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

The South’s Great Mistake

LINCOLN’S RELUCTANCE TO COMPROMISE WAS PART PERSONAL conviction; part loyalty to his core Republican constituency; and, in many accounts, an apparent failure to grasp how real the threat of dissolution was. In his 1858 campaign, Lincoln of course understood, as we have emphasized, that a sectional crisis was coming. As he said, “The tug has to come and better now, than any time hereafter.”41 And yet when it came he seems to have believed—or at least we are asked to believe that he believed—that it would pass without much consequence. As one scholar reports, “Lincoln seemed confused, incredulous, at what was happening to his country. He seemed not to understand how he appeared in southern eyes. . . . He could not accept the possibility that his election to the presidency might cause the collapse of the very system which had enabled him to get there.”42 Now here we must demur. Either, as Douglas professed, Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech was so inflammatory as to be the likely spark of civil war and Lincoln knew it, or, if not, we cannot escape the inference that Lincoln had taken leave of reality. We doubt very much that he did not understand how he was seen and what the ramifications were. The facts before him were too overwhelming for that excuse to hold water.

Consider the extraordinary fact that Lincoln, the presidential candidate of a national political party, did not even appear on the ballot in ten of the southern states. How could he have doubted that the southern electorate hated him? Given the hostile rhetoric that surrounded him, the public conviction by the moderate Stephen Douglas that Lincoln was calling for no less than a war against the South, and that Lincoln personally had been present to hear Douglas make that declaration, how could he have sustained the belief that the threat of dissolution and war was not real? If that is true, it flies in the face of claims that he was a brilliant politician. If it was not true, then we cannot escape the conclusion that he had maneuvered the country to the brink of dissolution and he had no intention to pull it back from that brink once his election was secured. He was going to make the country, as he indicated it must be, all free; and doing so peacefully, as he had written five years earlier, was an extinct possibility.

Still, one might object on the grounds that he had good reason to believe dissolution was a bluff. After all, many of the secession votes were close. In Virginia, for instance, the University of Richmond reported: “On April 4 [1861], as Unionist delegate John Baldwin met with Abraham Lincoln in Washington to discuss how war might be averted, the convention voted a second ordinance of secession down by a two-thirds majority. On April 17, after troops in South Carolina fired on Ft. Sumter and Lincoln called for troops to suppress the rebellion, delegates from Virginia voted to secede from the United States, 88 to 55.”43 Three other states seceded following Lincoln’s decision to defend Fort Sumter. Until then, many southern states, as Virginia illustrates, were deeply divided but chose—for the time being—against secession.

Just about every southern state was divided on the question of secession. Of course, these divisions could have fueled Lincoln’s alleged misconception that the crisis would pass without damaging the Union. But then, the close votes might also reflect the idea that he could have found a compromise to save the Union—but chose not to. Such a compromise had been put forward. The Crittenden Compromise proposed in December 1860, for instance, seemed to meet Lincoln’s avowed interest in preventing the spread of slavery while also addressing the slave South’s interest in preserving its “peculiar institution.” Senator Crittenden’s compromise included constitutional amendments that would have secured slavery “forever” where it already existed. His proposal included restoration of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had been voided in the Dred Scott ruling. In the end, Crittenden’s constitutional amendments and legislative proposals were supported in the South but were rejected by Lincoln and the Republican Party. In all likelihood, the decision to oppose the Crittenden Compromise probably reflected the loss of the last best hope of avoiding war.

Lincoln had advocated what the Republican core constituency wanted when, in 1858, he emphatically argued in the “House Divided” speech, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free .” And he again supported his core voters in 1860 even though doing so came at the expense of the Union. His actions throughout the lame duck period, and after he was inaugurated, supported and reinforced Stephen Douglas’s interpretation in 1858 of Lincoln’s intentions: “Lincoln advocates boldly and clearly a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free States against the slave States, a war of extermination to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other shall be subdued, and all the States shall either become free or become slave.”44

With the introduction of the Crittenden Compromise, it was clear as day that the South was prepared to give up on its Dred Scott gains and live within the federal bargain modified, as it had once been, by the Missouri Compromise. Loyalty to Lincoln’s electoral constituency, however, trumped his commitment to preserve the Union and did so in a way that belies the claim that he just did not see dissolution coming. Rather, a nation all free was his goal and that goal was anathema to the South. Just as Washington needed to rid himself of the British and the Indians, Lincoln needed either the unlikely acquiescence of the South or, more likely, to rid himself of the South so that he could go about the business of forging a nation that was all free. That meant, as Douglas had stated, war and, if victorious, that war meant Lincoln could both change the nation and vanquish the South. He stated as much in the “House Divided” speech, clear enough in meaning for anyone who chose to listen: “We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise councils may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later the victory is sure to come.”45 And, with many of his own mistakes delaying it, Lincoln proved right, victory did come.

Okay, so we have seen that the South was divided on the question of secession, and that Lincoln and his Republican Party were emphatic that they would not accept a compromise that meant the preservation of slavery. With that, some may conclude that the Civil War was inevitable. But was it? Secession was a hugely unnecessary step that reflected poor political judgment by southern leaders both about the likely response and the likely consequences of their actions. For starters, let us ask why in the world did the Civil War happen? Certainly there was not a united view in either the South or the North that secession should be allowed or should be prevented. Prominent journalists of the day, such as Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, shared the perspective Lincoln had articulated back in 1848 that it was a revolutionary right “upon the principles of 1776, to decide the question of a separate government for themselves.”46 In that view, the South’s secession would have been accepted quietly (with a mix of undoubted regret and relief) and no war would have happened. Still others in the North called for accepting the South’s terms, but as we have seen that was completely out of the question. Lincoln understood his election as a mandate to pursue the policies on which he had run, and those did not include giving in to whatever southern politicians wanted.

The answer to why the war happened, it seems, lies more in the personal quest for power by a number of competing politicians than in necessity, a point to which we will return in the “What If?” section of this chapter. To see why this is so, let’s do a tiny bit of “what if” reasoning now, starting with Abraham Lincoln. As central a figure as he was, still the bulk of the responsibility for the war lies, we believe, in the bad choices by a handful of ambitious southern politicians, such as Jefferson Davis and John Breckinridge, and even more so because of the ambition of the most extreme proslavery politicians, such as Robert Barnswell Rhett, William Loundes Yancey, Christopher Memminger, and Francis Wilkinson Pickens; and we will, therefore, assess them, too. That assessment will not be kind or forgiving.