Eli Merritt

“A principal theme of the Virginian’s note-taking was the means by which nations slip insidiously into civil war. This happens, Madison records, when political leaders are blinded by impetuosity and overconfidence, at one extreme, or timidity and complacency, at the other. Both sets of traits, he writes, deceive political actors into the fatal belief about incipient disunion and Civil War that “the danger is not real. " As a consequence, rulers either proceed into tumultuous, delicate affairs with a “blind rashness,” which precipitates civil war, or a timorous, self-denying inaction, which fails to prevent it.”
― Eli Merritt, Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution