How fast can things go to hell?

I gave this talk to the group back in  February 2011. Since then things have blown up in more Arab states - Syria being the major one to watch.

How Quickly Can Things Go To Hell?


We see, in Tunisia, Egypt,Yemen, and today Bahrain, Jordan, and Libya that political protests against the Arab Dictatorships have boiled over into street actions, and it took only a short time until some major abdications were forced. “An earthquake is shaking the whole Arab world and a larger part of the Muslim world and we don’t yet know how these things will turn out.” - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of Israel. It is instructive to look at how fast these changes can occur.

In America, we have had two periods of major government turmoil. It may be informative, to look at the time scales of first, the Revolutionary War, and second, the Civil War.

The Revolutionary War

Problems and discontent can fester for a long time before something triggers a sudden political outrage resulting in a major change. The time then can be very short before sudden major changes happen. “…all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that, in the Declaration of Independence.

In the Revolutionary War, Gradual Usurpations by the British Crown started to really annoy the colonies in 1707 with the Navigation Acts. Goods from Europe had to be transshipped through Britain and carried in British bottoms. By 1733 smuggling was endemic. Royal governors were appointed from gentry in England owed favors, and enriched themselves at the Colonies' expense. British officers in the French and Indian war, called the Seven Years War in Europe, 1755 –1763, were supercilious toward Colonial officers and troops, among whom was Lieutenant Colonel George Washington. After the war, Parliament began trying to recover the cost of the war from the colonists, who they thought were the prime beneficiaries of the war. Thus followed the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the Townshend Act. In 1768 British captains tried to impress American seamen in Boston, and at the same time customs agents tried to seize a sloop of John Hancock’s as a smuggler. A mob rescued the seamen and terrorized the customs agents. The case was dropped in 1769, but the Crown sent 4 regiments of troops to Boston. A confrontation with a few troops and an indignant crowd resulted in the troops firing on the crowd, killing four – this in 1770, became known as the Boston Massacre. Americans steadfastly refused to buy taxed East India Company tea – the company obtained remission of the tax on tea leaving Britain, and sent ships loaded with tea to America, expecting the Americans to buy, since they now had only to pay the tax on the American end. They refused. The Royal governor of Massachusetts refused to let the three ships leave the harbor, expecting the Americans to use that tea or nothing. Sons of Liberty, in Indian costumes, raided the ships and threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor in December of 1773, the Boston Tea Party.

Parliament, retaliating, passed five acts called variously the “Coercive Acts” or the “Intolerable Acts” in 1774.
The Port of Boston was closed, the Customs House moved to Salem.
The Massachusetts charter was revised, so that all Councilors and judicial officers were appointed rather than elected; the governor permitted when the town meetings could meet and what business they could transact, etc.
Officials charged with capital crimes could, along with witnesses, be sent to England for trial.
Troops could once again be quartered upon the populace (the quartering law of 1765 had expired.)
The Northwest Territories, claimed by New York, Connecticut, Virginia, And Massachusetts were attached to the Province of Quebec, cutting off westward expansion.

General Gage arrived in Boston as Governor, with four regiments of troops. Events began to pick up speed – Gage closed the port of Boston June 1st, 1774. A Continental Congress was called in September 1774. They agreed to import nothing from Britain, and to export nothing to any British port. Preparations for war began to be made. Minuteman companies were formed. Gage sent out 800 troops to seize the firearms, powder and cannon at Concord on April 18th 1775 – they had a slight skirmish at Lexington, with 60 Minutemen, killing 8 and wounding 10, suffering one wounded British soldier. At Concord, about 400 militia came upon them searching the town. They fired a volley, killing two and wounding nine, suffering two killed and two wounded patriots. The British began a march back to Charlestown, as another column of 1000 troops came out to rescue them. But militia were gathering on every side, perhaps four thousand in all, and it was sixteen miles back to Charlestown. It became a continuous skirmish all the way back to Charlestown – in Cambridge it became a running fight for a mile and a half, with bayonets and clubbed muskets. By dark, the exhausted British were back across Charlestown Neck, having suffered 73 killed, 26 missing and probably dead, and 174 wounded, out of 1800 men. The next day, thousands of armed New Englanders threw up works around Cambridge, and the war was on – the siege of Boston had begun. A second Continental Congress met May 10, 1775 to this electrifying news. By June 15th, they had appointed George Washington Commander in Chief, who left for Boston the next day. From the closing of Boston Harbor to the battle at Concord was ten months. The war continued actively for seven years, until October 1781 when the British general Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown Virginia, and the final peace was declared in 1783.

The Civil War

The problem of slavery festered from earliest days – slave states required agricultural workers –slaves – as the basis for their cotton, tobacco, etc. economy. Land clearing and agriculture were severely labor-intensive. Northern states saw slavery as economically an unfair competitive advantage, and religiously as an abomination before God. The founders danced around the issue to form a Union – Jefferson had written a dandy excoriation of the King for continuing the slave trade: “waging cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights…in the persons of distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” but had to take it out of the Declaration of Independence in deference to certain southern states who had yet to suppress the slave trade. Compromises were made as the country grew, with respect to extending slavery into the territories. These compromises generated ill will on both sides. Disunion threatened. In 1849 Congress had such intense sectional feeling that for seventeen days it could not choose a speaker. Finally on the sixty-third ballot Howell Cobb of Georgia had a plurality over Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts. The Republican Party sprang into existence in 1854 in opposition to extending slavery into Kansas and Nebraska territories. In 1855 and 1856, low-grade guerrilla raids were made, each side upon the other by John Brown and others, giving rise to the epithet “Bleeding Kansas”. In the 1856 election the Republican party, though only two years old, carried the northern states except New Jersey with nominee John C. Fremont. The Democrat party, Buchanan the nominee, carried the southern and border states, except Maryland (Fillmore) along with California, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Electoral votes were Buchanan 174, Fremont 114. John Brown’s October 1859 raid seizing the Armory at Harper’s Ferry, hoping to incite a slave rebellion, and his subsequent trial and hanging added fuel to the fire.

It all came to a head in the election year of 1860. I’ve printed out for you the sequence of events between the Democratic Party convention on April 23, 1860 and the first battle of Bull Run, known as First Manassas in the South, July 21, 1861. Here are the highlights :
April 23 – Democrats meeting in Charleston cannot agree on a candidate.
May 18 – Republicans in Chicago nominate Abraham Lincoln.
June 23 – Northern Democrats in Baltimore nominate Stephen Douglas.
June 28 – Southern Democrats in Baltimore nominate John C. Breckinridge.
November 6 – Lincoln elected, Electoral votes Lincoln 180, Breckinridge 72, Douglas 12, Bell (Constitutional Union Party) 39.
December 20 – South Carolina secedes.
January 9, 1861 – Mississippi secedes.
January 10 – Florida secedes.
January 11 – Alabama secedes.
January 19 – Georgia secedes.
January 26 – Louisiana secedes.
February 1 – Texas secedes.
February 8-9 – Confederate constitution adopted at Montgomery AL, Jefferson Davis elected President
February 18 – CSA Pres. Jefferson Davis and VP Alexander H. Stephens inaugurated.
March 4 – USA Pres. Abraham Lincoln and VP Hannibal Hamlin inaugurated.
April 12 – Confederates begin bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor.
April 13 – Supplies & reinforcement being interdicted, Fort Sumter surrenders.
April 17 – Virginia secedes
May 6 – Arkansas secedes.
May 20 – North Carolina secedes.
July 21 – Battle of First Bull Run (First Manassas). Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, CSA, 18,000 troops, 1980 casualties. Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, USA, 17,700 troops, 2900 casualties.

From the election of President Lincoln to the firing on Fort Sumter was six months, and nine months to the first full scale battle with 36,000 troops engaged. The war lasted until Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865; Johnston surrendered to Sherman near Durham Station, North Carolina April 26, and finally on May 26 General Kirby Smith surrendered the forces west of the Mississippi to General Canby at New Orleans. The four years of war involved approximately four million soldiers, of whom one million became casualties. Slavery was abolished, and we are still now one country, not two.