Then as now the big money interests had a considerable role in fomenting division.
It was the Northern elite who supported the abolition movement and pressed for war, which heated up the political atmosphere considerably.
But, the Northern elite were the folks who came up with the system of low wages and bad conditions for Northern workers in textile mills in Massachusetts, despite their hope for improving the lives of their workers. Enriching their stock holders became paramount, at the expense of conditions for the workers by the 1850s.
They controlled the textile mills, the financing of those mills, and railroad transportation of raw cotton and textile products.
They wanted control of the supply chain of cotton and agricultural land in the South, without the high capital cost of buying slaves. Slaves cost as much as a horse.
They had a much more profitable system in the North, but it led to the eventual ruination of Northern workers.
In the South, they said that Northern workers were treated worse than slaves. Better, perhaps, to be in the Army.
Currently, the largest international bankers are the most important donors and advisers to most US Presidents and members of Congress. They created and run the Federal Reserve System, the NSA and the CIA.
For instance, the Prescott Bush/Nelson Rockefeller-financed and advised Richard Nixon created the NSA (and the EPA) by executive order. We call this the Swamp, the Deep State, or the Establishment.
Nixon was advised by the Bush/Rockefeller man Henry Kissinger.
The Rockefeller commercial banks, Chase and Citi, were among both Obama and McCain’s top donors in 2008.
Obama’s adviser on oil-related wars in eight nations was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was David Rockefeller’s right hand man.
Obama was not a socialist President. He was a Bush/Rockefeller man. The Bushes and Rockefellers also financed the Third Reich, before and during WWII.
Trump represents a beak from big bank establishment control over both Democratic and Republican Presidents.
Trump is a populist President. His campaign money came mostly from his own real estate investors.
Trump got some funding from the Rockefellers after he beat their man Jeb Bush in the primaries. They financed both Hillary and Jeb during the primaries.
Trump has resisted the big bank oil wars, refused to start new oil wars in Iran and Venezuela, and renegotiated or gutted the establishment trade deals.
Trump is not a big bank establishment man, overall.
That’s why the big-bank-establishment-financed Democrats who are not the far left, support oil wars and trade deals for the interests of the same big bank establishment that waged war on the South and supported the Third Reich. They support the interests of their top donors, the international bankers, and the defense, pharmaceutical, and health insurance corporations, etc.
Mussolini called this type of system “corporatism”, but we normally call it fascism.
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian politician whom the US, British, and German bankers and industrialists financed and advised since 1919. He was their man, just like the Bush presidents, the Clintons, and Obama were.
Now we see the US dividing along about the same lines as it did during the Civil War, and for the same reason, resistance to the control of the big bank establishment over the US government.