Mr Lincoln was dealing with mouth-breathing morons of the lowest order: moral degenerates and warmongers. How exactly could he have prevented war, short of ignoring attacks on US forces and installations?
Terrible flaws in Mr. Lincoln's character enabled the War Between The States.
Lincoln initiated a war in which an estimated 625,000 Americans died. This is nearly as many as all the Americans who have died in all the other wars of the United States. Although Lincoln was obviously not the only cause of the Civil War, he was probably more responsible for the war than any other individual.
Slavery was one of the paramount issues that provoked the conflict between the southern slave states and the northern states. Lincoln was a ruthlesss politician, yet he did not consider himself a radical abolitionist.
Lincoln definitely hated slavery, and he believed it is wrong. However, he took the political position that slavery was authorized by the United States Constitution in the states where it already existed. He made this policy clear in his speeches and reiterated it in his first inaugural address on .
Lincoln represented the new Republican party that was formed by northerners. In the election of 1860 he was one of four candidates and won a majority in the electoral college even though he got less than forty percent of the popular vote.
Many abolitionists had advocated that northern states could secede in order to form a nation that would be free of slave states. During the transition between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration the Buchanan administration allowed seven of the southern states to withdraw.
Why did seven southern states secede when Lincoln had promised to protect slavery in their states and even enforce the controversial Fugitive Slave Law in the other states? The South felt exploited by the North because of the high tariffs that were the largest source of Federal taxation that resulted in southern taxes being used in other parts of the country. As a former Whig, Lincoln was a strong advocate of high protective tariffs. The Morrill Tariff Act was passed on March 2, 1861, and tariffs were increased early in Lincoln’s presidency to raise revenues to pay for the war.
South Carolina seceded on December 24, 1860, and by February 1, 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also voted and declared secession. Six days later these seven states adopted a constitution for the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama, and they elected Jefferson Davis president. If these were revolutions, they were quite peaceful so far. They went through some democratic process by conventions and in the state legislatures, and apparently their state governments accepted the new nation with little resistance.
The most difficult bones of contention became the federal forts and installations in the southern states and the collection of tariff revenues in southern ports. The Federal forces in Charleston harbor withdrew from other forts and moved into the most defensible Fort Sumter, which was a customs house used to collect duties. South Carolina had sent three commissioners, who had arrived in Washington on December 26 to negotiate a treaty between the new republic and the United States in order to resolve disputes over the forts, the arsenal, and lighthouses, to divide the public property and apportion the public debt, and to settle any other issues necessary to establishing South Carolina as an independent state. President Buchanan took the weak position that he had no authority to decide any of these questions, and he declined to make any preparations to fight over them.
Lincoln took the strong position, which some would call tyrannical, that states have no right to secede from the Union. He believed it was his obligation as President to enforce the laws that would keep the states in the Union even against their will as expressed by democratic conventions and state legislatures. His policy is ironic and even hypocritical because this position conflicts with Lincoln’s own doctrine of the right of revolution that he expressed in Congress on January 12, 1848 during the Mexican War when he said,
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 so much of the territory as they inhabit.
More than this, a majority of any portion of such people
may revolutionize, putting down a minority,
intermingled with or near about them,
who may oppose their movement.
Such minority was precisely the case
of the Tories of our own revolution.
It is a quality of revolutions not to go
by old lines or old laws,
but to break up both and make new ones.
In his inaugural address President Lincoln warned against a civil war while promising that he would not invade the South. Yet he indicated that the Federal Government would continue to occupy its property in the South and would attempt to collect “duties and imposts.” He promised he would not impose “obnoxious strangers” in Federal offices in hostile regions. The mails would continue unless repelled. He called for “a peaceful solution of the national troubles and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections.” However, in his view this came to mean only by the retention of the states in the Union.
Early in his presidency Lincoln rejected the option of letting the southern states withdraw peacefully. He took the position that secession is illegal and that the use of force against the Federal Government was rebellion and treason against the United States. He refused to recognize the Confederate States as legal entities and would not let anyone in his administration negotiate with their representatives. He also rejected an offer of mediation by Napoleon III of France. In March 1861 Jefferson Davis sent peace commissioners to Washington with an offer to pay for all Federal property in the South and to take on the southern portion of the national debt. However, Lincoln refused even to acknowledge them, thus blocking any attempt to resolve the conflicts by peaceful means. He took the hard line that the southern states must return to the Union. Unless they did so, or unless he relinquished the forts and tariffs, it became inevitable that the two sides would fight. His position has been compared to that of the British empire, which demanded that their American colonists pay their taxes.
Lincoln was careful to avoid beginning the war with an attack. However, he managed to instigate an attack on Fort Sumter by refusing to negotiate with South Carolina or to withdraw Federal forces from there. He informed the government of South Carolina that he was sending in supplies to his besieged men with the warning that he would retaliate against an attack.
President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet authorized the attack by the forces of South Carolina that began the fighting. Lincoln had provoked it by insisting on keeping control over Federal forts in their territory. He took the position that a minority who lost an election should not be allowed to withdraw from the nation, and he jumped to the erroneous conclusion that to do so would destroy democracy. Yet from the other point of view, he was denying democracy to the seceding states. If he had recognized their right to be independent states, surely both nations could have co-existed as republics. I do not believe that we should be blind to these democratic rights, as he was, simply because we believe that slavery is wrong or because we have a desire that the Union should be perpetual.
Lincoln as many evil men do had extraordinary determination, and he eventually found generals ruthless enough to win battles while suffering enormous losses. During the Civil War about 2,100,000 men served in the Union Army, and about 850,000 were in the Confederate Army.
On April 22 Rev. Richard Fuller had led a delegation of 35 delegates of the Young Men’s Christian Association from Baltimore, and he asked President Lincoln to avoid war by recognizing the independence of the southern states; but Lincoln obstinately referred to Washington, Jackson, and manhood in refusing to consider a peaceful approach. He complained that people in Baltimore had harassed Federal troops on their way to Washington, and five days later he suspended the writ of habeas corpus so that such people could be arrested without being charged with a crime. Conflicts in Missouri led to the imposition of martial law there. In May a list of more than a hundred newspapers that opposed the war was published, and Lincoln ordered Postmaster General Blair to deny those papers mail delivery, the usual means of circulating newspapers at that time. President Lincoln widened the suspension of habeas corpus, and during the summer of 1861 Maryland legislators who favored secession were imprisoned so that they could not even meet to decide the issue.
General Nathaniel Banks reported to Lincoln that every Maryland legislator who advocated peace had been arrested, and in their November elections judges were instructed to disallow votes for candidates who opposed the war. Peace Party ballots were a different color so that they could be thrown out, and those carrying them were arrested. In the first ten months of the war the Federal Government arrested 854 civilians.
After suffering several defeats by the Confederates led by General Stonewall Jackson, General John Pope began waging war on civilians in Virginia. His General Order No. 11 was issued on July 23, 1862 and required men behind Union lines to take a loyalty oath to the United States; those suspected of breaking their oath could be shot and have their property confiscated. Hundreds of southern churches were burned, and ministers who refused to pray publicly for Lincoln were imprisoned. On July 25 Pope issued General Order No. 13 which ordered soldiers not to guard private homes or property of those who were hostile to the Federal Government. This and the previous General Order No. 5 allowed Union soldiers to rob and mistreat civilians.
Two days after he announced the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the nation. Careful research by scholars, such as Mark E. Neely, Jr., indicates that during the Civil War the Federal Government imprisoned more than 14,000 civilians for opposing the Government or its war in some way. Lincoln authorized military officers to shut down newspapers if they were disrupting recruiting or the war effort.
Lincoln also had imperial ambitions for the United States, and he used Government subsidies to finance the transcontinental railroad to the west coast. In 1862 a crop failure caused starvation among the Santee Sioux because the Federal Government refused to pay them the $1,410,000 owed them from the sale of 24 million acres in 1851. When the Sioux revolted, General John Pope tried to exterminate them. Hundreds of Indians were held as prisoners of war and were given military trials that sentenced 303 to death. Thirty-nine were put to death in the largest mass execution in the history of the United States.
Lincoln was ambitious on behalf of the United States and did not want to see the empire divided. He developed the power of the imperial presidency as commander-in-chief by arrogating to himself extra-constitutional “war powers.”
Let us explore various scenarios of what might have happened if Lincoln had allowed the South to secede. In the 19th century most nations in the world abolished slavery by peaceful means. The British freed all the slaves in their empire in six years, completing the process in 1840. Most Latin American nations emancipated all their slaves between 1813 and 1854, and the gradual liberation of slaves in Brazil was completed in 1888. The only other violent emancipation of slaves was the slave uprising in Haiti in 1794.
Clearly the historical trend in this era was toward emancipation and the abolition of slavery. The proportion of slaves in the population had been declining for three decades in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and most of Virginia. The American Civil War, which Lincoln called the War of the Rebellion and others called the War Between the States, cost $6.6 billion and was borne about equally by both sides. The greatest cost of the Civil War was the death of 625,000 people—one-third in combat and two-thirds by disease. Nearly forty percent of the American economy was destroyed directly by the war. From the monetary costs alone all the slaves could have been freed by compensating their former owners while providing each of the former slaves with forty acres.
If Lincoln had agreed to negotiate the settlement of the Federal installations in the seceded states and their portion of the national debt, and if he gave up the exploitative taxes, then most of the costs of the war probably could have been saved. The remaining northern states may have lost some of the wealth they were exploiting from the South by the tariffs, but that would have been a small loss compared to the war costs. The greatest advantage of a peaceful settlement would have been saving the 625,000 lives that were lost and the other injuries. One can hardly overestimate the psychological trauma caused by young men being forced to kill their fellow countrymen in miserable conditions that caused so many to die of disease. Many civilians were also killed, wounded, or imprisoned.
If some of the slave states had remained in the Union, then they would have continued as before. Gradual emancipation with compensation to the former owners might have been negotiated so that the Union would eventually have become free of slavery. The question is how long the Confederate States would have maintained their “peculiar institution” of slavery against the trend of modern history. Instead of being forced to emancipate the slaves without compensation, they could have worked out some sort of gradual emancipation eventually. Without a war surely almost all those staying in the Union would have been much better off. Also the whites in the seceded states would have been more prosperous and safe compared to the utter defeat they suffered in the war and during the military occupation referred to as “Reconstruction.”
One can argue that the slaves in the seceded states would have been worse off. Yet they also suffered in the devastating war. The southern slaves liberated by the North were given a period of twelve years to reconstruct their lives during which they were favored with exceptional political opportunities because of the Union occupation that disenfranchised the rebels. Yet the resentment of the white southerners to having this forced on them led to a strong reaction after Reconstruction was ended in 1877. The whites then developed the segregation system of Jim Crow laws that perpetuated hatred between the races for the next century. So for several generations this discrimination lowered the quality of life for the slaves’ descendants.
If there had been no war, the northern abolitionists could have found ways to help the slaves in the South, and most likely the Fugitive Slave Law would not have been enforced. The northerners might have used economic pressures to urge the southerners to emancipate their slaves. .
After the Confederate States emancipated their slaves, they would likely have wanted to be readmitted into the United States. Thus the nation could have been reunited with less resentment than after a war because the northerners would have respected the right of the southerners to exercise their own sovereignty and learn their own lessons their own way without having them forced upon them.
by Sanderson Beck
