Commentary
Once upon a time, American politics was characterized by perfect comity and civility between the two major parties, leading members of which, from the president on downward, were always respectful and polite to one another, even when their differences of opinion were at their sharpest.
Just kidding. You knew as soon as you read that paragraph that it was a fairy tale, didn’t you?
In fact, as Joanne B. Freeman shows in “The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War” (2018), the hatred and bitterness between the parties, and even, at times, within them, 200 years ago was even worse than it is today and often led to violence long before it culminated in the mass violence of the Civil War….