POLITICAL VIOLENCEAmericans in Former Confederate States More Likely to Say Violent Protest against Government Is Justified, 160 Years After Gettysburg
Americans living in the Confederate states that violently rebelled against the United States during the Civil War express significantly greater support for the notion that it can be justifiable to violently protest against the government. Residents of what are known as the Border States, the slave states that did not secede from the Union, are also more likely than residents of Union states to say it can be justifiable to violently protest against the government.
Over the July Fourth long weekend, people will pour into the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the 160th anniversary of one of the deadliest battles in U.S. history.
The three-day battle left over 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead, wounded or missing and cemented Gettysburg’s place in American history as the turning point of the Civil War.
A few months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln visited the town for the dedication of Soldiers’ National Cemetery. There, he delivered his famed Gettysburg Address. Lincoln called on Americans to dedicate themselves to the “unfinished work” for which so many at Gettysburg had died: the preservation of the United States and a “new birth of freedom” for the nation.
I have researched Americans’ support for political violence in my work as a political scientist at Northeastern and Harvard Universities. As an incoming professor at Gettysburg College, which was attacked by Confederate soldiers and served as a makeshift hospital during the battle, I wanted to see whether the legacies of the Civil War still affected Americans’ support for political violence today.
I found that, overall, Americans living in the Confederate states that violently rebelled against the United States during the Civil War express significantly greater support for the notion that it can be justifiable to violently protest against the government.
Residents of what are known as the Border States, the slave states that did not secede from the Union, are also more likely than residents of Union states to say it can be justifiable to violently protest against the government. Confederate and Border State support are not statistically different from each other.
Residents of states belonging to the Confederacy are also significantly more likely than Americans living in Union or Border States to say it is justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government right now.
‘Greater Support for Political Violence’
From Dec. 22, 2022, to Jan. 17, 2023, my colleagues and I at The COVID States Project, a multi-university team polling Americans in all 50 U.S. states, surveyed over 20,000 Americans about their support for violent protest against the U.S. government. Our survey asked whether they felt violence is ever justifiable, and whether violence is justifiable right now.
I then analyzed the responses by state residence, grouping survey respondents by their state’s allegiance in the Civil War: Union, Confederacy or Border State. Americans living in states that did not exist during the Civil War are excluded from the analysis.
Confederate state residents are about 2 percentage
