A commenter to a recent article of mine, in which I suggested that Abraham Lincoln had no hesitation going to war on the false — that is, retroactive and deferred — pretext of combatting slavery, responded that “South Carolina firing on U.S. troops in Fort Sumter [was] a military act of open rebellion” and, in effect, that Lincoln was justified to proceed as he did. Admittedly, it is easy to be a lay historian when you don’t know the details and are convinced that your own understanding is accurate. The only solution to such dilemmas is a certain degree of self-deprecation, a desire to learn more, and an unwillingness to surrender to the precepts of one’s conventional education. I have tried to do this, but whether successful or not is not for me to say.
We might begin by recalling that three states, Virginia, Rhode Island, and New York, in their articles of ratification of the Constitution, retained the right of withdrawal from the Union. Recall, too, that four states, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, seceded only after Lincoln mobilized an army to invade the South. There is no indication they might have seceded before Lincoln signaled his intention to invoke military force.
In the course of events, South Carolina left the Union first. Other states in the Deep South seceded next. The debate in the Upper South lasted longer, but by the middle of 1861, those states, too, had seceded. Lincoln knew that the Border States, such as Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky, where slavery was permitted, were crucial to the Union cause. To keep them in the Union, he made it clear that he had no intention to free slaves as part of the war effort. As noted, saving the Union, as he conceived it, not freeing the slaves, was uppermost in his mind. Lincoln admitted in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase that the Emancipation Proclamation, which was passed almost two years after the War began, was not Constitutional but only a “war measure,” which is to say, a battlefield and publicity maneuver.
Even the affray at Fort Sumter (which Lincoln once called Fort Sumpter) that officially ignited the war on April 12, 1861, might not have been what it seems. Bruce Catton in The Coming Fury contends that Lincoln cunningly maneuvered Jefferson Davis into firing the first warning shots, and Shelby Foote in The Civil War similarly reveals how Lincoln goaded the Confederates into upping the ante by breaking his promise not to re-supply the Fort, which, after all, sat in Confederate territory.
Related: Lincoln and Douglass?
In the same vein, President of the Mises Institute and former Loyola College economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo, in his major trilogy, The Real Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked, and the more recent The Problem with Lincoln, variously points out that the Federal garrison was not starving and was already being supplied by South Carolina, which also offered to buy the fort. But Lincoln needed to gain the support of the North and, to this end, dispatched the schooner-rigged merchant steamer The Star of the West with, in violation of his word, a cargo of provisions plus 200 concealed troops. Southerners did fire the first shot as a warning salvo, though, according to reports, there were no casualties. Nonetheless, it was the shot heard around the nation and the literal spark for what was to come.
The Union Commander of Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, was not happy about the outcome, writing to his superiors, “We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.” Lincoln admitted his ruse in a May 1, 1861, letter to Gustavus Fox, his Assistant Secretary of the Navy: “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Ft. Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.” One would prefer not having to acknowledge the degree of strategic perfidy involved in the president’s decision. This does not resonate with our conception of Lincoln as a man who only reluctantly unfurled the standard of war. War is deceit.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s view of the war developed from a degree of abolitionist skepticism over Lincoln’s real intent to complete approval for Lincoln’s presumable emancipatory purpose and his loyalty to the sacred concept of the Union. Holme’s main concern, too, was for the preservation of the Union, as in “Brother Johnson’s Lament for Sister Caroline,” as if he endorsed Lincoln’s backward belief in the First Inaugural that the Union preceded the states that met to form it. Thus, Holmes, who was not privy to Lincoln’s private correspondence, lamented like so many others the brazen departure of South Carolina from the Union:
She has gone,-she has left us in passion and pride
Our stormy-browed sister, so long at our side!
She has torn her own star from our firmament’s glow,
And turned on her brother the face of a foe!
The remark of the commenter to my article was no different from what Holmes’ observation might have been, and no doubt was. Certainly, when it comes to Lincoln, the hagiographic impulse is hard to resist, especially in our historical era obsessed by race. Today, it is far easier to apprise oneself of the facts since one is no longer blinded by the fog of war, and documentary evidence is now available to anyone who is prepared to take the time and trouble to access it.
The almanac of Lincoln’s Speeches & Writings is a sine qua non, a compilation dedicated mainly to the research aims of political and academic scholars or any interested citizen, as is The Lincoln Reader. Many of Lincoln’s problematic utterances can be found therein, clearly indicating that the question of slavery was not his main concern. He was willing to let it be in order to further his goals. Such tomes make it clear that Lincoln’s primary, if not exclusive, aim was the preservation of a monolithic, managerial, centralized Union and its fiscal and political perquisites. Any serious reader trying to come to terms with Lincoln’s legacy should consult these volumes, if only to maintain credibility. Ploughing through thousands of pages is just another leg in the trek toward some semblance of the truth.
Similarly, the ten volumes of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler, is an arduous initiation ceremony I wouldn’t wish on anyone who does not have a bone-deep bizarre streak in his nature, but its many thousands of pages are worth substantial time if one is on a quest for truth. Even judicious skimming for those averse to literary tedium can yield surprising revelations. No commenter or scholar can be taken at face value if he or she has not made the effort to trudge through these indispensable documents. But it is a task. And, of course, it is inordinately difficult to go against the weight of one’s standard and even graduate education or swim upstream against the current of prevalent opinion.
To be reminded of Lincoln’s great speeches and laudable intents prompts the recognition that the man who penned the Gettysburg Address is the same man who frequently declared and acted on his cynical reaction to the black community that eventually became a pretext for the War. The actual facts do not inspire unalloyed confidence. Whether Lincoln ever resolved his internal conflict, if that is what it was, is a question that remains unanswered.
However, unless one is willing to undertake the research, one is condemned to circulate the customary beliefs and historical inaccuracies regarding America’s most beloved and significant president and his nation-changing War. And that is not a tenable position.
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