Opinion The New Civil War
On May 24, 1854, Anthony Burns, an enslaved man who had escaped from Virginia, was arrested in Boston. According to the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, enacted in 1850, enslaved people who escaped to the North would still be considered property, and federal marshals would assist in their recovery. Two days later, a multiracial crowd stormed the courthouse in a failed attempt to free Burns. A judge remanded Burns to his enslaver; 50,000 people lined the streets as Burns, guarded by 1,500 federal troops, was escorted to a ship that would return him to the man who’d enslaved him. These acts of brutal enforcement brought slavery into the free states and inflamed Northern opinion as nothing had before, as the historian Andrew Delbanco — who tells the story of Burns — argues in his book The War Before the War.
Never since then has one set of states been empowered to enforce its jurisdiction on another. But we may be arriving at another such moment with the demise of the abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. Legislators in Missouri and Oklahoma have discussed — but not yet passed — legislation that would allow individuals to sue someone in another state who facilitated an abortion for a citizen of the home state. Last year, Texas passed legislation that would allow a state prosecutor to seek the extradition of a telemedicine provider of abortion pills in another state. These measures have, in turn, provoked a reciprocal response in pro-abortion rights states: California and Connecticut have passed laws designed to protect citizens from extra-territorial punishments.
The stakes of the abortion debate are not, of course, comparable to those over slavery, an intrinsic evil in which one group of people profited from depriving another of their liberty and humanity. It was, in fact, the Fugitive Slave Act that first compelled many Northerners to recognize that monstrosity. Delbanco quotes a Bostonian who wrote in the aftermath of Burns’ capture, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & woke up stark mad Abolitionists.”
Abortion is not like that. Each side of the debate is motivated by a metaphysical proposition that is all but incomprehensible to the other. Those of us who believe in a woman’s right to choose would like to believe that the other side will not survive exposure to the facts, yet 50 years of constitutionally protected abortion has barely moved the needle of public opinion (save perhaps in the other direction). We will not settle the issue with another civil war, thank God, but we may be entering a metaphorical civil war which will continue to rage for a long time. And given the violence with which our politics is now infused, we cannot be altogether confident that the war will remain metaphorical.
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