Second American Civil War

The Second American Civil War is a term alternately used to describe contemporary reassessments of past periods of US social unrest and civil strife, and hypothetical future civil conflicts in the United States. In the former sense, events related to the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), Reconstruction (1865–1877), and Coal Wars (ca. 1890–ca. 1930) bear the hallmarks of civil war in the views of some experts. In the latter sense, the concept of a second civil war has gained increasing traction among social and political commentators since the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. Trump’s controversial victory in the 2016 presidential election sparked a period of intense political hyperpolarization that some analysts characterize as potentially foretelling of an impending large-scale violent factional conflict.

Overview: The American Revolutionary War as the First “True” Civil War

Popular depictions of the American Revolutionary War tend to reduce the conflict to a straightforward struggle between colonists fighting their unjust oppression and an imperialistic machine bent on their subjugation. However, historians acknowledge that the internal political dynamics of the American Revolution were far more complex. Divisions within colonial-era US society engaged two primary factions: the Loyalists who were faithful to the British crown and wished to see the Thirteen Colonies remain part of the British Empire, and the revolutionaries (commonly called Patriots) who drove the fight for independence from Great Britain.

According to assessments contributed by historian Robert M. Calhoonto the 2008 book A Companion to the American Revolution, Loyalists comprised approximately 15–20 percent of the white male population of the Thirteen Colonies while Patriots and their sympathizers accounted for about 40–45 percent. The Smithsonian Institution additionally notes that the Loyalist ranks were buttressed by a strong concentration of wealthy and influential merchants, who viewed the revolutionary uprising as a serious threat to their profitability and stability.

Direct fighting between the Loyalist and Patriot factions took place during the American Revolutionary War, given that tens of thousands of Loyalists fought alongside British troops over the course of the extended conflict. Other scholars note that Loyalist-Patriot factionalism extended to the political level, involving conflicts between state legislatures and the Continental Congress. Given these facts, some experts consider the American Revolution to be the first “true” civil war in US history and view the 1861–1865 conflict as the country’s second such war.

Civil Conflict during the Reconstruction Era

Following the 1861–1865 US civil war, the United States embarked upon an extended period of recovery and national reintegration known as the Reconstruction or Reconstruction Era. Observers generally cite a timeline of 1865–1877 for its active period, and the Reconstruction was marked by major internal political tensions and sporadic outbreaks of violence. As a result, some observers consider it a continuation of the 1861–1865 civil war, or a new period of factional conflict that would more properly be classified as a second civil war.

Mainstream historical assessments of civil strife during the Reconstruction period generally characterize it as the result of a deep ideological divide between the North and the South over the future direction of the country. Many members of the white establishment of the South intended to continue advancing institutionalized white supremacist policy despite the legal abolition of slavery by depriving Black southerners of government representation and most basic civil rights. Similar views and goals existed within some elements of the North, including Democrat president Andrew Johnson (1808–1875).

Meanwhile, Black Southerners, their Southern sympathizers, and Republican factions opposed to President Johnson rejected the continuation of the white supremacist project in the South and believed the Union could not properly move forward until the rights of former Black slaves were protected by effective policy at the federal level. The ensuring political maneuvering included an attempt to remove Johnson from office via impeachment along with regional outbreaks of violence in the South as Democrat-aligned white supremacists fiercely resisted federalized efforts to impose progressive racial policies.

The Armed Uprisings of the Coal Wars

During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, mining companies created what is known as the coal town system, in which settlements were usually unincorporated and operated by coal companies without the input of elected officials. Most coal towns lacked municipal law enforcement services and were instead policed by private agents hired by coal company owners. These private agents tended to prioritize the domination and control of coal town populations ahead of public safety and actively sought to keep organized labor activism from gaining any kind of foothold.

Sporadic outbreaks of violent resistance against the coal town system began in the late nineteenth century and became more widespread during the early decades of the twentieth century as coal miners and their allies mounted organized uprisings against their continued exploitation. West Virginia became a major epicenter of what are now commonly known as the Coal Wars, though comparable events occurred in Colorado and other parts of the eastern United States.

The 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, in which an armed faction of coal miners engaged in a violent confrontation with a citizen army backed by anti-union law enforcement officials in West Virginia’s Logan County, is widely viewed as the defining moment of the Coal Wars. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest uprising to take place in the United States since the 1861–1865 civil war, and President Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) was forced to deploy the military to bring it to an end. The underlying labor exploitation conflict later subsequently spilled over into the criminal court system when hundreds of pro-union coal miners were charged with treason against the state of West Virginia. Because of the large scale of the Coal Wars and its legal implications for the scope of state power, some observers classify it as a limited but authentic civil war between citizen-led organized labor and government-backed corporate power.

21st-Century Fears of a Second Civil War

Though the United States has endured through multiple past periods of elevated political polarization, experts and commentators note that new forms of factionalized ideological conflict began to emerge during the 2010s. Given the novelty of these developments, observers acknowledge the unpredictable nature of their potential outcomes, and many analysts believe the hyperpolarized political divides could potentially result in a second civil war.

Multiple paradigms endeavor to encapsulate the nature of the twenty-first-century ideological conflict in the United States. One commonly cited model characterizes it as the product of rising tension between Republican-leaning “red” states and Democrat-leaning “blue” states. It essentially roots the conflict in red states embracing what blue states consider increasingly extreme forms of right-wing conservatism while blue states have pushed for what red states interpret as authoritarian forms of hyper-liberal progressivism. Another model views the discord as primarily existing between the respective populations of racially and ethnically heterogeneous urban centers, and white-dominated suburbs and rural areas. Others consider the divide to be a conflict between a liberal government establishment and its corporate partners, and its antiestablishment opponents who have rallied around conservatism amid an unconventional shift in the political paradigm.

In any case, a plurality of expert observers generally agree that Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential election touched off overt conflict between the opposing factions. A multitude of cultural and political issues ranging from freedom of speech and public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic to abortion and immigration have since emerged as battlegrounds in the ongoing conflict, which some analysts believe holds the potential to escalate into violence that could even grow to threaten the federal foundations of the United States itself.

Further Insights

In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election victory, Democratic officials at both the federal and state levels, many Democratic voters, and multiple left-leaning mass media outlets embraced the widely promoted narrative that Trump’s win was buoyed by foreign election interference originating from Russia. Meanwhile, Trump voters, many Republican officials, and right-leaning US media rejected these election interference claims as a fabrication intended to discredit Trump and invalidate his presidency. Allegations of election interference and other abuses of power formed the core of the unprecedented two attempts to remove Trump from power via impeachment in 2019 and 2021, both of which failed.

Trump’s unsuccessful bid for a second presidential term during a chaotic 2020 election cycle culminated in an infamous and deadly riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The rioting followed repeated but unproven claims from Trump and his supporters that 2020 presidential election victor Joe Biden and the Democratic power complex had manipulated the vote’s outcome. These election controversies largely functioned as critical inflection points in the partisan ideological conflicts that have engulfed the US political landscape since 2016. Opposing factions have also engaged in bitter rivalries involving practically every major social, cultural, and political issue of consequence. Several key events defined periods of particularly elevated ideological tensions, including public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the civil unrest that followed the 2020 death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, and the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the 1973 abortion rights decision in Roe v. Wade. Multiple episodes of political violence have also occurred in various parts of the United States, including an extended period of rioting and looting that swept across major US cities in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd murder that resulted in at least twenty-five deaths.

With experts universally acknowledging ideological polarization as a common indicator of impending civil conflict, researchers have sought to quantify the severity of the political divides among the combatants in what has come to be called the US “culture war.” In 2021, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics published the results of a polling and data analytics study intended to generate insights into the country’s hyperpolarized partisan landscape. The study polled voters who had cast their ballots for either Biden or Trump in the 2020 presidential election, and found that majorities from both factions distrust officials, supporters, and media outlets they perceive as belonging to the opposing side. More than half (52 percent) of Trump voters and 41 percent of Biden voters indicated support for a national divorce through the secession of red and blue states. A statistically significant numbers of voters representing both presidential candidates indicated an inclination to subvert traditional democratic principles if it became necessary to advance their political priorities.

Viewpoints

Political experts sometimes distinguish between “cold” and “hot” forms of war, with a “cold war” being defined by intense political conflict without overt violence, while a “hot war” begins when underlying cold conflicts erupt into sustained periods of violence. According to this perspective, many analysts and cultural commentators believe that the United States entered a period of “cold civil war” in 2016, which migrated into the era of the Biden presidency and continued to escalate. Some adherents of this viewpoint opine that a second civil war has already effectively begun in the United States, with the only remaining questions centering on how it will be resolved and whether it will descend into the level of violence normally associated with “hot war.”

Competing analytical paradigms hold that the overt violence associated with “hot war” is unlikely to occur on a mass scale in an advanced economy like the United States, with the post-2016 civil conflict instead bearing the hallmarks of fourth-generation and fifth-generation warfare. Fourth-generation warfare marks a breakdown of the divisions that traditionally separate combatants and civilians, while fifth-generation warfare relies on tools such as information warfare and social engineering instead of physical force and military prowess. These observations have led some experts to speculate that economic rivals of the United States including Russia and China may be conducting covert operations intended to accelerate internal US tensions as part of a larger program to impede the United States from maintaining its position of global political and economic dominance.

Other observers question whether the ideological divides and civic tensions within the United States are really as widespread and profound as they appear. This view implicates the US media, which relentlessly reports on culture war issues in order to pander to their partisan audiences. According to some interpretations, profit motive functions as the driving force behind this project; the hyperpolarized political climate creates captive audiences for partisan media channels, which have suffered deep declines in their financial fortunes due to the intense competition introduced by the emergence of the internet.

In a similar fashion, some experts implicate social media and technology companies for pushing distorted political narratives and worldviews on internet users. Researchers have demonstrated that emotional manipulation acts as a powerful driver of the economic models that generate profits for internet-based news and commentary providers, with anger and outrage at political events generating large volumes of internet traffic and high page-view counts. This phenomenon, informally known as “ragebait,” suggests that the deliberate stoking of intensifying political tensions has been effectively adopted as a business model by unscrupulous news outlets, commentators, and content creators. More broadly, this perspective asks the question of whether the US ideological divide is really as deep and severe as it seems, or whether it has been manufactured and warped by a media complex that harvests financial gain from factionalized political polarization.

About the Author

Born in Canada and educated in Canada and the United States, Jim Greene is a European Union-based freelance writer and editor. Jim specializes in researching, writing, and updating academic reference materials on humanities, social sciences, and legal topics. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. Jim has been working as an editorial services professional since 2001.

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