hitler propaganda), directly counter to the Posse Comitatus Act (1878).
Immigration enforcement is only one of the issues tearing the country apart.
Rampant lies (e.g., that Democrats want undocumented immigrants to have federal health care benefits; that Trump will only deport criminals; that Portland is a “war zone”) and violent rhetoric (e.g., left-wing organizations are “a vast domestic terror movement;” praise for “physically hurting enemies“) are the parlance of this administration, also designed to divide not come together.
Trump’s “aggressive, divisive, and dehumanizing language [has been] seconded by his followers and inflicted directly or indirectly psychological and physical harm to Trump’s declared enemies.”
Thomas B. Edsall of the New York Times noted:
Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten businesses with bankruptcy, the criminalization of free speech and the blackmailing of corporate America into obedience.
Today Trump hinted that he was open to claiming that the US is in a state of insurrection, which would allow him “to sidestep any court rulings blocking the dispatch of Guard troops into Democratic-led cities, over the objections of local and state officials.”
The [Posse Comitatus Act], which gives the president authority to deploy the military to quell unrest in an emergency, has typically been used only in extreme cases, and almost always at the invitation of state governors. The act was last invoked by President George H.W. Bush during the Los Angeles riots of 1992.
Today’s GOP is the party of the white slave owners of the 1800s … and the current president is the antithesis of Abraham Lincoln, founder of the Republican Party. Civil war or soft secession seem increasingly inevitable.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com