Echoes of the 1850s? Historians see parallels to the Civil War Era

Professor Kevin Waite had just finished a seminar on the run-up to the American Civil War on Friday morning when a student cautiously raised her hand.

“Can I ask about the Charlie Kirk situation?” she said in Waite’s classroom at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The student wondered whether recent events carried any echoes of the past. Previously, hyperbolic comparisons between modern political conflict and the bloodshed of past centuries were largely confined to online forums. But this week’s shooting brought the topic into mainstream conversation.

While cautioning that the country isn’t near as fractured as it was before the Civil War, Waite and other scholars of the period are increasingly seeing parallels.

“Our current political moment really resonates with the 1850s,” the historian said.

He and other scholars note similarities between deploying troops to American cities, widespread disillusionment with the Supreme Court, and spasms of political violence-especially from disaffected young men.

“What we call polarization, they called sectionalism, and in the 1850s there was a growing sense that different parts of the country were pulling apart,” said Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson College.

Even before Kirk’s alleged assassin was publicly identified as a 22-year-old who left antifascist messages, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical left political violence.”

Conservative influencers amplified this rhetoric, with Trump ally Laura Loomer posting on X, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

Violence was far more organized and widespread in the late 1850s,historians caution. Congressmen regularly pulled knives and pistols on one another. mobs brawled in the streets over the Fugitive Slave Law. Radical abolitionist John brown and his sons hacked five men to death with swords.

But some aspects of modern politics are worryingly similar,scholars said.

“What almost scares me more than the violence itself is the reaction to it,” Waite said. “It was paranoia-the perception that this violence was unstoppable-that really sent the nation spiraling toward Civil War in 1860 and ’61.”

Top of mind for Waite was the paramilitary political movement known as…