Have we seen the likes of Donald Trump before in our jagged political history? Oh, yes.

You may think Trump is utterly unique as New Hampshire primary voters go to the polls. No other president ever incited mass violence to stay in office.

Yet there is a Civil War political party, the Copperheads, to which Trump belongs across time.

Time has erased how dangerous and despicable the Copperheads were, but they are a perfect fit with Trump’s ugly racism and sympathy with the old Confederacy. He is now the leader of that movement, revived.

Trump sports an orangish copper head of hair, a clue to his true ancestral origins.

The Copperheads, based in the Northern and Midwestern Union states, opposed the Civil War. They undermined President Abraham Lincoln’s quest to hold the nation together and abolish slavery.

The Copperheads used popular pressure and media to argue that the nation should just make peace with the Confederacy and abandon Lincoln’s larger aim. Emancipation of millions of enslaved people was not worth (white) bloodshed, so they claimed.

All along, the Copperheads hotly opposed Lincoln’s freeing the Confederacy’s enslaved people. A strong component of the Democratic Party, they gained ground whenever a Civil War battle went badly for the Union in the seesaw days of war.

The charismatic Copperheads waged a vocal war within the Civil War. They were denounced as traitors in their time, for working against the United States government. Who does that sound like?

Union soldiers became a strong political faction against the Copperheads. The military vote buttressed Lincoln’s reelection win in 1864. With “a new birth of freedom,” in Lincoln’s words, the Union was poised to win the war.

His enemy’s name came from copperhead snakes, a venomous viper that strikes quickly without warning. Early in the war, Copperheads came perilously close to upsetting Lincoln’s delicate political balance in keeping the new Republican Party unified and in power.

The first Republican president, Lincoln’s political skills and judgment were matchless, even as he had to contend with enemies on the war’s home front.

I invite you to see the parallel to this moment.

The country is rough-cut along the Civil War divide. Trump’s threats of violence led to a white nationalist mob of 30,000 marching and laying siege to the Capitol and Congress.

We also know that, like the Copperheads, Trump reaches down to the lowest base of human nature. His old playbook of mimicking “foreign” names never fails with many in the Republican base. Former Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., of Indian heritage, is getting the Trump treatment.

The tragedy here is that Trump trashed the proud party that Lincoln helped found, fighting for human rights and emancipation — to a hard-won victory.

In fact, Trump has devolved since the Copperhead model as a political menace. He chips away at the American soul, day by day, in his relentless way.

Unlike voters in 2020, the election Trump lost to Joe Biden, we know Trump is capable of inciting violence against the state to stay in power. We know he is charged with 91 criminal counts.

The American people know he’s been found or judged guilty of sexual assault and financial fraud in court.

Believe me, the world is watching: whither democracy in America?

I might add, the hard-right voters of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina do not hold the answer to that question.

These three small states are minor in the scheme of things. They hold the first presidential primaries, not the keys to the kingdom.

Yet they get hours of attention and airtime from the national press as election voices and oracles. It’s a deceptive practice that happens every time. If I never hear the glib governor of New Hampshire again, that would be OK.

In South Carolina’s primary next month comes another echo of history: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.)

That slave state was the first to secede from the Union, the spark that started the raging Civil War. The man from Illinois, Lincoln, faced insurrection the moment he got off the train in Washington.

The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com.

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