Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Chapter 3

Abraham Lincoln and the Pursuit of Ambition

Bring on a war . . . and . . . escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory.

—Abraham Lincoln

ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS A BRILLIANT POLITICIAN, A FAILED politician, an extremist, a pragmatist; honest as the day is long—and a smoke-filled-room, dirty-tricks operator. The same Abraham Lincoln who wanted nothing more than to preserve the Union also seems to have wanted to be president of the United States at any cost. Each of these descriptions identifies a central feature of Lincoln’s character that, contradictory as they may be, taken together made him into such a remarkable figure. Today he is remembered and revered because of what was accomplished in the Civil War. We will see, however, that all of it could have, and in all likelihood would have, been done without war. But had he not exacerbated the risk of war as the price for winning the presidency, his place in history might be minor, and his ambition to matter greatly would have been unfulfilled.

With any figure of Lincoln’s stature and nobility, it is tempting to gloss over unpleasant, or at least dissonant, truths about who he was. Yet we argue that those very truths were central—not incidental—to what he achieved. Our interest is in how the Civil War might have been avoided but for Lincoln’s personal ambition and the southern leadership’s poor decision making. We do so as a further cautionary tale that we hope will help us find future leaders whose path to greatness need not be strewn with blood and gore, but with the promotion of peace and prosperity for all. Once again it will be evident how profoundly right James Madison was in worrying that unfettered presidents would wage war for their own benefit and all-too-often at the expense of “the desire and duty of peace.”

We admire Abraham Lincoln today, as well we should, because we know, in ways his contemporaries did not, that he set into motion the transformation of America’s moral standing before the world. Most of us believe, and we are almost certainly right in that belief, that but for the assassin’s bullet, Lincoln would have proven a great fabricator of peace and reunion. Had he lived to serve out his second term, it seems likely that the century long foray into the “separate but equal” doctrine of segregation and repression might have never occurred. Of course, we cannot know because the assassin’s bullet did happen. But what can be known—and shown—is that to fulfill his personal ambition and, incidentally, to fabricate a better America, he needed to raise the risk of a civil war and all the dangers that implied, and therefore he maneuvered to gamble on the dissolution of the Union whose salvation he professed was his foremost ambition. And if we think fairly about him and his times we will see that without the bloodiest war in American history, we would almost certainly barely know his name today.

With or without Lincoln, slavery would have been extinguished long ago. How long it would have taken is a question intensely debated among historians. Whether postponing the moment of liberation for nearly 4 million slaves would have been a better or worse outcome depends on who is answering; it is a question that cannot have a definitive answer. We will return to that issue. For now, we know that Lincoln’s presidency cut short the productive lives of more than 700,000 Americans (northern and southern combined); that is, about 2.4 percent of the population of the United States and a vastly higher proportion of the working-age population. However justified in hindsight the cost of the Civil War was, we also need to remember that Lincoln did not contend that ending slavery was his goal.

We will argue that war most assuredly was Lincoln’s expedient to defeat the political vision that had come to be the law of the land, replacing it with a national future closer to his own moral standard. The great results he attained, like those of other political leaders, did not and do not require high-mindedness or altruism. Indeed, such achievements may often be precluded by a politician who sets out intent on making selfless sacrifices on behalf of others. Such men or women are unlikely to come to power and if they do they are even less likely to survive in office for long.1 Lincoln can hardly be said to have been a selfless altruist. He came to power by sowing division and discord. He was an ambitious, calculating man who saw opportunity and seized it when he could. That is certainly not a fault; it is simply a fact!

Great results in politics require leaders with ambition, vision, and a willingness to pay the price in hard work and political maneuvering to fulfill a dream. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, understood that in promoting and signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 he was turning the southern electorate over to the Republican Party. This was a great political price that had to be paid by future generations of Democrats (and less so, perhaps, by himself) to enable Johnson to fulfill his personal (and laudatory) vision for civil rights in America. The irony must not have been lost on Johnson that the Republican Party was to be the beneficiary of his choice to follow where Republican president Abraham Lincoln had earlier dared to tread. The southern states, after all, had voted against the Republicans (then the more progressive party) for more than one hundred years, starting in 1856. Then they anticipated that the Republican Party (under John Frémont) was committed to undoing the federal deal that, in their interpretation, created a nation that tolerated slavery. With Lincoln’s campaign in 1860, and then for a hundred more years, the South continued to vote against the Republican Party out of the realization that its fears had been justified. As Johnson feared, the Republican Party today and for a half century has dominated southern elections probably because of the Voting Rights Act, which expanded the enfranchisement of African American voters but stimulated higher turnout in the South by those opposed to the act, turning the Democrats’ former Dixiecrat southern stronghold into Republican territory, as we will explore in Chapter 5.

Lincoln must have asked himself from time to time whether the fulfillment of his political ambition and his vision for America was worth the price to be paid. But did he also ask, as we have suggested all presidents must, whether the price was worth it to “We, the people”? Were candidate Abraham Lincoln here to defend himself, he might well argue, as he did in 1861, that he indeed did ask himself this question and that his answer was yes. He addressed this issue in a letter to Senator John Hale from New Hampshire: “We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. . . . Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government.”2 Thus, president-elect Lincoln maintained, seemingly quite sensibly, that he was setting the nation on the path desired by “We, the people” as expressed through the ballot box. In his judgment it was others who promoted the idea of national dissolution and the grave danger of war.

Lincoln’s electoral defense was a good defense but a tad disingenuous. True, he won the presidential election, but then he did so with the smallest popular vote percentage of any American president except John Quincy Adams. And he won in an election in which the opposition—the Democratic Party—was divided, putting forth three candidates whose very division was fostered, nay instigated, by Lincoln’s own political maneuvers in 1858. Hence, the outcome of the 1860 election could readily be said to have masked the true will of the voting electorate, more than 60 percent of whom voted against Lincoln. The remainder of this chapter can be seen as an exploration of that hypothetical debate between Mr. Lincoln and ourselves regarding his extremism or moderation; his political talents and honesty; and the role of his ambition when confronted with his desire to save the Union. To conduct this debate properly, we must understand how slavery was handled by the country’s founders, how the Dred Scott decision of 1857 altered that understanding, and how Lincoln built his ultimate political success around the changes wrought in 1857.