President of Civil War Museum: Similarities Between the Elections of 1860 and 2016

The American Civil War Museum president S. Waite Rawls discusses how both 1860 and 2016 witnessed fractured political parties, anti-immigrant sentiments, and clear divides in voting patterns between different geographical factions of Americans.

On February 22, S. Waite Rawls, foundation president of The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va., joined Merion West’s Erich Prince to discuss the Civil War in context. He explains the parallels he sees between the United States presidential elections of 1860 and 2016.

Could you begin by giving a general background of what prompted you to start looking into this comparison between the elections of 1860 and 2016? Is this something that emerged from your research or was it something that just dawned on you one day? Where did this hunch come from?

Erich, being a Civil War historian and working at the country’s biggest Civil War museum, you start to know that era well. During the Summer of 2016, I started really noting similarities between much of what Donald Trump was saying and what the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s was saying. There were two parties in America in the 1830s and 1840s: the Whigs and the Democrats.

The Whigs were breaking down into different factions, and they basically disappeared. There were some good historians, and then a few op-ed folks picking up on the dissolution of the Whig party [as compared to events in 2016]. You could observe something similar happening to the Republican Party with the breakup of the Tea Party, or the Freedom Caucus on one side and the moderates from the other side.