Jeremi Suri - Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.

Winston Churchill

W orries about a new civil war in America are misplaced because the Civil War never fully ended. Its lingering embers have burst into flames at various times, including during our own.

On January 6, 2021, thousands of American citizens, self-proclaimed patriots, marched up the Mall in Washington, DC, crossed a line of barricades, and broke into the U.S. Capitol. They interrupted the House of Representatives and the Senate in session, sending the vice president and others scuttling to secure locations. Capitol Police were wholly unprepared for the crowds desire to break the windows, ransack the offices, and assault the occupants of the building.

The bright Capitol dome symbolizes the peaceful transfer of power in a united country, but this mob would have nothing of it. They were an insurrection against the Union and the electoral process. The timing of the march was meant to prevent the inauguration of a new president with whom they disagreed. Some rioters posed proudly for selfies, displaying self-righteous anger and intolerance. They sent videos around social media, documenting their break-in.

Look at me, so many shouted on Facebook, I am here, taking back our government!

Not all in the crowd were violent, but if you were a Black law enforcement officer on duty that day, you felt the brutality personally. James Blassingame, a police officer with seventeen years of experience, recounted the fury:

My squad, we head over to the Capitol, to the Crypt. Then I hear somebody yell, Theyre coming through a window. I look north. I wish I could come up with a better analogy, but its just a horde of zombies running at us full speed. I mean, the whole length of the hall. Theres maybe like eight, ten of us. People are yelling. Theyre throwing stuff. Were holding the line. Somebody broke a wood stanchion in half and threw it at a guy next to me; he just dropped. People were pissing on walls. People were dumping water coolers on the ground. It was mob mentality.

The fanatical rage had roots in the Civil War, which explains why the mob flagrantly displayed the Confederate Battle Flag. The loudest insurrectionists proclaimed a connection to the Confederacy and its defense of white families and privileges. They targeted those who placed democracyparticularly the will of the majority of votersabove their needs and desires.

The mob wanted to stop the certification of the 2020 election, one of the freest and securest in American history. They echoed old Southern claims of fraud, first articulated when nonwhite votes had turned Confederate partisans out of office. A renunciation of white power at the ballot box was unacceptablea cause for vigilante justice, authoritarianism, and worse. The mob came prepared for battle, with guns, knives, handcuffs, and pepper spray.

Kevin Seefried was a foot soldier in this forever war. A stout, short-haired, bearded, fifty-one-year-old white man from southern Delaware, he carried a life-size Confederate flag into the seat of American democracy, threatening to murder the vice president. Those around him shouted, Kill Mike Pence! as he waved the symbol of slaveholders under the majestic white rotunda. Some members of the mob had already used their flagpoles to impale police officers. Others prepared to do much worse.

On the grass field in front of the Capitol, Seefrieds confederates had assembled a wooden gallows with a noose, a uniquely American symbol of racist vengeance. They were ready to lynch the vice president and other elected leaders who undermined their control of the government.