Historian Heather Cox Richardson, among others, has compared the current state of political affairs in the United States to the 1850s, just before the Civil War. Ms. Richardson also made a comparison to the immediate decades after, when the traitors who formed the Confederacy faced almost no consequences for committing treason and starting a war. In her opinion, this led directly to the violence and terror used to maintain their political power in the South from the end of Reconstruction through to the Civil Rights Act.
