The American spirit was still alive in the 1860s and the American people’s relationship with the government was different.
They weren’t so dependent and needy.
Would it, really?
Let me tell you a story.
In May 1968, the college students of France decided it was time to send De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic to the showers and replace it with a Sixth Republic based on Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They took to the streets and erected barricades in the French revolutionary tradition.
De Gaulle knew that if the problem were confined to the students, the gendarmes could handle it, but if the trade unionists joined, the Fifth Republic’s existence would be threatened. De Gaulle struck a deal with Franco in Spain. The French Air Force would fly him to Madrid. Then the French military would put the rebellion down by all means necessary, to include machine guns, flamethrowers and bombs. With De Gaulle in Spain, his fingerprints would not be on the final result.
Fortunately, the trade unionists farted in the general direction of the students, and the police cleaned things up with dispatch.
How does this relate to America?
After the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Lyndon Johnson faced the possibility that the November election might not be held in a state of domestic tranquility. His greatest fear, echoed by J. Edgar Hoover, was that the antiwar youth would join forces with the Black Panthers to create urban insurrections and even terrorism. Johnson wanted to know if there were a way to postpone the election.
Aside from legal issues, the political problem connected with this was George Wallace’s candidacy. Every incident of protest or violence drained working class votes from Humphrey to Wallace. The reason that neither party wanted any kind of presidential debate was because Wallace would have to share the stage. Restricting Wallace’s votes to the Deep South was the best way to keep the election out of Congress and the 12th Amendment. If Wallace were have enough electoral votes to flip to one of the major party candidates with a deal to reverse civil rights legislation and court decisions, it might create a race war precisely at the time we were overdrawn militarily thanks to Vietnam.
In mind of what happened in France, Johnson asked the NSC to war-game such a situation. The NSC pointed out just how much of our federal elections were hard-coded into the Constitution and federal law. The only choice Johnson had was to declare martial law, annul the Constitution, restore domestic tranquility via the military – and set a new date for the election, to include new dates for the tabulation of electoral votes and new presidential inauguration and congressional commencement dates. Then the Constitution could be restored.
This was going much farther than Lincoln had dared to go. Politically, Johnson knew that the country no longer trusted him, and setting the Constitution aside might be a step too far for people of any political persuasion. He asked the NSC if procuring Chief Justice Earl Warren’s signature on the declaration might make it more acceptable. The NSC attorneys said that Warren’s signature was irrelevant. It was the president’s signature that would execute martial law.
In the end, the Black Panthers saw the antiwar youth as unfit for revolution, and the crisis passed.
After Nixon’s resignation, the Washington Post and New York Times published a series of articles on the “White House Horrors.” This particular story got a little play, then vanished.
Create a crisis large enough, you’d be surprised what the American people would accept. Think of masks.