Former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant spoke to a group of military veterans in 1875, a decade after the Union and the Confederacy fought over the future of the country. Grant offered a prophecy about what might happen if America was split in two again. The divergence wouldn’t be North versus South. “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence,” he offered, “I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”
