The United States is presently in a state of transition from the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden presidency to that of the Republican presidency of the re-elected Donald Trump. Mr. Trump was elected three weeks ago and will be inaugurated on January 20, 2025. He has been nominating the members of his Cabinet, who, according to the U.S. constitution, have to be accepted by the Senate, which is controlled by the Republicans. 

This week it was announced that the United States under President Biden has brokered a ceasefire between the Hezbollah of Lebanon and Israel. War continues, however, between Israel and Hamas of Gaza. The Gaza war has been horrific beyond description, while the Lebanon war is relatively recent, but has resulted in massive damage to Beirut, the Lebanon capital, and other areas.

There is social and political tension within the United States itself, because Mr. Trump has promised mass deportation of immigrants from the day he is inaugurated. President Trump is supported by a movement referred to as the MAGA (Make America Great Again) group, which appears to have a white supremacist attitude.

From my personal viewpoint, there would have been a level of violence in the United States had Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement been defeated in the election earlier this month. The rhetoric in the MAGA movement gave one that impression, especially when one considered the violent behavior of militant Trump supporters on January 6, 2020 at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

I recently read a work by one Erik Larson about the period leading up to the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865. This war began in early April of 1861 with the shelling of the federal fortress at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, by Confederate elements which wanted to maintain chattel slavery as an American institution. Confederate elements in America’s southern, slaveholding states had been heavily agitated by the election to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in November of 1860.

But the incident which had earlier alarmed the South was the raid by a white American named John Brown on October 16, 1859, on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia. John Brown was a militant abolitionist whose intention was to arm the region’s enslaved Blacks and spark widespread uprising.

In that same year, the United States had brokered the signing of a treaty between Great Britain and Guatemala on April 30, 1859, which delineated the borderline between Guatemala and British Honduras. This 1859 treaty will be a centerpiece of the negotiations/arbitration at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which will rule on Belize’s borderline with Guatemala, the republic which claims it inherited ownership of Belize from Spain.

In Belize’s education system, we are taught nothing about the period from 1834, say, to 1859, a period during which slaves were freed in Belize (1838), Texas fought Mexico in 1835 to preserve slavery in Texas after Mexico outlawed slavery in the late 1820s, and the United States itself went to war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848, defeated Mexico and took possession of territory from Texas all the way to California.

The United States, which had declared the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, then confronted Great Britain in the 1850s, signing two treaties which stripped Britain of territory in Nicaragua and Honduras, and followed that up with the brokering, to repeat, of the 1859 treaty between Britain and Guatemala. 

The period between 1834 and 1859 has never existed in the educational curriculum of British Honduras/Belize. Today, we Belizeans can see that we are in a tricky spot where Guatemala is concerned, and we have no idea what the mighty Trump’s thinking is where the Guatemala/Belize situation is concerned.

It struck me that John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was just months after the Britain/Guatemala treaty in 1859. I thought some readers may be interested in Larson’s description of the raid and the context in which it occurred in the United States. The United States, incidentally, lost 750,000 lives in its Civil War.

Following are five paragraphs from pages 66 and 67 of Larson’s THE DEMON OF UNREST, published this year by Crown:

On October 16, 1859, John Brown, a fierce abolitionist, led a company of twenty-one men in an assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia with the intent of arming the region’s enslaved Blacks and sparking a widespread uprising. Local citizens and militia battled Brown to a standoff until a federal force arrived, led by Col. Robert E. Lee, for the moment an officer in the U.S. Army. Lee quickly crushed Brown’s insurgency, killing ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons. The effect throughout the South was galvanic. The raid and its leader were the embodiment of the chivalry’s darkest imaginings of slave uprisings. As one historian would later put it, “Not even the fieriest radical could ever have made the threat of an internal holocaust appear so real and imminent to Southerners as had the grim, dedicated Brown.”

Ruffin understood at once that this changed everything. He was elated. Although the news at first seemed hard to believe, he wrote in his diary, “It really seems now most probable that the outbreak was planned and instigated by Northern abolitionists, and with the expectation of this starting a general slave insurrection. I earnestly hope that such may be the truth of the case. Such a practical exercise of abolition principles is needed to stir the sluggish blood of the South.”

In the North, the reaction was laden with a surprising degree of nuance. Widespread condemnation of the raid was tempered by warm praise for Brown’s character and his moral stand. Even William Lloyd Garrison’s the LIBERATOR made a distinction between the act and the underlying principle. Garrison described Brown as “conscientious, truthful, brave,” but called the raid “a misguided, wild and apparently insane escapade”. The New York INDEPENDENT echoed this, declaring, “The insanity of the act does not impeach the rectitude of the motive.”

In the South, there was only rage and fear. Existing state militias saw a surge in new recruits; new companies formed as well and began actively drilling their volunteers. Stockpiles of weapons expanded. Communities formed vigilance committees to identify and eject citizens who might be harboring abolitionist views. An Atlanta newspaper warned, “We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South who does not boldly declare that he or she believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing.”