Congressman Lincoln addressed the subject of the Mexican-American War in three major speeches: on his “Spot Resolutions” (December 22, 1847), on war with Mexico (January 12, 1848), and on the “presidential question” (July 27, 1848).  But his most insightful analysis of why the Constitution assigned the power to declare war to Congress, and Congress alone, was given in his letter of February 15, 1848, to his friend and law partner William H. Herndon.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever, he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons.  Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.  This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

In another letter to Herndon, dated February 1, 1848, Representative Lincoln had written about his opposition to the Mexican-American War:

That vote affirms that the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President; and I will stake my life, that if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did . . . Richardson’s resolutions, introduced before I made any move, or gave any vote upon the subject, make the direct question of the justice of the war; so that no man can be silent if he would.  You are compelled to speak; and your only alternative is to tell the truth or tell a lie.

These words could be mistaken for those of another antiwar congressman, Clement L. Vallandigham, whom President Lincoln would arrest and deport.  On May 1, 1863, Vallandigham delivered a speech at Mount Vernon, Ohio, denouncing President Lincoln’s war as

a wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war . . . a war not being waged for the preservation of the Union . . . a war for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism . . . the sooner the people inform the minions of usurped power that they will not submit to such restrictions upon their liberties the better . . .

Representative Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions (which the House ignored and did not adopt) urged Congress to ask that the President answer his eight questions regarding the legitimacy of the war.  The fifth asked

Whether the People of that settlement, or a majority of them, or any of them, had ever, previous to the bloodshed . . . submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas, or of the United States by consent, or by compulsion . . .

The sixth inquired “Whether the People of that settlement, did, or did not, flee from the approach of the United States Army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops . . . ”  These two, in particular, expressed Lincoln’s moral outrage at the apparent violation of civilians’ democratic rights and the safety of their persons and property—an outrage Lincoln would abandon while conducting his own war.

Lincoln’s most important antiwar speech, on war with Mexico, was more partisan, attacking the motivation and emotional stability of President James K. Polk.  It alienated his constituents back home, ensuring Lincoln would not be elected to a second term.  His criticisms of President Polk, however, are directly applicable to his own behavior as president:

I carefully examined the President’s messages, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point.  The result of this examination was to make the impression, that taking for true, all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him. . . .

[L]et the President answer the interrogatories, I proposed, as before mentioned, or some other similar ones.  Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly.  Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments . . . But if he can not, or will not do this—if on any pretense, or no pretense, he shall refuse or omit it, then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. . . .

[H]e plunged into it, and has swept on and on, till, disappointed in his calculations . . . he now finds himself, he knows not where.  How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream, is the whole war part of his message. . . .

[T]he president is, in no wise, satisfied with his own position . . . His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.

[The President] is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.  God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscience, more painful than all his mental perplexity.

Congressman Lincoln then asks his colleagues in the House of Representatives what is to be done with the population inhabiting territory captured by the U.S. Army.  “I suppose no one will say we should kill the people, or drive them out, or make slaves of them, or even confiscate their property.”

Yet these are the very policies President Lincoln would support and laud General Sherman, among others, for implementing.  In his official report dated January 31, 1864, Sherman declared,

Next year their lands will be taken, for in war, we can take them, and rightfully too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives . . . Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence . . . to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is a mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better.

On July 26, 1864, President Lincoln commended Sherman for his conduct in warfare: “My profoundest thanks to you and your whole Army for the present campaign so far.”

Approval was not restricted to private correspondence.  On September 3, 1864, President Lincoln issued two proclamations: One praised Sherman; the other mandated public celebrations in his honor.  Lincoln’s “Executive Order of Thanks to William T. Sherman and Others” declared:

The national thanks are herewith tendered by the President to Major General William T. Sherman, and the gallant officers and soldiers of his command before Atlanta, for the distinguished ability, courage, and perseverance displayed in the campaign in Georgia, which, under Divine favor, has resulted in the capture of the City of Atlanta.  The marches, battles, sieges, and other military operations that have signalized this campaign must render it famous in the annals of war, and have entitled those who have participated therein to the applause and thanks of the nation.

The second presidential proclamation, “Executive Order for Celebration of Victories in Atlanta, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama,” proclaimed

That on Wednesday, the 7th day of September, commencing at the hour of twelve o’clock noon, there shall be fired a salute of one hundred guns at the Arsenal at Washington, and at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburg, Newport, Ky., and St. Louis, and at New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Hilton Head & Newberne, the day after the receipt of the order, for the brilliant achievements of the army under the command of Major General Sherman, in the State of Georgia, and the capture of Atlanta.  The Secretary of War shall issue directions for the execution of this order.

In criticizing Polk’s war with Mexico, Representative Lincoln displayed prescience with words that indict the proclamations of President Lincoln and all those

trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.

As an antiwar politician, Lincoln returned to the question of civilians in a speech on the “Presidential question”:

The marching [of] an army into the midst of a peaceful . . . settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops, and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us.  So to call such an act, to us appears no other than a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak accordingly.

The policy so eloquently condemned here is the very policy pursued by President Lincoln between 1861 and 1865.  As General Sherman described it in an official correspondence dated December 24, 1864, “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.”

After Sherman completed his destructive March to the Sea known as the Savannah Campaign, which culminated in the occupation of that city, he received another laudatory note from President Lincoln (December 26, 1864):

Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift, the capture of Savannah.  When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that “nothing risked, nothing gained,” I did not interfere.  Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours . . . Please make my grateful acknowledgments to your whole army, officers, and men.

In January 1865, Sherman boasted:

I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia [alone] . . . at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction.

Seventeen years earlier, in his speech on the presidential question, Lincoln had declared to the war hawks in Congress that

the distinction between the cause of the President in beginning the war, and the cause of the country after it was begun, is a distinction which you can not perceive.  To you the President, and the country, seems to be all one.  You are interested to see no distinction between them; and I venture to suggest that possibly your interest blinds you a little.

As president, Lincoln implied (if not insisted) that in wartime the cause of the president and the country are one.  So to an inquiry from the House of Representatives as to the unlawful arrests of city officials in Baltimore, he wrote on July 27, 1861, that,

In answer to the resolution of the House of Representatives of the 24th instant, asking the grounds, reasons, and evidence upon which the police commissioners of Baltimore were arrested, and are now detained as prisoners at Fort McHenry, I have to state that it is judged to be incompatible with the public interest at this time to furnish the information called for by the resolution.

Continuing on the presidential question, Congressman Lincoln opposed what he perceived as threats by the president to advance executive authority by usurping powers of the legislature:

[T]hat the constitution gives the President a negative on legislation, all know: but that this negative should be so combined with platforms, and other appliances, as to enable him, and in fact, almost impel him, to take the whole of legislation into his own hands, is what we object to . . . To thus transfer legislation, is clearly to take it from those who understand, with minuteness, the interest of the people, and give it to one who does not, and cannot so well understand it.

That is exactly how President Lincoln governed—by usurping the powers of the legislature.  Pro-Lincoln scholars acknowledge this.  James G. Randall wrote that “It thus appears that the President, while greatly enlarging his executive powers, seized also legislative and judicial functions as well . . . ”  Clinton Rossiter concurred, writing that

[Lincoln] was allowed to proceed without external check to a series of unusual measures which he alone deemed necessary to lay the rebellion.  Unlike Cincinnatus, this great constitutional dictator was self-appointed.

Of Lincoln’s executive acts, he added: “This amazing disregard for the words of the Constitution . . . was considered by nobody as legal.”

This unconstitutional expansion of the powers and prerogatives of the executive office by President Lincoln was for the express purpose of prosecuting a war to advance his economic agenda.  The result was death, corruption, and war profiteering.  Over 600,000 Americans were killed as the federal government was transformed, according to Lincoln’s attorney general Edward Bates, into a bloated bureaucracy of institutionalized corruption.  Lincoln’s friends and cronies did quite well.  The war

assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families . . . Brewsters, Bushnells, Olcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Langworthys, Reids, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noyeses, Brooks, Cornells, and dozens of others . . .

This series of tragedies brought forth by President Lincoln proved the wisdom and insight of Representative Lincoln, who, in a speech on June 20, 1848, observed: “I say there are few stronger cases in this world of ‘burthen to the many, and benefits to the few’ . . . than the presidency itself . . .”

I suppose the paper has had a few good reporters and done some minor good here and there, but our naive hopes died aborning.  The first editorial page editor, William Cheshire, a man of integrity, quickly learned that no professional could tolerate the position.  I had long known Cheshire, my fellow Tar Heel.  In the early days, before he resigned in disgust, he offered Yours Truly a job as editorial writer.  I was in no position to make a move at the time.  I suggested my Chapel Hill friend Sam Francis. The rest, as they say, is history.

Obviously, any hopes that we had for the Times were over when the neocon third-stringers who controlled the paper fired Sam Francis, one of the few intelligent, learned, principled, and honest writers they had.  In fact, the only writer on the Times’ editorial page who had anything to say other than Republican boilerplate.

I remembered this when someone sent me a link to the Washington Times’ Lincoln Day editorial (unsigned).  This silly exercise in fantasy pretending to be serious commentary would be a D- paper in any respectable freshman history class.

The readers are told that there have been two occasions when “the very existence of the United States was in grave doubt.”  The first time we were saved by the Founding Fathers and the second time by Lincoln.  This is to skip over the minor consideration that the existence of the United States was not in doubt when the Founders acted—because the United States did not exist in the way this writer means.  That is why they are called Founders.  (The Founders did not create the United States either.  The United States was created by the American spirit of liberty and self-government and the thirteen free and independent States that already existed when they acted.)

Interestingly, in light of some discussion that has gone on on this site in regard to Lincoln’s reading, we are told that his treasured books were the Bible, Shakespeare, the Constitution, and the Statutes of the United States.  This is a lawyer’s arsenal, not a statesman’s.

Our editor goes on to quote someone named Michael Beschloss, “perhaps America’s most noted historian.”  I am considered a bit of an historian myself, but I have to admit I have never before heard or seen the name of Mr. Beschloss.  There follows a long barf-making quotation from Carl Sandburg, whose name is misspelled by the way—which illustrates the folly of our pervasive Lincoln worship better than any critic can possibly do.

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and as soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.

Gag!

And then we reach the peroration of this learned editorial: “Thank God for Abraham Lincoln.  May our nation always be worthy of him.”  Well, Mr. Washington Times pundit, the way things are going you don’t have to worry about that.

In a deeper sense, though, the Lincoln years and their legacy represent the most significant revolution that the United States have undergone.  We went from being a confederation of republics that minded their own business, and permitted farmers, merchants, and manufacturers to mind theirs, to a global empire run by stockjobbers, moneychangers, and Transcendentalist do-gooders, a Leviathan with wings that is forever busybodying at home and abroad.  From a fairly homogeneous ethnic base—a British core with Northern European accretions—we have morphed into a multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural population in which no one, not even descendants of the oldest stock, knows or cares who he is.  Leftists now rejoice that the White House will be presided over by someone whose middle name is Hussein and actually run by someone whose middle name is Israel.  What a wicked country this was, when we had to be content with people named Washington, Adams, and Jefferson!

No sensible person can deny the reality of the transformation nor the fact that its first phase coincided with Lincoln’s administrations and those of his heirs and successors.  James McPherson and other leftists exult in the revolution, while M.E. Bradford deplored it, but neither doubted that it happened.  But how fair is it to blame Lincoln personally for what happened?  Many of Lincoln’s cronies would have been puzzled by the allegation that the man they knew as a railroad lawyer and courthouse politician could have staged a revolution.  Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s dictatorial secretary of war who breathed the spirit of martial law against any and all opposition, might be imagined to have admired a President whose arbitrary ways and contempt for the Constitution gave him so much power, but Stanton’s early attitude toward Lincoln was little short of contempt, and, while he succeeded in overcoming—or at least concealing—his distaste, he and his boss were frequently at loggerheads.  Like some other prominent players in Lincoln’s government (W.H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Charles Francis Adams, Sr.), Stanton probably did not think Lincoln was up to the job.  Adams, leaving the country to take up his duties as ambassador to England, tried to interest the President in his sensitive mission but could not distract him from his absorption in “the distribution of offices.”  Over a decade after Lincoln’s assassination, he still recalled the “moral, intellectual, and executive incompetency” displayed by Lincoln upon taking office.

In more recent years both Samuel Francis and David Donald (Lincoln’s most respectable apologist) have described an office-seeking money-grubbing politician who blundered his way into revolution.  I am inclined to agree with them, though with this caveat: A man who pursues and attains an office for which he is unfit must bear the moral blame for the disasters that ensue.

If Lincoln’s primary fault was that mixture of ambition and incompetence that has characterized American politicians ever since, he was also a romantic who regarded himself as a Napoleonic character destined for greatness.  Indulging in what David Donald calls “a rare moment of self-revelation,” Lincoln denigrated the petty politicians who would be content with a seat in Congress: “Such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle.”  Routine honors would not satisfy “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon”: “Towering genius disdains a beaten path. . . . It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.”  Though we may question whether he did much to run up the former of these expenses, there can be no doubt about the latter.

Whatever conclusion one may come to about Lincoln’s personal responsibility for the revolution that has transformed America in the past century and a half, we can, at least, evaluate the influence of his rhetoric.  As the late M.E. Bradford has shown, Lincoln, although a religious skeptic, cloaked his political agenda in a lofty religious language that tended to elevate politics above the mundane give and take of interests that found a nearly perfect expression in the Constitution.  Setting aside that document, with its nice adjustment of checks and balances, its weighing of sectional and economic interests, its aspirations toward more perfect union muted by its respect for local peculiarities, Lincoln spoke of the Union with the mystical reverence that Christians reserve for the Holy Ghost.  Before he came along, Yankee politicians like Daniel Webster had been purely pragmatic in overstating American unity: It was simply a canny means of advancing their own sectional interest, and thus, when they found themselves checked by opposition from the West and South, they were perfectly willing to compromise.

Lincoln and the other post-Christian Unionists, however, are a different story altogether.  Invoking the Old Testament’s God of Battles, they sang “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” as they sent 600,000 American soldiers and perhaps twice as many noncombatants (most of them black) to their graves.  Some years ago, when I was debating Lincoln’s legacy, a graduate student asked if I did not think the war that freed the slaves was worth the cost.  He was actually shocked that I did not think that hundreds of thousands of dead slaves would have agreed with him.

Lincoln was not an original political mind, and his rhetoric is an echo of the French Jacobin who treated mass murder as the noblest part of statecraft.  It is in the French Revolution and its aftershocks that ideology began to take the place of religion as the formative rhetoric of Europe and North America.  It hardly matters whether that rhetoric is nationalist—the Jacobins, too, celebrated la patrie—or globalist, communist, fascist, or democratist.  In an ideological regime the citizens are called upon to sacrifice their private interests and the interests of family and friends to some magnificent abstraction like “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the “glorious Union,” the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Aryan race, or the fascist republic of Italy.  To be fair to the Italian Fascists, they were, perhaps, the least dedicated and (if one overlooks their North African adventures) the least bloodthirsty of ideologues.

Like Lincoln, Robespierre and St.-Just, Lenin and Stalin, and Hitler and Mussolini were anything but Christian, and it is the rejection of Christianity that is the hallmark of modern ideology.  Despite recent attempts—as futile as they are foolish—to blame the horrors of modern war on Christianity, the plain truth is that most of these horrors, from the French to the Russian Revolution, from Abraham Lincoln to Pol Pot, were perpetrated by post-Christians, non-Christians, and anti-Christians.  This is not because a cross around the neck is some kind of magic talisman that cures the wearer of the Old Adam’s tendency to act like a rogue gorilla.  Men have learned to behave with some restraint in both pre-Christian and Christian societies, but as Europeans and Americans gave up the Faith, they transferred Christian rhetoric about the Kingdom of God and the Millennium to the political sphere.  That is where Robespierre and Marx, Lincoln and John Brown come in.

Here is one great difference between traditional commonwealths—whether republics, empires, or monarchies—and the modern ideological state.  In ancient Athens or Rome, in medieval France or England, the ruling class interfered rather little in religion.  Yes, as part of a program to gain their citizens’ loyalty, Pericles and Augustus instrumentalized traditional cults, and, yes, medieval emperors and kings, in attempting to unify their realms, struggled with popes over the investiture of bishops.  But it was the rare ruler (a few theology-crazed Byzantines) who either innovated in theology or interfered in religious practices.  During and after the Renaissance, kings and their apologists might speak of “the divine right of kings” and assume the power to make their country either Catholic or Protestant, but even John Knox’s Scotland is a very long way from that American ruling class that makes war on the religion we have inherited from our ancestors and insists that we worship the state and its “commander in chief.”

The hallmark of the Lincoln regime was not the war crimes perpetrated by Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan (among so many other gallant officers who made war on civilians) but Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase’s decision to impose paper money as legal tender and to print the words “in god we trust” on coins.  What a world of hypocrisy and idolatry lies in that single act and that little phrase.

This was far from being the world’s first experiment in fiat money.  The bankrupt states of the Union had tried to cheat themselves out of their debts by issuing banknotes and scrip, and the geniuses of the French National Assembly, even as they were beginning their revolt against civilization, issued large-denomination paper notes known as assignats.  Initially, these notes were backed by parcels of land the assembly confiscated from the Church, but the temporary success of this experiment encouraged these noble dilettantes and small-town lawyers to repeat and broaden the project.  The result was entirely predictable: inflation and financial chaos.  Of course, our own financial geniuses know better, which is why the Fed has decided that part of the solution to our current crisis is to print lots and lots more money.

When Our Lord, on a famous occasion, was questioned whether Jews should pay taxes to the empire, He asked to see a coin.  Pointing to the face on the coin, He told His mockers to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  In those days, Caesar’s things were made of solid metal, and neither Jesus nor Tiberius would have confused the Roman Empire with the Kingdom of God.  Salmon Chase should have known better—he seems to have been one of the few believers in Lincoln’s Cabinet—but, in recommending that “in god we trust” be put on the coin that would one day bear Lincoln’s image, he was actually telling us to worship the almighty dollar and the government that created that idol.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“The preservation of the union is the supreme law.”
—Andrew Jackson, December 25, 1832

The Civil War was the greatest tragedy ever to befall the nation.  Brother slew brother.  Six hundred thousand of American’s best and bravest died of shot, shell, and disease.  The South was bled to death, invaded, ravaged by Union armies, occupied for a dozen years.  Under federal bayonets, her social and political order was uprooted and the 11 states that had fought to be free of the Union were “reconstructed” by that Union.  America’s South would need a century to recover.

Thirteen decades after Appomattox the questions remain: Was it “an irrepressible conflict”?  Was it a necessary war?  Was it, as Churchill wrote, “the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass-conflicts of which till then there was record”?  Was it a just war?  What became of the great tariff issue that had divided and convulsed the nation equally with slavery in the decades before the war?  Are there lessons for us in this most terrible of tragedies where all of the dead were Americans?

After any such war, it is the victors who write the history.  That has surely been true of the Civil War.  Among the great myths taught to American schoolchildren has been that the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, was elected to free the slaves from bondage, that America’s “Civil War” was fought to end slavery in the United States.

This is fable.  Even the name given this terrible war is wrong.  A civil war is a struggle for power inside a nation like the War of the Roses, or the horrible war between Bolsheviks and Czarists in Russia, “Reds” and “Whites,” after Lenin’s October Revolution.  The combatants from 1861-1865 were not fighting over who would govern the United States.  The South had never contested Lincoln’s election.  The South wanted only to be free of the Union.

The war was not over who would rule in Washington, but who would rule in South Carolina, Georgia, and the five Gulf states that had seceded by the time of Fort Sumter.  From the standpoint of the North, this was a War of Southern Secession, a War to Preserve the Union.  To the South this was the War for Southern Independence.

The Birth of a Myth

At the dedication of Gettysburg Battlefield, on November 19, 1863, three years after Lincoln’s election, the Great Myth was born.  There, Abraham Lincoln declared that the war had been, all along, about equality.

Four score and seven years ago our father brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

But four score and seven years before Lincoln spoke was 1776.  The “new nation” may have been “conceived” in 1776, but it was not born until 1788 after the ninth state had ratified the Constitution.  In that Constitution, freemen, black and white, were equal.  But slavery, the antithesis of equality, was protected.  By Benjamin Franklin’s compromise, slaves were to be considered as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House.  Painful to concede, it is more truthful to say that slavery, the essence of inequality, was embedded in the Constitution of the new nation.

Moreover, in reaching back to 1776, Lincoln had invoked, in defense of a war to crush a rebellion, the most powerful brief every written on behalf of rebellion.  The Declaration of Independence is not about preserving a union.  It is a declaration of secession; it is about the “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” one form of government “and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers on such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  It is about a person’s right “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

Lincoln’s words, eloquent as they are, are the sheerest audacity.  As Garry Wills writes approvingly, Lincoln, at Gettysburg,

performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting.  Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.  The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them.  They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America.  Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.

On reading Lincoln’s address, many, North and South, were astounded.  In suggesting the terrible war had all along been about equality, what was the President talking about?  Quoting the Constitution back to the President, the Chicago Times charged Lincoln with betraying both that sacred document he had taken an oath to defend and the men who had died for it:

It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg.  How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government?

Even as Lincoln spoke, slavery was still legal in Washington, D.C., the seat of government, as well in Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Delaware, and the areas of Tennessee that had remained loyal.

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freed only the slaves in those states that were still in rebellion.  All other slaves remained the protected property of their masters.  Prime Minister Palmerston noted in amusement that Lincoln had undertaken to abolish slavery where he had no power to do so, while protecting slavery where he had the power to destroy it.  Indeed, when issuing the proclamation, Lincoln confided to his secretary that he had done so only as a “military necessity” after the defeats of First and Second Manassas, Jackson’s Valley Campaign, the Seven Days battle, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and the stalemate at Antietam:

Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operation we had been pursuing; that we had about played out our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game.  I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy.

Far from universal celebration, the Emancipation Proclamation was regarded by many, even in abolitionist England, as a cynical and awful weapon of war, settled upon by Lincoln in desperation.  As Sheldon Vanauken points out in The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy (1989):

[T]he Confederate states were winning the war.  Only a few days before, Lee had smashed Burnside at Fredericksburg.  The Proclamation freed all the slaves within the Confederate lines….These slaves were grouped on the isolated plantations, controlled for the most part by the women since their gentlemen were off to the wars.  The only possible effect of the Proclamation would be the dreaded servile insurrection (that which John Brown was hanged for inciting).  Either a slave rising—or nothing.  So Englishmen saw it.  Lincoln’s insincerity was regarded as proven by two things: his earlier denial of any lawful right or wish to free the slaves; and, especially, his not freeing the slaves in “loyal” Kentucky and other United States areas or even in Confederate areas occupied by United States troops, such as New Orleans.  It should be remembered that [in England] the horrors of the Indian mutiny, as well as the slave uprising in St. Domingo, were in every memory.

The effect of the proclamation upon many in the Union ranks was the same.  They had gone to war not to free the slaves but to preserve the nation!  As James McPherson writes in What They Fought For, 1861-1865,

plenty of soldiers believed that the proclamation had changed the purpose of the war.  They professed to feel betrayed.  They were willing to risk their lives for the Union, they said, but not for black freedom….Desertion rates rose alarmingly.  Many soldiers blamed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Closing his address, Lincoln spoke of the duty imposed on Americans by those who had fallen on the great battlefield.  We “here highly resolve,” he said, in his immortal words, “that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  If Southerners found this incredible, it is understandable.

The Confederates had never sought to cause the Government of the United States to “perish from the earth.”  It was the Union that was seeking to cause the Confederacy and the governments of the 11 Southern states to “perish.”  Had the South wanted the government to “perish from the earth,” the Confederate army could have marched into Lincoln’s capital after the First Battle of Bull Run in June 1861, when the Union army had been sent up the road to Washington in wild retreat.  The South did not want this; the South only wanted to be free.

While Lincoln surely knew his eloquent words would be noted, and remembered, he could not have known his brief remarks would become the most famous address in American history.  Nor is there evidence that Lincoln, at this moment, deliberately enlarged the war aims of the Union.  But at Gettysburg, the war aims of the Union were enlarged, dramatically.  In that address, they do go beyond anything Lincoln enunciated before the war began.  Indeed, if racial equality was now Lincoln’s and the Union’s goal, then Lincoln himself was a changed man.  For the Abraham Lincoln of 1861 was no champion of political or social equality.

“We Cannot Make Them Equals”

The Lincoln Americans know, the father figure with the wise and wonderful wit, who came out of Illinois to free the slaves and believed in racial equality—who would have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.—would be unrecognizable to his contemporaries.  While Lincoln as early as 1854 had condemned slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” and bravely took the antislavery side in senatorial campaign debates with Stephen A. Douglas, here is the Republican candidate for the United States Senate on the stump, in Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, after he had been baited by the “Little Giant” to explain where he stood on marriage between the races, and on social and political equality:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.  And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Four years before, at Peoria, on October 16, 1854, Lincoln confessed to his ambivalence as to what should be done about slavery, and with the freed black men and women were slavery abolished:

If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.  My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land….[But free] them, and make them politically and socially, our equals?  My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not….A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.  We can not, then, make them equals.

Three years later, in June of 1857, in Springfield, Lincoln was still entertaining the idea of repatriating the freed slaves back to their native continent:

Such separation, if ever effected at all, must be effected by colonization;…what colonization most needs is a hearty will….Let us be brought to believe it is morally right…to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.

In urging colonization Lincoln was echoing men of far greater learning and higher station, such as Jefferson and Madison.  In 1829, the author of the Constitution became president of the American Colonization Society—founded by John Randolph and Henry Clay after the War of 1812—“in the belief that its plan to return slaves to Africa represented the most sensible way out of that long-festering crisis.”  Clay, Lincoln’s idol, advocated returning the slaves to Africa throughout his public career.  In eulogizing Clay in Springfield on July 6, 1852, Lincoln celebrated his hero’s lifelong association with the American Colonization Society, and quoted Clay’s 1827 address to that society:

There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence.  Transplanted in a foreign land, they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law and liberty.

In hearty approval of Clay’s words, Lincoln declared:

The suggestion of the possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African continent was made twenty-five years ago.  Every succeeding year has added strength to the hope of its realization.  May it indeed be realized!

Gradual repatriation and return of all the slaves to Africa, said Lincoln in the closing words of his long eulogy, would be a “glorious consummation”—Henry Clay’s greatest contribution to his country.

Lincoln’s words in the decade prior to his presidency are jolting to the modern ear.  But all they tell us is this: on racial equality, Lincoln in 1858 was a man of his time and place.  Like almost all white males of his age, he believed the races should remain separate.  This is confirmed by his ardent admirer, General Donn Piatt, who thought Lincoln “the greatest figure looming up in our history.”  After meeting with the President-elect in Springfield, Piatt wrote on the eve of Lincoln’s departure for Washington:

Expressing no sympathy for the slave, [Lincoln] laughed at the Abolitionists….We were not at a loss to get at the fact, and the reason for it, in the man before us.  Descended from the poor whites of a slave State, through many generations, he inherited the contempt, if not the hatred, held by that class for the negro.

A man must be measured against his time.  As Lincoln himself said in his Second Inaugural: “judge not that we be not judged.”  Lincoln’s position on slavery—that it was evil, that he would have no part of it—was that of a principled politician of courage.  As for his views on racial equality, they were the views of almost all of his countrymen.  But if Lincoln did not go to war to make men equal, did he go to war to “make men free”—to end the evil of slavery?  For to answer the question, “Was this a just war?” we have to understand why both sides fought.

Lincoln’s Concessions to the South

Unlike the Lincoln of Gettysburg battlefield in 1863, the Lincoln who slipped into Washington in disguise in the dead of night in the winter of 1861 did not have the least intention of freeing any slaves.  Nor did the South have reason to fear Lincoln would, or could, abolish slavery.  The Supreme Court was Southern-dominated, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney of the 1857 Dred Scott decision.  There was no threat to slavery from that quarter.  And, during the campaign of 1860, Lincoln repeatedly assured the South he was no Abolitionist.  In the first paragraphs of his Inaugural Address, Lincoln repeated his assurances that he would make no attempt to abolish slavery.

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered.  There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.  Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed, and been open to their inspection.  It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you.  I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.  I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no intention to do so.”  Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I have made this, and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them.

His party’s platform, said Lincoln, endorsed the “inviolate” right of each state to “control its own domestic institutions.”  In excoriation of John Brown’s raid, Lincoln noted in his Inaugural that, in their 1860 platform, Republicans “denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”

South Carolina had seceded on the grounds that the United States was failing to uphold the fugitive slave provision of the Constitution.  But Lincoln assured Southerners their escaped slaves would be returned:

There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor.  The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

It is scarcely questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it, for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the law-giver is the law.  All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution—to this provision as much as to any other.  To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases come within the terms of this clause, “shall be delivered up,” their oaths are unanimous.  Now, if they would make the effort in good temper, could they not, with nearly equal unanimity, frame and pass a law, by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath? [Emphasis added.]

Lincoln is calling here for a new federal fugitive slave law to reinforce Congress’ constitutional obligation that escaped slaves “shall be delivered up” to their masters.  In capturing and returning fugitive slaves, said Lincoln, some observers favor state authority, others federal authority.  But, he asked: What is the difference?  “If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him, or to others, by which authority it is done.”

The issue on which Republicans were united was that the extension of slavery to new states should be halted.  Lincoln did not back down from this position in his Inaugural Address.  But he did offer a guarantee to the South that where slavery existed, it could be made a permanent institution, by a new constitutional amendment.

One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong , and ought not to be extended.  This is the only substantial dispute….I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution…has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service.  To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable.

Thus, in this final concession, Lincoln says he would not oppose a constitutional amendment to make slavery permanent in the 15 states where it then existed.  The first Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution Abraham Lincoln endorsed, then, did not end chattel slavery, but would have authorized chattel slavery forever.  No true Abolitionist could have been other than horrified by Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address.

Is there a moral defense of Lincoln’s offer to make permanent an institution that all now agree was odious and evil?  Only this: if it was not wrong for the Founding Fathers to accept slavery as the price of a constitution to establish the United States, it cannot be wrong for Lincoln to reaffirm the Founding Fathers’ concession—to repair and restore his fractured country.  In appeasing the South on slavery, Lincoln was being faithful to his duty as President to unite his divided nation.  He was also being true to his belief that, if slavery were restricted to where it existed, it would wither and die.

At the dedication of Freedmen’s Monument in Washington in 1876—a sculpture depicting a slave on his knees looking up in gratitude into the benevolent face of the Great Emancipator—Frederick Douglass stunned an audience including President Ulysses S. Grant by calling Lincoln “the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”  “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground,” Frederick Douglass went on, “Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country…he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”  A not unfair assessment.

Did slavery cause the war?  In 1927, historians Charles and Mary Beard produced their famous and first in-depth study of American history, The Rise of American Civilization.  It captivated scholars and laymen alike.  After carefully examining the facts concerning slavery and the Civil War, they concluded:

Since, therefore, the abolition of slavery never appeared in the platform of any great political party, since the only appeal ever made to the electorate on that issue was scornfully repulsed, since the spokesman of the Republicans [Lincoln] emphatically declared that his party never intended to interfere with slavery in the states in any shape or form, it seems reasonable to assume that the institution of slavery was not the fundamental issue during the epoch preceding the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

To those who yet contend that Lincoln and the Union went to war “to make men free,” how do they respond to the fact that when the war began, with the firing on Fort Sumter, there were more slave states inside the Union (eight) than in the Confederacy (seven)?  Four Southern states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, had remained loyal.  They did not wish to secede; they did so only after Lincoln put out a call for 75,000 volunteers for any army to invade and subjugate the Deep South.  That army would have to pass through the Upper South, which would have to join a war against its kinfolk.  This the Upper South would not do.  It was Lincoln’s call to war against the already seceded states of the Deep South that caused Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to leave a Union in which they had hoped to remain.  Jeffrey Hummel notes in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996):

Previously unwilling to secede over the issue of slavery, these four states [Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas] were now ready to fight for the ideal of a voluntary Union.  Out in the western territory… the sedentary Indian tribes—Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—also joined the rebellion…Lincoln [by calling up the militia] had more than doubled the Confederacy’s white population and material resources.

Before Fort Sumter, the Confederacy sent emissaries to Washington to discuss a compromise.  Lincoln refused to meet with them, lest a presidential meeting confer legitimacy on a secession he refused to recognize.  Against the advice of army chief General Winfield Scott, Secretary of State William H. Seward Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, all of whom advocated evacuating Fort Sumter, he sent the Star of the Sea to resupply the fort.  Viewing this as a provocation, the Southerners fired on the fort, and the American flag, and the great war was on.

And Southerners were perhaps not mistaken in their belief that Lincoln had provoked the conflict.  As the President wrote with quiet satisfaction to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox, commander of the expedition to Fort Sumter, on May 1, 1861:

You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter [sic], even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.

Like Polk before him, and Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt after him, Lincoln had maneuvered his enemy into firing the first shot.

Did the South Have a Right to Secede?

In the modern era, one reads more and more that the great Southern leaders were “traitors.”  Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, all heroes of the Mexican War, however, were no more and no less traitors than Washington, Adams, and Jefferson were traitors to Great Britain.  At West Point, which George E. Pickett, Stonewall Jackson, and Joe Johnston attended, the constitutional law book that all three Confederate generals had studied, A View of the Constitution of the United States by William Rawle—a Philadelphia abolitionist and Supreme Court Justice—taught that states had a right to secede: “To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed.”

Union officers had studied Rawle as well.  Indeed, the idea of state supremacy, of states’ rights to nullify federal law, and of a right to secede if the issue were truly grave, had a long, distinguished history in America.  In the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, Jefferson and Madison, authors respectively of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—enraged at the jailing of editors under the Alien and Sedition Acts—argued that states had a right to nullify patently unconstitutional federal law.

Between 1800 and 1815, three serious attempts were made by New England Federalists to secede—at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, and Madison’s War of 1812.  The secessionist leader was a Revolutionary War hero and a member of Washington’s Cabinet, Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering.  The Federalist causes mirrored South Carolina’s causes: what they saw as an intolerable regime, interference with trade, incompatibility with alien peoples (Germans and Scotch-Irish), and a conviction the Union was being run for the benefit of the South.  Said Pickering in 1803: “I will rather anticipate a new confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South."

By a twist of fate, Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton, who had made Jefferson President in 1801 by persuading his allies to abandon Aaron Burr in the House of Representatives in the tie election of 1800, probably saved the Union.  Federalists had conspired with Burr in 1804 to support him for governor, if Burr would lead New York into a New England Confederacy.  But the revilement of Burr by Hamilton, as venal, corrupt, dictatorial, and dangerous, persuaded New Yorkers, by 7,000 votes, to reject him.  Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel and killed him.  Revulsion at the death of the patriot-statesman aborted the Federalists’ plot.

In anticipation of John C. Calhoun’s nullification, Massachusetts’ legislature in 1807 denounced Jefferson’s embargo, demanded that Congress repeal it, and declared the Enforcement Act “not legally binding.”  Many merchants ignored the law; and the New England authorities looked the other way.  At the Hartford Convention of 1814, New Englanders, enraged by Madison’s war with England when the Mother Country was in a death struggle against the dictator Napoleon, and by the interruption of their trade, threatened to secede and reassociate with Great Britain.

In 1832 South Carolina “nullified” a tariff law it believed was bleeding the South to death and asserted a right to secede.  In 1843, when Tyler was driving for annexation of Texas, a vast territory that might be broken into five states, tilting the political balance of power in favor of the slave states, John Quincy Adams thundered that the annexation of Texas would justify Northern secession.  And, in 1848, a freshman congressman critic of the Mexican War spoke of the inherent right of states to secede:

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.  This is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.  Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it.  Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit….It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.

These are the words of Abraham Lincoln, January 12, 1848.

Why Did the South Secede?

If Lincoln did not threaten slavery, why, then, did the Deep South secede?  Answer: by 1861, America had become two nations and two peoples.  The South had evolved into a separate civilization and wished to be a separate country.  While moderates like Lee wanted to remain in the Union, Southern militants had concluded that, with the election of Lincoln, the North had won the great struggle for control of the national destiny.

The South had given the Union most of her Presidents, her Supreme Court Justices, her Speakers of the House.  But, the South would never again determine the nation’s direction.  This first Republican president had not received a single electoral vote in a Southern state; in ten Southern states he had not received a single vote.  Lincoln owed the South nothing; but he owed everything to her enemies, to the admirers of John Brown, to the Northern industrialists who had Lincoln’s commitment to a protective tariff that the South believed threatened its ruin.

After decades of a troubled and unhappy marriage, for the Deep South Lincoln’s election was the final blow.  They had decided, irrevocably, on divorce.  Thus, six weeks after Lincoln’s election, December 2, 1860, South Carolina seceded.  By February 1, a month before Lincoln’s Inauguration, South Carolina had been followed out of the Union by Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.  In these states, federal forts, post offices, customs houses, and military posts had been occupied.  Federal employees and troops had been sent packing.  Yet, by the day of Lincoln’s Inauguration, four months after his election, there was no war.  Why not?

Because President James Buchanan did not believe the federal government had the right to use military force to compel states to remain within the Union.  If the Union was not voluntary, it was not a true Union.  To our 15th President, coercion was unconstitutional.  As Professor Woodrow Wilson wrote in Division and Reunion, Buchanan “believed and declared that secession was illegal; but he agreed with his Attorney General that there was no constitutional means or warrant for coercing a State to do her duty under the law.  Such, indeed, for the time, seemed to be the general opinion of the country.”  Most Northern newspapers agreed.

As early as November 13, 1860, the Daily Union in Bangor, Maine, defended the South’s right to secede, asserting that a true Union “depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people” of each state.  “[W]hen that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone.”  If military force is used, then a state can only be held “as a subject province,” and can never be a “co-equal member of the American Union.”

Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, “the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration is that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed.”  If the Southern states wished to depart, “they have a clear right to do so.”  And, if tyrannical government justified the Revolution of 1776, “we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Million of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.”

Many Northerners and Abolitionists were delighted to see the Deep South states gone.  Abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison had spoken for many when he wrote that the original Constitution, protecting slavery, had been a “covenant with Death” and an “agreement with Hell.”  In April 1861, Greeley wrote that “nine out of ten of the people of the North were opposed” to using force to return South Carolina to the Union.  General Scott, hero of the Mexican War and Commander of the U.S. Army, said of the “wayward sisters…let them go in peace.”  Ironically, the “wayward sisters” were like fugitive slaves.  They were trying to break free of Father Abraham’s house, but he would not let them go.

Absent Abraham Lincoln, there might have been no war.  But, without Lincoln, there might also be no United States today.  Unlike Buchanan, the new President would accept war, raise an army of a million men, and fight the bloodiest struggle ever on the American continent, rather than let the South go.  The Confederate firing on Fort Sumter may have been the spark that ignited the conflagration, but the real cause of the war was the iron will of Abraham Lincoln, as resolute a Unionist as was Andrew Jackson, who also would have accepted war rather than let South Carolina secede.  Thus, as the Mexican War had been “Jimmy Polk’s War,” this was “Mr. Lincoln’s War.”

To win it, the President would assume dictatorial power, suspend the constitutional right of habeas corpus, overthrow elected state legislatures, arrest and hold without trial thousands of political prisoners, shut down opposition newspapers, and order army after army into the South to give his nation a new “birth of freedom,” and a new baptism of blood and fire.

When mobs rioted against the draft in July 1863, looting and pillaging New York City, lynching blacks they saw as threats to their jobs and the cause of the war, Lincoln ordered units detached from Meade’s army.  When the veterans of Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge entered the city, a witness described the action:

streets were swept again and again by grape [shot], houses were stormed at the point of a bayonet, rioters were picked off by sharpshooters as they fired on the troops from housetops; men were hurled, dying or dead, into the streets by the thoroughly enraged soldiery; until at last, sullen and cowed and thoroughly whipped and beaten, the miserable wretches gave way at every point and confessed the power of the law.

Estimates of the dead ranged from 300 to 1,000.

Lincoln meant to enforce the draft law.  There are no reports of commissions established to investigate the “root causes” of “urban disorder.”  Though he has come down to us as a kind and courtly homespun, backwoods humorist, there is truth in the depiction of Lincoln in Gore Vidal’s novel, where the President is seen through the eyes of a marveling Secretary of State:

For the first time, Seward understood the nature of Lincoln’s political genius.  He had been able to make himself absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer…

No tougher, more resolute man ever occupied the White House.  As the historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager have written, Abraham Lincoln was

a dictator from the standpoint of American constitutional law and practice; and even the safety of the Republic cannot justify certain acts committed under his authority….A loyal mayor of Baltimore, suspected of Southern sympathies, was arrested and confined in a fortress for over a year; a Maryland judge who had charged a grand jury to inquire into illegal acts of government officials was set upon by soldiers…beaten and dragged bleeding from his bench, and imprisoned…

To this Lincoln pled military necessity, the imperative of preserving the Union: “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”  To those who denounced him as a tyrant for ignoring due process in crushing sedition, Lincoln made no apology:  “Must I shoot a simple-minded boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?”

The First Emancipation Proclamation

That preserving the Union, not ending slavery, was Lincoln’s agenda is evident from the first year of the war.  In the summer of 1861 General John C. Fremont, Republican candidate for President in 1856, was in command in Missouri.  In a daring move, Fremont drew a line across the state, separating the pro-Confederacy region from the Union side, and issued an order: any civilian caught carrying a weapon north of the line would be shot.  Any man aiding the secessionist cause was to have all his slaves instantly emancipated.

An instant national hero to Abolitionists and Freesoilers in the United States and Great Britain, the general sent his order to the President for approval.  But Lincoln, desperate to keep pro-slavery Kentucky in the Union, told Fremont to withdraw it.  Fremont refused, insisting he would not comply unless Lincoln issued a direct order.  Lincoln issued the order.

The general’s wife, impulsive and high-strung Jessie Benton Fremont, daughter of the great Missourian Thomas Hart Benton, who had married the dashing Lieutenant Fremont when she was 16, undertook a journey to Washington, carrying a written plea from her husband.  When she arrived in the capital, exhausted after days of day-and-night travel in a dirty coach over rough roads, she sent a brief note to the White House—where she had played as a girl in the days of Andrew Jackson—to set up an appointment to deliver the letter.  A response came back that very night: “Now, at once, A. Lincoln.”

When Lincoln received her in the Red Room, Jessie Fremont lectured the President on the difficulty of conquering the South with arms alone.  She urged Lincoln to appeal to the British nation and the world by declaring emancipation to be the Union’s cause.

“You are quite a female politician,” an irritated Lincoln responded.

Mrs. Fremont walked out of the White House and wrote in her diary:

I explained that the general wished so much to have his attention to the letter sent, that I had brought it to make sure it would reach him.  He [Lincoln] answered not to that, but to the subject his own mind was upon, that “It was a war for a great national idea, the Union, and that General Fremont should not have dragged the negro into it…”

Jessie Fremont had clearly upset Lincoln.  When a confidante of the President saw the general’s wife the next day, he was irate.  “Look what you have done for Fremont; you have made the President his enemy!”

The Chicago Tribune denounced Lincoln for reversing General Fremont’s emancipation proclamation.  Lincoln’s action takes away the penalty for rebellion, charged the Tribune on September 16.  “How many times,” asked James Russell Lowell, “are we to save Kentucky and lose our self-respect?”  In Connecticut, indignation had risen to fury.  Senator Ben Wade of Ohio wrote “in bitter execration”:”The President don’t object to Gen. Fremont’s taking the life of the owners of slaves, when found in rebellion, but to confiscate their property and emancipate their slaves he thinks monstrous.”

But Lincoln’s policy was not emancipation.  It was to return the South to the Union, even if it meant appeasing the South on slavery.  As Lincoln wrote Greeley in his famous letter of August 22, 1862, “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.  If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.”

Lincoln, however, had already settled on his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and had so informed his Cabinet.

Did Tariffs Cause the War?

In For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes Upon the Course of Civilization, historian Charles Adams refers back to John C. Calhoun’s 1832 warning about the great sectional division Calhoun had seen on the horizon:

Federal import tax laws were, in Calhoun’s view, class legislation against the South.  Heavy taxation on the South raised funds that were spent in the North.  This was unfair.  Calhoun argued further that high import taxes forced Southerners to pay either excessive prices for Northern goods or excessive taxes.  Competition from Europe was crushed, thereby giving Northerners a monopoly over Southern markets.  Federal taxation had the economic effect of shifting wealth from the South to the North—not unlike what the OPEC nations have been doing to the oil-consuming nations since 1973.

After Lincoln’s election, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas did not wait to see how he would govern.  All seceded before his inauguration.  They knew what lay ahead.  For, even before Lincoln took his oath in early March, the first of the Morrill tariffs had been passed and signed by Buchanan, raising tariff rates to levels not seen in decades.

Consider the situation of the South: as the South purchased two-thirds of the nation’s imports, and tariffs were the prime source of tax revenue, the South was already carrying a hugely disproportionate share of the federal tax load.  By raising tariffs, Congress, in Southern eyes, was looting the South.  Southern imports would cost more, while the rising tariff revenue would be sent north to be spent by Republicans who reviled the South.  The South’s alternative: buy Northern manufactures instead of British.  Either way, more of the South’s wealth was headed north.

Dixie was unwilling to sit by and watch Lincoln’s customs officers haul their fattening satchels of duty revenue out of Southern ports, up to Washington, to be spent somewhere else, by a President who had not won a single Southern electoral vote.  As the historian Adams writes,

The Morrill Tariff…was the highest tariff in U.S. history.  It doubled the rates of the 1857 tariff to about 47 percent of the value of the imported products.  This was Lincoln’s big victory.  His supporters were jubilant.  He had fulfilled his campaign and IOUs to the Northern industrialists.  By this act he had closed the door for any reconciliation with the South.  In his inaugural address he had also committed himself to collect customs in the South even if there were a secession.  With slavery, he was conciliatory; with the import taxes he was threatening.  Fort Sumter was at the entrance to the Charleston Harbor, filled with federal troops to support U.S. Customs officers.  It wasn’t too difficult for angry South Carolinians to file the first shot.

Believing herself an exploited region in a country where the newly empowered Republicans despised her, Dixie decided to leave.  But there was a powerful reason the industrialized North could not let her go.  The free-trade Confederacy had written into its Constitution a permanent prohibition against all protective tariffs: “nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry.”

To Northern manufacturers a free-trade South spell ruin.  Imports would be diverted from Baltimore, New York, and Boston where they faced the Morrill Tariff to Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans where they would enter duty-free.  Western states would use tariff-free Southern ports to bring in goods from Europe.  So would many Northerners.  On the very eve of war, March 18, 1861, the Boston Transcript wrote:

If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is aldi upon the imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby.

The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederated States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than New York.  In addition to this, the manufacturing interest of the country will suffer from the increased importations resulting from low duties….The…[government] would be false to all its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against.

Adams describes the political and economic crisis the North would have confronted, living side-by-side with a free-trade Confederacy:

This would compel the North to set up a chain of customs stations and border patrols from the Atlantic Ocean to the Missouri River, and then some.  Northerners would clamor to buy duty-free goods from the South.  This would spell disaster for Northern industrialists.  Secession offered the South not only freedom from Northern tax bondage but also an opportunity to turn from the oppressed into the oppressor.  The Yankees were going to squirm now!

Nor was Lincoln unaware of the dread prospect.  In his First Inaugural Address, where he had been a portrait in compromise on slavery, promising “no bloodshed or violence” against seceding states, he had made an exception:

The power confided to me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against, or among the people anywhere. [Emphasis added.]

Message to the Confederacy from Abraham Lincoln: you may keep your slaves, but you cannot keep your duty-free ports! British intellectuals like John Stuart Mill blithely declared, “Slavery the one cause of the Civil War.”  But, as Adams writes, others in Britain put the cause elsewhere:

In the British House of Commons in 1862, William Forster said he believed it was generally recognized that slavery was the cause of the U.S. Civil War.  He was answered from the House with cries, “No, no!” and “The tariff!”  It is quite probably the British commercial interests, which dominated the House of Commons, were more in tune with the economics of the Civil War than were the intellectuals and writers.

The tariff was “a prime cause of the civil war,” writes historian John Steele Gordon, author of Hamilton’s Blessing.

But, while tariffs were a cause of sectional rancor and division, and one of the reasons for secession, Lincoln never discussed the tariff in depth after his speech in Pittsburgh before the inauguration.  Henry Carey, the great protectionists, never forgave Lincoln, whom he had supported to the hilt, for the omission.  And given Lincoln’s devotion to the Union—the cause to which he subordinated all others—it would seem that, for him as for Andrew Jackson, the tariff was not the end, but the means to the end: a greater, more glorious Union.  Murray Rothbard was not too far off when he wrote that Abraham Lincoln “made a god out of the Union.”

The South’s Fatal Dependency

Though the abolition of slavery was not why Lincoln went to war, slavery and the South’s dependency on trade for the necessities of national life were the South’s undoing in that war.  Slavery had kept the South in mercantilist bondage.  Eighty years after Yorktown, the South was still shipping raw materials to Britain for manufactured goods.  Had slavery been abolished, the Deep South would have been forced off her dependence on cotton, tobacco, and rice.  Given her natural resources, the capacities of her people, black and white, the South would have developed alongside the North and West.  Instead, it was in the North where 90 percent of the manufacturing was done, where warships were built, cannons were forged, locomotives were constructed, and most of the railways laid.  From the war’s outset, the position of the South to the North was like that of the colonies to Great Britain in the Revolution.

With its fleets, the North quickly imposed a naval blockade, and sliced the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi.  Dependent on trade, the South saw her cotton and tobacco rot in warehouses, and her trade dry up.  The South’s slaves, unlike Northern immigrant labor, could not be used to produce weapons of war.  Slavery and the agrarian character of the South tied them to the land.  There may be truth in what Henry Carey wrote: “Had the policy advocated by Mr. Clay, as embodied in the tariff of 1842, been maintained, there could have been so secession, and for the reason, that the southern mineral region would long since have obtained control of the planting one.”  Without slavery, the South’s statesmen would not have been forced to use their brilliance defending an institution the South’s greatest men—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lee—knew could not be reconciled with the ideals in which they believed.

Southerners were bound to a system they inherited at birth.  Because that system depended on three-and-a-half million slaves, the South had to submit to abuse from moral posturers from the North who ignored the exploitation of immigrant labor and could not care less about the plight of slaves.  Eventually the South had to leave a Union their fathers helped create, and fight to their defeat and ruin in an independence struggle made almost impossible of victory because they had relied to long on the land and neglected the “work bench” Jefferson and Randolph had so detested.

One cannot read the story of that four-year struggle without coming away with boundless admiration for the bravery of Southern soldiers, the perseverance of her people, the brilliance of her generals.  From Bull Run to Antietam, Gettysburg to Appomattox, the men in gray wrote a chapter in glory that will bring tears to men’s eyes as long as they have hearts.

And Mr. Lincoln?  Unquestionably, the war changed the man.  The President-elect who arrived in Washington anxious to appease the Southern slave-owners, that ambivalent man of whom Richard Hofstadter wrote that his mind on the Negro was a “house divided against itself,” seemed, by the war’s end, to have become a remorseless Abolitionist.  At Gettysburg, whether he had intended it or not, Lincoln had succeeded for all time in “ennobling” the Northern cause and immortalizing himself.  In those brief, haunting, and memorable words, Lincoln had proclaimed that the war, all along, had been about the equality of man.

Antietam, the Battle of the Wilderness, the March to the Sea, had hardened Lincoln.  Unlike the conciliatory rhetoric of his First Inaugural, his second rings like the final warning of impending judgment from an Old Testament prophet.  In that Second Inaugural, the armies of Sherman and Grant have become instruments of God’s will.  This Inaugural could have been delivered by John Brown:

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

The war had not been about slavery when it began.  But, by its end, Abraham Lincoln had declared it to be so.  And, so it was.  And the terrible and tragic manner of his death affirmed it forever.

Was the Cause Just?

Was the great war a just war?

For the South, the issue comes down to a single question: Did the South have the right to secede from the Union?  For, if the South had a right to secede—as the colonies had a moral and legal right to break away from the British Empire—then the South and the right to fight for that independence, and to resist a Union invasion and forcible return at the point of Union bayonets.

On that first question, the South in 1861 had at least as strong a case for secession as the Federalists of the Hartford Convention, or ex-President John Quincy Adams, who threatened President John Tyler with secession if Texas were admitted into the Union.  By the Jeffersonian test, that, to be legitimate, a government must rest upon the consent of the governed, the Confederacy had legitimacy by the time of Fort Sumter.  What the Union took back in 1865 was not free men and free states, but defeated rebels and conquered provinces.

In 1861 it had been an open question whether a state had a right to secede.  The question was submitted to the arbitrament of the sword and settled only at Appomattox.  But, of all the wars America ever fought, “vital interests” were at risk in the Civil War.  Had South Carolina, Georgia, and the Gulf states broken away, British and French would have moved in to exploit the Southern free-trade zone to undermine Northern industries, and wean the West away from the Union.  Indeed, during the war, Napoleon III installed a puppet regime in Mexico in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, and the British were moving troops into Canada.  The first secession would not have been the last.  Fragmentation of the nation was at hand.  As a private in the 70th Ohio wrote home in 1863:

Admit the right of the seceding states to break up the Union at pleasure…and how long will it be before the new confederacies created by the first disruption shall be resolved into still smaller fragments and the continent become a vast theater of civil war, military license, anarchy and despotism.  Better settle it at whatever cost and settle it forever.

With the Deep South gone, the United States would have lost a fourth of its territory, its window on the Caribbean and the Gulf, its border with Mexico, and its port of New Orleans—the outlet to the sea for the goods of Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and the Middle West.  The South would have begun to compete for the allegiance of New Mexico and Arizona; indeed, rebellions arose in both areas and had to be put down by Union troops.

To Lincoln, secession meant an amputation of his country that would have destroyed its elan and morale.  Disunion was intolerable.  Where Jackson said it directly “Disunion is Treason,” and “preservation of the Union…the highest law,” Lincoln used his rhetorical powers to elevate the cause to one of universal values.  But his goal was the same as Jackson’s.

Lincoln was the indispensable man who saved the Union.  He accepted war and may have provoked war to restore the Union.  In the end, that war freed the slaves.  “At last after the smoke of the battlefield had cleared away the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over the whole continent had vanished and was gone for ever,” wrote England’s John Bright.  But was war necessary to free the slaves, when every other nation in the hemisphere, save Haiti, freed its slaves peacefully, without the “total war” Lincoln’s generals like Sherman and Sheridan unleashed on the South?  To Lincoln, then, belongs the credit of all the good the war did, and full responsibility for all the war cost.

While the men of government had one set of reasons for going to war, the men who marched into the guns had another: patriotism, love of country.  They fought, as Macaulay said, for the reasons that men always fight, “for the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods.”

We are fighting against “traitors who sought to tear down and break into fragments the glorious temple that our fathers reared with blood and tears,” a Michigan private wrote to his younger brother.  A month before he fell at Gettysburg, a Minnesota boy wrote home that he was willing to give his life “for the purpose of crushing this g--d--- rebellion and to support the best government on God’s footstool.”

In the war’s last days, a Union soldier captured a wounded rebel and was astonished by the man’s ferocity.  “Why do you keep fighting like this?” he demanded.  “Because you’re here!” the dying rebel replied.

This article first appeared in the October 1997 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  It was adapted from a book manuscript.

A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor.

Wait a minute.  Pearl Harbor and September 11 were massive sneak attacks by foreign enemies.  The reduction of Fort Sumter was preceded by a gentlemanly warning, was bloodless, and the garrison was allowed to depart with honor.  It would not have happened at all if Abraham Lincoln had not maneuvered to bring it about.  Think about this.  Why should Southerners (free Americans) permit a fort that had been built with their tax money for their protection to be used as a base to conquer and extort taxes from them, when every other federal post in the South had already been peacefully transferred pending a political settlement of the issues raised by secession?  One can become outraged at Fort Sumter only by placing a higher value on the will of the political party controlling the machinery of government than on the core purpose of a free regime to protect the people.

Nor did Lincoln’s call after Fort Sumter for 75,000 troops to suppress “the rebellion” evoke unity and determination.  The (illegal) call was either a deliberate deception or the most terrible miscalculation in American history, since over a million men would be required to complete the conquest of the Southern people and the destruction of their self-government.  The immediate effect of Lincoln’s mobilization was to drive four more states out of the Union and to put the border states into bloody play.  The long-range effects were military rule in much of the North, a staggering cost in blood, and systematic terrorism against Southern noncombatants.

It is true that Lincoln got a temporary boost of morale from having forced the Confederacy to “fire on the flag,” but that did not last.  The number of Northern men who evaded service in Mr. Lincoln’s war in one way or another was in the hundreds of thousands.  Others signed up for the minimal time allowed: There were examples of whole regiments going home on the eve of battle.  Compared with complete mobilization in the South, no affluent or connected Northerner ever saw service unless he wanted to.  A recent study suggests that Lincoln could not have raised his armies if it had not been for widespread industrial unemployment at the beginning of the war, an immense expenditure on enlistment bounties, and unlimited access to foreign recruits who made up a fourth of the military manpower.  More Northerners voted against Lincoln in 1864 than had in 1860, even though the army was dispatched to control the polls.  Lincoln and his friends never put complete trust in the Northern public and saw conspiracies under every bed.  They behaved with the ruthlessness of a revolutionary cadre.  After victory history was edited to portray a unified righteous North.

It is a wonder that the historian mentioned above would even allow Southerners to fight beside real Americans in later wars, since he equates Lee and Jackson with Tojo and Bin Laden.  Perhaps it has always been this way in Boston, which happens to be the location of the scholar referred to.  But in general it has not always been so.  Franklin Roosevelt had no objection to being photographed with Confederate flags.  Harry Truman chose a romantic equestrian portrait of Lee and Jackson for the lobby of his presidential library.  Dwight Eisenhower went out of his way to correct someone who called Lee a “traitor,” and John Kennedy chose Calhoun as one of the five greatest senators.

For a long time Americans North and South observed a truce.  It was agreed that the war was a great tragedy with good and bad on both sides, from which a stronger and better country had emerged.  In this scenario, Lincoln is the great martyred Peacemaker who would have “bound up the nation’s wounds” and avoided the evils that followed the war.  This is a dubious estimate of Lincoln, but one in which it was useful for all parties to believe.

Things have changed in the last few years.  There is a concerted effort to banish the South into one dark little corner of American history labeled “slavery” and “treason.”  Here in the Lincoln bicentennial, we can note that there has been an accompanying literature that celebrates Lincoln not as the Peacemaker but as the great Hero of Democracy who was justified in using any means necessary to destroy evil (i.e., kill recalcitrant Americans).  This accompanies and justifies America’s turn toward a mission to impose “global democracy” by unlimited force and preemptive war.  Even General Sherman is once more being celebrated as a great military hero for his ruthless campaigns against civilians.  (There has been a countertrend, exemplified by Thomas DiLorenzo’s and Ronald and Donald Kennedy’s best-selling books as well as a number of solid monographs exploring the uglier aspects of Northern motives and actions in the war.  If my e-mail correspondence from above the Potomac and the Ohio is any measure, a great many non-Southern Americans now regard Lincoln as the fount of the excessive centralization and imperial war-making under which we now live.)

During the Civil War centennial, Robert Penn Warren wrote a little book called The Legacy of the Civil War.  He had some critical things to say about the tendency of his fellow Southerners to use the war as an excuse for their shortcomings.  But for our purposes, what he had to say about the American majority is more pertinent.  The éclat of having “saved the Union” and freed the slaves had left Northerners with “a Treasury of Virtue.”  This is the basis of a kind of plenary indulgence that automatically prejustifies the motives of American wars and the goodness inherent in America’s acts to force the world into conformity with America’s ideal version of herself.

The Treasury of Virtue renders Americans immune to simple truth.  The war was one of conquest against other Americans.  It was not a righteous crusade or a family spat.  “Government of the people” would not have suffered if a war of coercion had not been launched against the Southern people.  The opposite is true.  The fundamental purpose of the war was to protect the prosperity of the ruling elements of the Northern states by keeping the South captive as a market and a source of raw materials and exports.  The philanthropic Boston abolitionist Theodore Parker announced that war was being waged for the supremacy of “Northern industry.”  European observers took this for granted.  The primary goal of the Republican Party was permanent installment of Hamilton’s “blessings”—a national debt, a protected market for industrialists, and a collusion between bankers and politicians.  Many Northerners said plainly that they wanted emancipation because “free labor” was cheaper and more disposable than “slave labor.”

Orestes Brownson, a strong supporter of the Union, lamented that the war had been sustained not by patriotism but by patronage, profit, and a trumped-up hatred of Southerners.  The last was exemplified by the bigotry and blasphemy of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and more than a few New England clergymen calling for the extermination of wicked Southerners.  The Republican Party’s war was accompanied and sustained by immense corruption.  Americans seem to have persuaded themselves that the postwar corruption of “the Great Barbecue” somehow mysteriously erupted after Lincoln.  No, it was a creation of the war for the “Union.”  At least one major military expedition was mounted to steal cotton to enrich Union commanders.  Plunder of the government and the South made many of Lincoln’s supporters wealthy.  Lincoln himself encouraged various acts of corruption for political purposes if not for personal profit.

The Lincoln hagiography that is an essential part of the Treasury was a post-assassination creation.  As one Southern wag put it, Lincoln had so many admirers when he was dead because he had none when he was living.  When looked at coldly, the man Lincoln and his career contains much that is tawdry.  The strongest supporters of his cause regarded him as incompetent and temporizing.  The possibility cannot ever be dismissed that they were implicit in his assassination.  One would think that the event would have received exhaustive investigation.  Instead, the alleged conspirators were quickly and secretly seized and murdered by the Army.  Confederates were not angels.  Unlike their conquerors, they never claimed to be.  But by comparison they shine with honor bright, something much of the world has sensed.

In the history books and in popular imagination Americans are in denial.  They cling to their Treasury of Virtue—the belief that the war was waged with righteousness and philanthropic motives and in defense of “government of the people.”  Realities do not register.  In the North, on the whim of an Army officer, people were dragged from their homes and held incommunicado in military prisons, without any formal charges or right of counsel, and with no set duration.  Sometimes these people were guilty of nothing more than a “disloyal” word in private conversation, being the object of some anonymous spite, or even whistling the wrong tune.  Overwhelmingly, the arrests were not for acts but for opinions.  In the case of newspaper editors, they were held until they agreed either to dispose of their presses or refrain from further criticisms of the Lincoln administration.  This “American Bastille” was more oppressive and unprecedented at the time than it seems now.  Republican mobs were also active in punishing dissenters.

In Kentucky and Missouri and the early seized regions of Tennessee and Louisiana, occupation involved executing innocent civilian hostages, uprooting the population of extended regions, and imprisoning women wholesale.  From the first step of the federal army across the Potomac, the people of the South were seen as fair game for looting and vandalism.  (One Northern critic of the war wondered what law gave federal soldiers the right to steal Southern pianos, watches, and silver tableware.)  This soon became systematic policy.  Houses, barns, tools, livestock, stored food, standing crops, children’s pets, schools, churches, convents, libraries—these were systematically destroyed, the houses usually being looted first.  A Georgia lady recalled how Union officers’ wives went through her home and divided up her furniture for shipment north.  This policy was not directed just at wealthy planters, as some recent apologists have claimed, but at the entire population, white and black.  Old men and blacks were tortured, and fresh graves, of which there were many in the South, despoiled to reveal the location of valuables.  “Historians” on public television recently claimed that Sherman’s depredations were limited to “military necessity”—despite his announced desire to make the women and children of the South howl in misery.  Not to mention the bombardment of cities and the deliberate destruction of undefended cities that had already surrendered.  As General Lee wrote, “These people delight to destroy the weak and those who can make no defense; it suits them.”

Since the mid-20th century Americans have been obsessed with race, and it has become de rigueur to declare that the war was about slavery and nothing but slavery.  Earlier generations knew better.  Emancipation was a byproduct of the conquest of the South.  The mass of the Northern public and army was far more antiblack than antislavery, and the destruction of the South was as hard on the black population as on the white.  The notion that soldiers in blue and emancipated slaves rushed into each other’s arms with shouts of Glory Hallelujah is pure fantasy.  Ambrose Bierce, who fought for the Union the entire war, said the only emancipated slaves he saw were the concubines and servants of Union officers.  He respected Southerners but had only contempt for the foreigners in his army.

Nor was slavery (domestic servitude) in 1860 at all the horror that it is now imagined to be.  In 1860 in New York City there were women and children working 16-hour days for starvation wages; 150,000 unemployed; 40,000 homeless; 600 brothels (some with girls as young as 10); and 9,000 grog shops where the poor could temporarily drown their sorrows.  Half of the children did not live past the age of five.  Further, half of the free black people in the country were in the South and generally lived better than the despised free blacks of the North.  One Southern Unionist testified to his belief that half of the black population of his state had perished in the deprivations and dislocations of invasion.  In Louisiana free blacks pleaded in vain that their hard-won property not be destroyed.  Federal soldiers had been told that no black people could own property in the South.  New England shippers got rich in the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil right up to the war, and Bostonians owned slave sugar plantations in Cuba even after the war.

A Southern planter who reflected on the circumstances in which he had been born, observed everyday life around him, and examined his Christian conscience saw no reason to accept the hatred and abuse of strangers who claimed moral authority over him.  The abuse had been going on for 30 years before the war and was a main cause of secession.  A great man of the North, John Adams, had observed that the only distinction between the slaves of the South and the poorest workers of the North was in the label.

Secession should have been an occasion for constitutional negotiations such as the Confederate government sought, especially by a President whose position had the support of less than 40 percent of the people.  Instead, Lincoln declared that the solemn, open, deliberative, democratic acts of the people of 11 states were merely “combinations” of criminals too numerous to be put down by the marshals.  He supported his position by a false American history and the transparent lie that the “people” did not really support their states.  On the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, the Constitution died as a governing document.  It became a mere rule of thumb for politicians and lawyers, who continue Lincoln’s heritage of twisting it to suit their ends.  After all, the Constitution defines treason against the United States as waging war against “them” (the states), not as resisting the federal government.  Lincoln’s very intent to coerce required that Southerners be deprived of citizenship and their states destroyed.  It was Lincoln who was engaged in a rebellion to overthrow the Union.  He had to dispense with the real Constitution because it disallowed not only a war of coercion against Americans but most of the acts of central power in favor of private profit that his party was determined to make permanent.

In fact, Lincoln’s campaign to “retake the seditious states” could only rest on the tacit assumption that the Southern states, resources, and people were and always had been the property of the federal government—or more properly, of the politicians who had got control of the federal machine.  And that the South existed not for herself as a self-governing part of America but for the benefit and disposition of the North.  Consent of the people could only be given one time, and they were ever after bound to obey the federal machine.  Thus, the primary principle of the Declaration, that governments rest on the consent of the governed, was abolished.  A Northern critic of the war remarked, “If this war is right then the Revolution was wrong.”  The Union could not have been preserved under such assumptions, any more than a marriage can be properly preserved by battery.

Lincoln’s pretty words in the Gettysburg Address managed to have it both ways—he was, he claimed, preserving the sacred old Union and at the same time promulgating a “new birth of freedom” that was somehow necessary to save government of the people.  But these were not the arguments normally used by the spokesmen of his party to justify their war.  They spoke instead of conquest and authority, of empire and punishment of disobedience, of the removal of obstructions to their designs.  This is not a Southern accusation; it is the overwhelming evidence of their own words, both public and private, evidence refused by the American consciousness.  Lincoln’s icing has been mistaken for the cake.  Karl Marx agreed enthusiastically with Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the war to be a rebellion of “slave drivers” against the “one great democratic republic whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued.”  Marx, like many other supporters of Lincoln’s war, also regarded it as a rebellion against progressive German immigrants who somehow were better Americans than the Southern sons of patriots and founders.

It is unlikely, but if Americans could ever come to recognize and admit how much counterfeit is contained in their Treasury of Virtue, they could have a more realistic view of themselves and play a more humble and responsible role in the world.  They would realize that they are not above history or immune to sin.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis.  Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing.  Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches . . .

Two thin men?  What normal person would make such a comparison?  To our elites, thinness is a sign of moral virtue.  Here is a President who goes to the gym every day and shoots hoops with the best of them: A penumbra of health radiates from his person like the glow of sanctity.  Evans and Wolffe don’t just acknowledge the cosmetic superficiality that got Obama elected: They celebrate it.  According to Newsweek, Obama is the New Lincoln because both are thin, geniuses at stagecraft, and write a lot of their own material—a rationale that also makes Obama the New Michael Jackson.

The Lincolnian legacy was constantly reiterated by the Obamaites as they readied themselves for Inauguration Day, and “a new birth of freedom” is their theme song.  As to what this freedom consists of, it depends on whom you ask.  Obama is the perfect demagogue; his followers project their own hopes and desires onto the blankness of his expression.

Since we live in an age from which greatness has been banished, it’s only natural for politicians, ideologues, and common demagogues to reach back into the past for models to serve as masks for their nostrums.  Lincoln, the self-educated rail-splitting backwoods boy, born in a lean-to, who rose from nothing to become a larger-than-life figure in our history—Obama sees himself in our 16th president, as he admits in a 2005 essay in Time, and his cultists lap it up.  It’s pure Madison Avenue.  As Peggy Noonan acerbically remarked,

Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family.  He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency.
You see the similarities.

Beyond the Stalinesque cult of personality promoted by the mainstream media, there is a real sense in which Obama’s kinship with Lincoln, the politician, is all too apparent.  The left’s love affair with Obama will continue long after they realize that he’s simply a shill for big business, just like Lincoln.  Honest Abe was the perfect embodiment of Whiggish economic principles: subsidies for politically connected industries, starting with the banks but not ending there.  With Lincoln, it was the railroads who collected government favors and tax dollars; in Obama’s time, it will be the road builders.  In both scenarios, the banks are showered with governmental largesse.  Obama has often been likened to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the shadow of a Second Great Depression looms ever larger, and yet Obama’s New New Deal will no doubt resemble the corporate welfare state championed by Lincoln rather than the WPA-style work brigades romanticized by Obama’s leftist supporters.

Lincoln abolished hard money, introduced the greenback, and laid the foundations of the seminationalized banking system that is presently crumbling all around us.  Furthermore, Lincoln set up a tariff wall behind which the “trusts” were sheltered, and these monstrous economic institutions sprouted and flourished like rampant weeds, choking their economic and political competitors and effectively running the country.  Think of the Great Emancipator as the host at a gigantic orgy of corporate welfare: Favored businesses were heavily subsidized—not just the banks but the railroads, which were lavished with land grants.  The machinery of government loomed larger than ever before in America.  At the heart of it beat that great engine of government-created inflation, the regulated central banks, to finance it all.  Wherever Lincoln trod, the old free and independent spirit of American enterprise was stamped out: The Post Service was monopolized, the tax burden grew much heavier, and “sin” taxes were slapped on tobacco and whiskey.

Obama set about further centralizing and outright nationalizing the banking system before he even took office: He spoke in favor of the bank bailout and, together with John McCain, issued a statement that, in effect, gave the federal government a blank check to take whatever measures it deemed necessary, by administrative fiat, to shore up the collapsing walls of the Lincolnian central-banking edifice.

Taxation was the Great Emancipator’s tool of choice in his effort to weld together a strong centralized mercantile state, and the tariff was a major aspect of his economic program.  His nomination at the Republican National Convention over his better-known and more experienced rivals was made possible, in part, by the support of the key Pennsylvania delegation.  As the center of the ailing iron and steel industry, Pennsylvania was angling for higher tariffs, import quotas, and other special privileges.  One of Lincoln’s first acts was to erect the highest tariff wall in our history, doubling tariff rates and later imposing import quotas.

Labor, a major Obamaite constituency, is already agitating for a higher tariff wall, and this fits right in with Obama’s industrial economic policy, which will pick winners and losers in the marketplace—and protect corporate favorites in the name of “national security” and the “war against recession.”  While protesting that he wants to lift the tax burden on most of us, Obama has promised to push for a tax hike on the “wealthy”—if anyone is left who fits that description by the time he begins his term.  And you can bet us nonwealthy types will be asked to make “sacrifices” for the good of the country, in the name of “unity”—as state and local governments hike tax rates to pay for his gigantic public-works program, another Lincolnian favorite.

For insight into Obama’s Lincolnian character, Newsweek turned to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—“a self-described ‘student of Lincoln’ and author of two [pretty awful] books on the Civil War”:

He has been impressed by Obama’s use of Lincoln as a prop.  But he is waiting to see if Obama is sincere in his emulation.  “Obama’s got a liberal voting record, and I don’t know of any substantive issue where he’s ever broken with his leadership,” says Gingrich.

Yet the Republicans preempted any grand gesture of bipartisanship when McCain signed on to that joint endorsement of the bank bailout—and arguably threw the election to the Democrats, perhaps deliberately.  A few weeks after the election, Chris Matthews opined on Hardball that if only McCain had opposed the bailout, the outcome might have been different.  The Republicans, in short, never gave Obama the chance to “reach out” across the aisle, having broken with their stated principles of small government and fiscal responsibility long before the election.

Doris Kearns Goodwin has been all over the talking-heads circuit, babbling about the “team of rivals” that Obama-Lincoln has assembled, one that will “unite the country” in this time of crisis, which in no way resembles the Civil War, and her bromides have been wielded like a bludgeon in order to stamp out a possible rebellion by Obama’s more sincere followers who are attracted to his ostensibly antiwar stance.  The appointment of Hillary Clinton to head up the State Department is a hard pill for many of those followers to swallow, and they finally did so only at the particularly loud insistence of leftist bloggers and print-world opinionmongers, as well as their televised counterparts over at MSNBC.  Even the news that Obama is reconsidering a specific timetable for withdrawal—oh, and that “residual force” we’re leaving behind, just in case, will number as many as 70,000—did not phase them.  There was not a peep out of the leftist-led “antiwar” brood, or the Hollywood liberals perched around Arianna Huffington and her faux-Drudge website.

With the prospect of the auto industry collapsing, and deflation easily outpacing the government’s efforts to stem it, President Obama will have his hands full with domestic economic matters and will be excused by many “progressives” for ceding the foreign-policy realm to Hillary and her menagerie.  Those whose preferred policy stance in the Middle East is stasis will have reason to celebrate, and the bipartisan group behind the push for confronting Iran will have a strong voice and a majority vote in the corridors of power.  Of course, one vote—the President’s—is all that’s needed to launch an attack, but it’s a thousand-and-one little decisions, usually made by subordinates, that pave the road to war.

Obama’s identification with Lincoln is all tied up with the issue of race and the idea that an Obama presidency is somehow the fulfillment of the Lincolnian dream of a land where the descendant of slaves could attain the highest office in the land.  But of course there is nothing Lincolnian about this dream: Setting aside the fact that Obama is not the descendant of slaves, we must acknowledge, as Obama does in his Time essay, that Lincoln himself did not believe in racial equality and even advocated sending African-Americans back to Africa.  But no matter.  Mythology is not amenable to fact-checkers.  History can always be made to fit into the Procrustean bed of ideology.

In the Bizarro World in which we live, where up is down and the laws of nature and man are stood on their heads, Wall Street’s victorious champion is hailed as a populist hero, even a “progressive.”  As unprecedented sums of money poured into his campaign coffers, from every corporate interest—with particular generosity shown by the bankers—Obama was hailed as the great egalitarian whose triumph would strike a blow for the ordinary man.  He is the avatar of the new plutocracy, the perfect oreo—a creamy patrician center sandwiched in dark, crunchy populism.

Our time calls for real leaders, but what we are getting are manufactured heroes, draped in historical allusions and set up on a pedestal for us to worship.  The priests of the Obama cult intone their prayers and burn incense at his altar, while the Remnant looks on, bemused and not a little frightened, hoping he will not do too much harm.

The potential is there, however, for very great damage.  If Obama is ambitious, his advisors are even more so: They might fall into the trap of believing in Dear Leader’s greatness, and their own.  They might even come to believe in the Obama-as-Lincoln myth—in which case we are all in some very big trouble.  Lincoln, after all, suspended habeas corpus, jailed his opponents, and closed down newspapers that displeased him.  I was struck by the audacity of the Time article comparing Obama with Lincoln, in which “humility” was listed as one of our new President’s many virtues.  If one can say anything about the 44th President, it is surely that pride bordering on arrogance oozes from his every pore.  He acted as if he were already President throughout his campaign: The swearing in, as far as he was concerned, was just a formality.  Hubris—the abiding sin of mankind, and the flaw that has brought down more than one of Barack Obama’s predecessors—promises to be the leitmotif of his administration.  And pride, as we all know, is what goeth before destruction.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle [the Revolutionary War].

This was all the more remarkable because Lincoln was a nonbeliever.  His first law partner, John T. Stuart, stated that Lincoln

was an avowed and open infidel . . . and sometimes bordered on atheism. . . . [He] went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I ever heard; he shocked me.

Ward Lamon, another law partner and friend of Lincoln, relates that,

[a]s he grew older, he grew more cautious. . . . The imputation of Infidelity had seriously injured him in several of his earlier political contests; and, sobered by age and experience, he was resolved that the same imputation should injure him no more.  Aspiring to lead religious communities, he foresaw that he must not appear as an enemy within their gates; aspiring to public honors under the auspices of a political party which persistently summoned religious people to assist in the extirpation of that which it denounced as the “nation’s sin,” he foresaw that he could not ask their suffrages whilst aspersing their faith.  He perceived no reason for changing his convictions, but he did perceive many good and cogent reasons for not making them public.

Herndon concurred:

Lincoln was very politic, and a very shrewd man in some particulars.  When he was talking to a Christian, he adapted himself to the Christian. . . . I could state facts about Mr. Lincoln’s jokes on and gibes at Christianity and committee of ministers, who waited on him while President of the United States, and before, that would shock a Christian people.

On August 12, 1861, as Ft. Sumter was being attacked, Lincoln issued a Proclamation of a National Day of Fast.  He was explicit on who started the war:

And, whereas, when our own beloved Country, once, by the blessing of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation.

Lincoln then broadened the blame to all Americans.  They were sinners who had offended God, and the war was His retribution:

[I]n sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him, and to pray for His mercy,—to pray that we may be spared further punishment, though most justly deserved.

For Lincoln to call upon people to pray to God to end the war was all the more extraordinary, as it contradicted his personal beliefs.  According to Herndon, Lincoln

believed that both matter and mind are governed by certain irrefragable and irresistible laws, and that no prayers of ours could arrest their operation in the least . . . what was to be would be. . . . [T]he laws of human nature are persistent and permanent and could not be reversed. . . . In proof of his strong leaning towards fatalism he once quoted the case of Brutus and Caesar, arguing that the former was forced by laws and conditions over which he had no control to kill the latter, and vice versa, that the latter was specially created to be disposed of by the former.

Throughout his presidency, Lincoln maintained that God alone was responsible for the war.  In his September 3, 1862, “Meditation on the Divine Will,” he wrote:

God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds.

Lincoln continued in the same vein in an October 26, 1862, letter to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney:

We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial.  In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out his great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to his will . . . but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light which he affords me I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise.  If I had had my way, this war would never have been commenced; If I had been allowed my way this war would have been ended before this, but we find it still continues; and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.

As the war dragged on from one bloody encounter to the next from Manassas to Antietam to Shiloh with no end in sight, the President’s unbelief, both in God and his own rhetoric, was evident in private correspondence.  His letter of November 24, 1862, to Carl Shurz is petty and childish in its attempt to evade responsibility:

I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not.  And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better.  You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already.  I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me.

Nonetheless, Lincoln continued to repeat his accusation against God on public occasions.  In a proclamation on March 30, 1863, designating another National Day of Fast, he wrote:

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People?

With victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, some in the North thought the war would soon end.  But in an August 26, 1863, letter to James C. Conk­ling, Lincoln disagreed, reiterating that God, not he, determined when there would be peace.

Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph.  Let us be quite sober.  Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.

In his Proclamation of Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863, Lincoln left any question of a timetable in the hands of “our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens”:

I . . . fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.

As the number of dead and maimed mounted, and an official policy of total war was pursued against Southern civilians, Lincoln persisted in denying any responsibility for his own acts.  He was a victim of circumstance, and circumstance was determined by God.  In his April 4, 1864, letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln declared

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.  Now, at the end of three years of struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected.  God alone can claim it.

He continued bizarrely asserting that the death of over 600,000 Americans would be a testament to God’s righteousness.

If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Lincoln assiduously promoted the idea that, while he was blameless for the war, its death and destruction served some higher good.  As he wrote to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney in a letter dated September 4, 1864:

The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.  We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best and has ruled otherwise. . . . Surely, He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.

By March 1865, the war was fast coming to an end.  But in his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, Lincoln ominously insisted that God might want the bloodshed to continue indefinitely.

The Almighty has His own purposes.  “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offences cometh!”  If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Loving God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” . . . [W]ith firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

Through use of such rhetoric about a righteous and triumphant God, Lincoln exploited religious feelings in the North to carry out a four-year war against Southern civilians.  Women, children, the sick, and the elderly were targeted; homes and cities burned; crops destroyed; and domestic animals slaughtered.  Lincoln’s influence on the North validated Voltaire’s observation that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Jaffa school has an unfortunate tendency to talk as if Lincoln agreed with men who didn’t always agree with each other: Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton.  Unanimity among such strong-minded men of genius would be almost miraculous.

I know of no evidence that Lincoln ever read or mentioned, let alone studied, The Federalist (though Krannawitter opines that he “echoes” Federalist 49).  In fact Lincoln hardly seems aware of the whole ratification debate, the most crucial controversy in American history.

Though Lincoln was largely right about slavery, he was wrong about secession—a separate question, as most Northerners once understood.  During his war, millions of Northerners who opposed slavery also recognized the right of a sovereign state to secede from the Union.  This led Lincoln to crack down on dissent, closing down hundreds of newspapers (many permanently) and having a few thousand war critics arrested.  His excellent biographer David Herbert Donald calls his presidency the worst period for individual liberties in American history.

Lincoln’s knowledge of history was shaky, too; in his First Inaugural Address and ever after, he insisted that the states were not, and had never been, sovereign.  “The Union,” he said in that speech, “is much older than the Constitution.”

So much for the Articles of Confederation, which says plainly that “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence . . . ”  And so much for the Declaration of Independence he so often appealed to, which claims for the 13 former colonies the full status of “free and independent states”—or as Willmoore Kendall put it, “a baker’s dozen of new sovereignties,” as opposed to Lincoln’s “a new nation.”

New Jersey and Pennsylvania were sovereign states, just as France, Russia, Prussia, and Holland were.  Independence, sovereignty, and autonomy were almost implied by the term statehood.  A state was not a subdivision, like a province or county, of a larger entity.

Northern Abolitionists, if they meant what they said, should have welcomed the secession of slave states; and some of them did.  But for Lincoln “the Union” was sacred, its terms beyond compromise or negotiation.  When Southern cannons killed a horse at Fort Sumter, he launched a war that would kill 600,000 young men.  As a result he has received a deification any Roman emperor might envy.

I have sometimes been accused of hating Lincoln; the charge is false.  He had qualities that command my esteem and almost affection.  The only American President I really loathe is Franklin D. Roosevelt—liar, adulterer, warmonger, friend and benefactor of Stalin and the Soviet Union, betrayer of Christian Europe, father of the nuclear age, enemy of the U.S. Constitution, and a few other things.  What’s more, it’s personal.  Several members of my family had to fight in his accursed war; I thank the Lord none of them was killed, though my older cousin Jack was terribly wounded and came home from France permanently mad.  (In his lucid moments I never heard him suggest he’d been fighting for freedom.)

Lincoln, we should also remember, was a passionate segregationist, a fact Krannawitter barely touches on, though it might interest our new President to know that the Great Emancipator’s preferred solution was to abolish slavery and to remove all “free colored persons” from the United States.  In 1862 he proposed an amendment that would authorize Congress to pay for this huge project.  “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” he wrote in his State of the Union Message to Congress, “that I strongly favor colonization.”  Nor was this a sudden enthusiasm; he had been arguing for it since the early 1850’s.  As President, Lincoln did in fact create colonies for black freedmen in Haiti and what is now Panama, giving up on the cause only when these fizzled out.  Very few blacks were attracted to such schemes; the United States was the only homeland most blacks had ever known, and it was naive—indeed, utopian—to think they could easily leave it and adapt to Africa.

In August 1862, Lincoln became the first president to invite blacks to the White House; the purpose of this little celebrated historical event was to urge them to lead their liberated brethren (“the African,” as he often called them; he would have thought “the African-American” a contradiction in terms) to exercise their freedom by settling abroad.  Separation was best for both races, given a physical difference that would make assimilation impossible.  (To white audiences he often expressed his horror at racial “amalgamation.”)

For months we have been hearing that the election of a black man to the White House was the fulfillment of Lincoln’s dream.  It would be truer to say that the election of a mulatto was a cruel mockery of his actual dream of a unified, and white, America.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

You cannot have a First World economy and military with a Third World population.

The Republican Party is not and never has been a conservative party.  (For most of American history, until less than a century ago, the Democratic Party was the conservative party.)

The Republican Party has been responsible for very few acts of constructive statesmanship during its entire history.  Its main activity has been to provide patronage for rich people and ambitious politicians.  Most of its voters have been people with no political principles and no accurate sense of their own interests who have craved to be seen as respectable.

Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat, led many to believe that some principles might be injected into the Republican Party, but his effort was over before it began.

The main problem with free enterprise is that it is impossible to get Big Business to practice it.

Abe Lincoln was no saint, and his war was not a righteous crusade for freedom and government of the people.

America is not a democracy.  It is a plutocracy (government of the rich) with elements of kleptocracy, imperialism, executive dictatorship, and judicial oligarchy.

The Constitution is not our governing document.  Its essential features ceased to be binding, relevant, or even recognised long ago.

Most of the commentary and reporting on the federal government’s financial-sector interventions remarked on the supposed irony of a “pro-market” administration embracing an expansive role for government in response to the crisis, but throughout its tenure the Bush White House consistently geared its policies and regulations to suit large financial firms.  Adopting costly measures to socialize the risk of lending institutions and shore up large, overleveraged banks at public expense, the Bush administration stayed faithful to its state-capitalist roots, shaping policy according to the particular interests of major corporations and the financial industry.    With the bailout, the confusion of public and private interests can be said to have reached a new level, but the cooperative relationship between Washington and Wall Street did not fundamentally change—it merely intensified.

Economic centralization and consolidated power are thriving in the wake of the financial crisis, as both tend to increase when the public is panicked and willing to cede more power and control to the very institutions that have already egregiously abused what power they previously possessed.  Opponents of the bailout were fragmented and easily cowed by market turmoil.  No common set of principles or objections animated the odd right-left alliance of convenience that voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and the slightest pressure was sufficient to break the limited resistance of many House members to the bill.  Paradoxically, many of the opponents of the largest Wall Street bailout came from the party of Lincoln.  In a rare moment of clarity, even if they lacked the language to describe it, a majority of House Republicans recognized that state capitalism and the free market were in conflict and that the interests their party leaders served truly had no connection to their purported principles.

There is scarcely any coherent opposition to the collusion of government and what Lord Bolingbroke and Jefferson identified as “the moneyed interest.”  They were referring to the combination of financial and commercial power that found its political defenders among the Whigs of both Britain and America.  Today, the moneyed interest enjoys the support of the leadership of both U.S. political parties.  Those who expect anything different from the newly inaugurated protégé of George Soros and Warren Buffett are bound to be disappointed.  Nor is there much more awareness of the severe dependency to which government policy, past and present, has reduced American citizens and which will facilitate ever-greater consolidation in the future.  One of the crucial reasons for this lack of awareness is a general loss of understanding of the relationship between economic and political independence.  Most Americans believe that they are enjoying economic liberty when they yoke themselves to increasingly large-scale firms.
Over 40 years ago, Canadian philosopher George Grant said that American conservatives must oppose economic centralization if they seriously hope to pursue political decentralization.  The opposing tradition, the Country tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, always held that this alliance of wealth and government has been antithetical to political and economic liberty as well as to the proper functioning of constitutional government.  That tradition also held that permitting this collusion privileged the interests of a relative few with access and ties to the centers of power.  When Jackson fought the Bank and other Southerners later declared their fear of “bank rule,” they were opposing the same sort of collusion in another form.

Over the last few months, we have become all too familiar with the phrase “too big to fail,” which acknowledges that economic centralization on such a large scale, whose efficiency and virtues we have heard praised for decades, represents a grave threat to the health of the national economy during a normal correction.  Having become dependent on a few large institutions, we are told that we must prop up the same institutions and trust the same government that singularly failed the public.  Instead of seeing the necessity of more broadly distributing wealth and power, Lincolnists insist that the collusion that helped create the current crisis must be deepened rather than abandoned.

It is perhaps fitting that the only other man elected president from Illinois has already embraced many of the tenets of Lincolnism.  Barack Obama’s attempt to connect himself to Abraham Lincoln goes well beyond his publicity stunt of announcing his candidacy at the statehouse in Springfield.  Obama, like many of his predecessors, embraces state capitalism, which is why so many of his early appointments have won praise for their “centrism” and “pragmatism.”  From what we can gather so far, Obama’s Treasury Department is likely to be even more active in intervening in the financial sector.  As head of the New York Federal Reserve, Obama’s nominee for treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, endorsed each of Secretary Henry Paulson’s and Chairman Ben Bernanke’s bailout decisions, and Obama himself supported the bailout legislation in the early fall.  One of the consequences of the bailout debate in the months since the financial crisis became particularly acute has been that the Democratic Party, already reconciled to financial interests during the Clinton years, has become even more closely allied to Wall Street.

Given Obama’s appointments and his own record, it’s a safe bet that the Obama administration will be as wedded to Lincolnism as the past three administrations.  Though his top nominee for U.S. trade representative, Xavier Becerra, is known for having second thoughts on his support for NAFTA, President Obama is not going to renegotiate NAFTA in any significant way, and he will likely attempt to resurrect the Doha round of international trade talks.  As the global recession unfolds, we can expect Obama to modify and institutionalize the ad hoc G-20 coordination of economic policy that began at the tail end of 2008, and we will see an attempt to use existing international institutions to secure the interests of multinational corporations.  An ambitious internationalist such as Obama will pursue a more coordinated global state capitalism, building on the example that the WTO has already provided and spreading Lincolnism worldwide.

In his April 2007 Chicago Global Affairs Council speech, Obama famously said that the security of the United States is inextricably tied to the security of every other nation; practically speaking, this was a theoretical justification for intervention everywhere.  Obama’s statement also revealed his view of international relations in terms of extensive interdependence.  With respect to economic policy, this special emphasis on interdependence implies that his administration may push for coordinated, transnational mechanisms for bailing out failing multinational firms.  As we become more and more dependent on foreign investors to buy our debt, we may be told by future administrations that stabilizing vulnerable European or Chinese or other foreign financial sectors will be necessary to the functioning of our own economy.

Lincolnism’s corporate-government alliances also create incentives for firms with vested interests in foreign and domestic government contracts to support policies that promise to bring them additional business.  The most straightforward example of the state taking on additional, unnecessary risks to “open new markets” is the ongoing push for NATO expansion ever eastward for the benefit of defense contractors.  Corporate-government alliances also create opportunities for the government to co-opt corporations in the name of national security, which we have seen most recently in the use of telecommunications companies to conduct illegal surveillance operations and the subsequent granting of immunity to the firms that helped the government break the law.

Healthy republican government and Lincolnism are entirely incompatible.  Through its support for concentrated wealth, Lincolnism establishes an oligarchy that dominates the polity, whether formally or informally, and makes self-government impossible.  Classical republicanism requires the subordination of private interests to the good of the commonwealth.  A republic must not become captive to one faction, whereas it is advantageous to both state and private factions to reduce citizens to dependency on one or both.  For all of Lincoln’s misleading rhetoric of preserving “government by the people,” Lincolnism has always meant the rule of the few who are qualified primarily by their wealth and proximity to power.  It is natural, then, that such an oligarchic, state-capitalist system fears above all things the mobilization of a populist protest against its misrule and usurpations.  This fear acknowledges the basic illegitimacy and misrepresentation at the heart of the entire enterprise, which is vulnerable to losing all credibility once critics begin to probe beneath the surface.

Lincolnism today is the attempt to maintain the antithesis of the Country tradition, that of the Court, in a country whose people are still somewhat attached to the ideals of Jeffersonian republicanism insofar as they believe that they, and not the princes of Washington and New York, ultimately control their government.  The good news for populists is that the Wall Street bailout was such an obvious and transparent swindle that many more citizens have become suspicious of the federal government’s exploitations of crisis and invocations of emergency powers.  The instinctive revulsion of at least a plurality of the people at the prospect of the bailout suggests a healthy level of distrust of both government and corporate leaders.  Lincolnists consistently frame government giveaways and gifts to private interests as vital for the national interest and the common good.  In so doing, they conceal the antirepublican character of the ideology of the first Republican president.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.