Reconsidering Abraham Lincoln

[MediumTex]

I've been wanting to have an Abraham Lincoln discussion here for a while, so here goes:

To me, the whole Abraham Lincoln story is basically one giant myth.  As Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her excellent Team of Rivals, Lincoln was a distant fourth going into the Republican convention in 1860 and never should have even been in serious running for the nomination.  He was a frontier version of a second tier Republican presidential candidate like Rick Perry.  It was only through several masterstrokes of political strategy (along with the hubris of the top three candidates) that he was able to get the nomination.  When it comes to executive level experience going into the White House, however, Lincoln made Barack Obama look like FDR.

Lincoln was an exceptionally intelligent but essentially uneducated person with great personal warmth and charm.  I believe that the southerners in Congress instantly recognized that Lincoln was in way over his head and felt that they could push the secession agenda with little in the way of repercussions.  I think that many in the North also recognized that Lincoln was basically a charming but uneducated hillbilly, which matters because it is hard to lead people who don't respect you.  

As far as Lincoln's performance in office goes, I would say that the fact that the Civil War ever occurred was one of the most colossal failures of leadership in our country's history.  In Washington, it seems that almost no one respected Lincoln, including his own cabinet and his own generals (his wife was also the subject of widespread ridicule).  How weak a leader must you be that your own hand-picked assistants won't follow your directions?

Through Lincoln's incompetence as a President (I think that failure to prevent war and then failure to properly manage it is normally the result of political incompetence), the nation was almost destroyed, and yet somehow through all of the carnage that Lincoln presided over two narratives emerged from his Presidency: (1) that Lincoln freed the slaves (which is not exactly true, and ultimately is irrelevant to the issue of whether he was an effective leader--in fact, if you read the Emancipation Proclamation it only applied to areas that weren't under the control of the U.S. at the time it was written, so legally it actually freed no one), and (2) that Lincoln was a wise sage of a leader, when the truth is that he was tortured by self-doubt and indecision.

I'm sure that Lincoln was a wonderful person who was kind, personable, warm and very funny, but if you visit the Lincoln Memorial it's hard not to be struck with the mythic way in which it presents someone who was basically a country lawyer with pretty weak political and leadership skills.  To me, Abraham Lincoln is what you might have gotten if Davy Crockett had become President (and I love Davy Crockett, but I don't think he would have made a good President).

The one thing that you hear in every account of anyone who knew Lincoln is that he was very funny, and yet I have never seen a depiction of Lincoln with any expression other than that ultra-serious "weight-of-the-world-on-your shoulders" look.  It's like someone took this interesting but flawed man and basically spun a myth almost completely from their own imagination.  

It's so easy for me to imagine a U.S. history in which the country gradually transitioned out of slavery as industrialization slowly destroyed its whole economic structure without the country having to go through the agony of a civil war, but this would have taken a higher quality of Presidential leadership than Lincoln was capable of providing.  It's not Lincoln's fault that he was cast into this role, but to convert him into a saint after the fact is sort of bizarre to me.

As I went through school, I don't ever recall hearing any skeptical treatment of Lincoln from any teacher or professor.  Not one.  It's like people are experiencing a group delusion about this person.  It's weird.  I suppose there is maybe the sense that if you criticize Lincoln that suggests you might be supportive of the Confederacy's views on slavery, which is ridiculous.  I can be 100% opposed to slavery and still respect the right of sovereign states to both join a political union and secede from it without being attacked, and I can be 100% supportive of an expansive federal government and still point out that Lincoln was in many ways a bumbling and incompetent leader of that government.

[moda0306]

After reading some of Lincoln's near-abolitionist views word-for-word as he approached the years preceding his presidency (certainly before that he had different views on it, but I think many of our founding fathers' views changed drastically on this topic as well as time went on) I hardly get the impression that he was basically a hillbilly.  Especially when we're comparing him to the South which actually rejected Douglas as a Democratic Presidential candidate specifically because of his views on slavery, which were hardly even close to abolitionist, as was proven in his debates with Lincoln a few years earlier where he strenuously argued for any state to have the right to maintin slavery, and the North's obligation to return "fleeing property" of the South.

Further, I would agree completely that the fact that the war even happened is a tragedy.  However, the Southern states started to announce secession before he even took office, and were the first to fire weapons, so I have a bit of trouble seeing how the situation could have been avoided.  

If anyone was to attempt to both preserve the Union AND free all slaves during this period, I can see no other outcome than for him to be hated by many, even by people who agree with your political assertions, no matter what the outcome or how skillful a politician and leader you were.  The fact that he had succeeded at both is a testament to leadership, even if he ended up being reviled by everyone.  And your point about the Emancipation Proclomation is valid, but pretty irrelevant, since that was just a speech and wasn't taken very seriously.  It was the pushing of the passage of the 13th Amendment where his leadership was probably tested and atually had post-war teeth.

I definitely think there is more to the man than history books will tell, but I think labelling him a lucky hillbilly without any real leadership skills is not looking at what forces were working strongly against preserving the Union and abolishing slaver, both being multitudes more difficult together than on their own.

[MediumTex]

I don't mean "hillbilly" in a negative way; I mean "hillbilly" in the sense that a large portion of the educated urban population would be less likely to support him because he struck them as not being their equal.

It's not unlike what LBJ faced when he tried to keep Kennedy's team together after Kennedy's assassination.  Their lack of respect for him because they thought he was a hillbilly (they called him "Uncle Cornpone" behind his back) had all sorts of repercussions that ultimately manifested itself in another war debacle.

I'm not saying that Lincoln was not a good person.  What I'm saying is that he wasn't the right person for the job, which can be seen in the fact that he presided over a war that needn't have occurred.  Lots of nations were transitioning away from slavery in that period without completely destroying their countries in the process.  It's not inconceivable that it could have happened here more peacefully under more seasoned leadership.

[moda0306]

What leadership could have pierced the South's utter hatred for anyone that didn't fully support the Dred Scott decision and allow the actual spread of slavery into new territories?  I probably shouldn't even use the term "The South" in terms of trying to apply a single opinion to a group, especially when 40% of the population isn't being counted... but I think people get the idea.

I've heard the argument that the government could have literally paid slaveowners for their slaves, and that this was actually a big part of the concern of the Southern plutocracy (aka, the ones who likely controlled the South's political landscape).  Maybe that was a solution, but I hesitate to reward tyranny with payments to cease it.

Another reason my B.S. meter goes off when I hear about how the South's secession "wasn't about slavery, it was about federal gov't tyranny" is because if you look 50 years later when the political landscape changed a bit in terms of who stood for what, and it was Republicans such as Harding & Coolidge trying to limit federal power, and Wilson & FDR trying to expand it in ways that would make Lincoln blush, and neither were seeking much in the way of Civil Rights reforms for minorities, the South was vehimently on the side of the statists, not the libertarians.  How did they go from anti-federal government in one era, to solidly supporting massive expansions of federal government power in another era, right back to lambasting the federal government in the mid-20th century?

Basically, I see state & local governments, as Pointed Stick mentioned earlier, as tools that may help insure more accountability and hopefully also limit the federal government's infringement on individual rights.  However, they too often ended up simply infringing far more on individual rights themselves, and then screaming "states rights" when limited by the federal government.  Well if everything in the theme of the Constitution stems from individual rights, and the states are the ones most grossly violating them, I hesitate to feel like it's the federal government that was the most out of line during the 1860's... though both sides have a lot to answer for with hundreds of thousands dead.

[MediumTex]

I've heard the argument that the government could have literally paid slaveowners for their slaves, and that this was actually a big part of the concern of the Southern plutocracy (aka, the ones who likely controlled the South's political landscape).  Maybe that was a solution, but I hesitate to reward tyranny with payments to cease it.

But what if "tyranny" was one of the conditions on which the union was formed in the first place?

What would Thomas Jefferson have said if some representatives from New York had shown up at Monticello and announced that he was a tyrant and they were going to liberate all of his "property"?

There are no easy answers to these questions, but it's easy to sit here in 2012 and make it sound like it would have been easy to do this or that back in 1861, but it's hard when you have certain legal agreements in place that people are assuming will be honored (even if we consider them to be "wrong" today).

[moda0306]

I'm not saying these decisions would have been easy back then.  In fact, I'd probably be arguing a lot of your points to some degree, but I've had a lot more anti-Lincoln exposure lately, so I decided to really dive into the politics of the 1850's and beyond, and find the traditional anti-Lincoln or "states rights" arguments to be pretty hollow, though they absolutely deserve to be explored, because Lincoln did engage in a war that resulted in the deaths of massive numbers of Americans to do something as nebulous as "Preserve the Union."

Much like Jefferson, Lincoln moved the ball forward in terms of the relationship between government (all levels, not just the boogy-man federal) and individuals.  That is, not including some questionable things he did during the war, or even going to war in the first place.  I just don't like this beating around the bush regarding exactly what the Southern states were, which were, to me, Plutocratic-controlled tyrannical governments trying to cry foul over having to reduce the tyranny that they exert over individuals they had enslaved. 

If slavery really was on the way out, why were they trying vehimently to expand it Westward?  Why did it lose Douglas the support of the Southern Democrats?  If they really hated federal government power so much on a Jeffersonian philisophical level, they would have continued to 50 years later when they supported Woodrow Wilson, and later FDR, perhaps the two most federal-gov't-expansionary presidents in our history.  When you realize that most of the clash was actually about slavery, which many try to deny but is evident in so much of the debate back then, it becomes pretty clear.  I'd like to hear a Confederate apologist (not referring to anyone here as that, or even really using it as a pajorative) to explain to me when exactly they think slavery would have died out in the Southern states.  I wonder if it would have even gone away by the 20th century.  In fact, without any sort of compensation for the position they'd been put in, it basically didn't end. 

Let's say it had ended by 1900 or so... would slaves have been granted citizenship of any kind?  Or would they have maybe been slowly moved to communities, compounds, and gas chambers as they became less useful and more of a burden?  I mean, is it impossible to think that under the right leadership, the South would have acted any differently than Nazi Germany by 1930?  I mean if the Germans could rally behind the rounding-up and removal of very productive, educated members of their society, can we really put it past the people of the South to do something similar to people they had deemed to be near-animals?  This isn't to say that elements of the North wouldn't have.  Judging others as beneath you and group think are very natural and easy to fall into, and grow during difficult economic times.  Combine a charasmatic leader and willful ignorance and you have a pretty simple recipe for organized genocide.  I mean we probably weren't too far from it on a smaller scale with the internment of Japanese.

Sorry for rambling.  This is an amazingly interesting topic, or connected series of intertangled topics.  Soon enough we'll get back to Lincoln .

[MediumTex]

If slavery really was on the way out, why were they trying vehemently to expand it Westward?  Why did it lose Douglas the support of the Southern Democrats?  If they really hated federal government power so much on a Jeffersonian philosophical level, they would have continued to 50 years later when they supported Woodrow Wilson, and later FDR, perhaps the two most federal-gov't-expansionary presidents in our history.  When you realize that most of the clash was actually about slavery, which many try to deny but is evident in so much of the debate back then, it becomes pretty clear.  I'd like to hear a Confederate apologist (not referring to anyone here as that, or even really using it as a perjorative) to explain to me when exactly they think slavery would have died out in the Southern states.  I wonder if it would have even gone away by the 20th century.  In fact, without any sort of compensation for the position they'd been put in, it basically didn't end.

Well, actually it never completely ended, except today we don't call them "slaves", we call them "prisoners."

What Do Prisoners Make for Victoria's Secret?
From Starbucks to Microsoft: a sampling of what US inmates make, and for whom

By Caroline Winter
July/August 2008

Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor. Here's a sampling of what they make, and for whom.

Eating in: Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens). Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup "entirely consistent with our mission statement."

Around the Big House: Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips. Bullwhips?

Windows dressing: In the mid-1990s, Washington prisoners shrink-wrapped software and up to 20,000 Microsoft mouses for subcontractor Exmark (other reported clients: Costco and JanSport). "We don't see this as a negative," a Microsoft spokesman said at the time. Dell used federal prisoners for PC recycling in 2003, but stopped after a watchdog group warned that it might expose inmates to toxins.

Back to school: Texas and California inmates make dorm furniture and lockers, diploma covers, binders, logbooks, library book carts, locker room benches, and juice boxes.

Patriotic duties: Federal Prison Industries, a.k.a. Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers' uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have "produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)" and "wiring harnesses for jets and tanks." In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.

The law won: In Texas, prisoners make officers' duty belts, handcuff cases, and prison-cell accessories. California convicts make gun containers, creepers (to peek under vehicles), and human-silhouette targets.

A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace "Made in Honduras" labels on garments with "Made in the usa."

Open wide: At California's prison dental laboratory, inmates produce a complete prosthesis selection, including custom trays, try-ins, bite blocks, and dentures.

Constructive criticism: Prisoners in for burglary, battery, drug and gun charges, and escape helped build a Wal-Mart distribution center in Wisconsin in 2005, until community uproar halted the program. (Company policy says, "Forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart.")

On call: Its inmate call centers are the "best kept secret in outsourcing," Unicor boasts. In 1994, a contractor for gop congressional hopeful Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty. Metcalf, who prevailed, said he never knew.

LINK TO STORY

Back to moda's questions:

Let's say it had ended by 1900 or so... would slaves have been granted citizenship of any kind?  Or would they have maybe been slowly moved to communities, compounds, and gas chambers as they became less useful and more of a burden?  I mean, is it impossible to think that under the right leadership, the South would have acted any differently than Nazi Germany by 1930?  I mean if the Germans could rally behind the rounding-up and removal of very productive, educated members of their society, can we really put it past the people of the South to do something similar to people they had deemed to be near-animals?  This isn't to say that elements of the North wouldn't have.  Judging others as beneath you and group think are very natural and easy to fall into, and grow during difficult economic times.  Combine a charismatic leader and willful ignorance and you have a pretty simple recipe for organized genocide.  I mean we probably weren't too far from it on a smaller scale with the internment of Japanese.

You can't make people be better than they are, but it seems to me that harnessing fossil fuels on a large scale and the mass production of the tractor in the early 20th century would have ended slavery if for no other reason than the economics of slavery no longer worked.

You can't change what happened, but I am certain that if the Civil War had been avoided by a more able statesman than Lincoln, slavery probably have ended by the end of the 19th century.  As far as what would have happened to the freed slaves, I don't know.  As I said, you can't make people be better than they are (even though I wish you could).

[moda0306]

Here is a link to the Declaration of Causes of Seceding States for Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Mississippi.


http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html

Word Search Phase 1:

If you search the word "tariff," you get zero hits.

If you search the word "tax," you get 1 hit.

If you search the word "agricultur," (to capture all forms of "agriculture") you get 2 hits

If you search the world "industr," (to capture all forms of "industry") you get 1 hit

If you search the word "Lincoln," you get 1 hit.

Word Search Phase 2:

If you search the word "slave," you get 82 hits.

If you search the word "aboli," (to capture all forms of "abolish), you get 8 hits, still more than Phase 1 combined.

If you search the word "negro," you get 5 hits, still as many as Phase 1 combined

Quotes:

Mississippi (Second Sentence): "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."

Georgia (first line of their Causes): "For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

South Carolina (explaining why they are now finally deciding to secede): "but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue."

Texas: She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time."

An interesting article about Secession:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/f ... ory_1.html

[MediumTex]

moda,

It looks like there is a pretty good book addressing this topic of post-Civil War slavery all the way through the World War II era: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

Perhaps Lincoln didn't accomplish as much as people imagine he did.

In case one is tempted to only focus on the South in this discussion, remember what was happening in the American West in the 19th century with Native Americans, much of which occurred in the decades after the Civil War.  In other words, a Native American might laugh at the idea that the Civil War somehow ended slavery in America in 1865.  For many Native Americans, their slavery started after 1865.

[MediumTex]

Here is a link to the Declaration of Causes of Seceding States for Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Mississippi.

But what does that have to do with the question of whether Lincoln was an effective political leader?

[moda0306]

Here is a link to the Declaration of Causes of Seceding States for Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Mississippi.

But what does that have to do with the question of whether Lincoln was an effective political leader?

It has to do with the motivations of the people he was dealing with.  They weren't simply pissed about tariffs.  It was almost completely about the status of slavery and the economic impact limitations on it might have in the South. 

If it was simply about tarriffs and some other cruel expansion of the federal government, then maybe Lincoln could have simply said, "Hey, Dixiecrats, I really don't want to start a war over taxes or where federal dollars go... Let's work this out and figure out what our economic differences are without expanding slavery.  How does that sound?"

They would have laughed in his face.  It was almost ALL about slavery.  He would have had to spew avid anti-abolitionist rhetoric for them to even consider him.  Any acceptable "political leadership" short of telling the South they were full of it and sticking an army in their face would have resulted in Secession (though I do understand some states Seceded that were on the fence after Lincoln's invasion of the South).  Based on all this, I don't think there's a political leader in the world that could have avoided war without either accepting secession or given into huge demands by the slave states regarding returning runaway slaves, expanding slavery westward, and even the status of blacks in the North that had been free since 1776 (see implications of Dred Scott decision)... unless, of course, we decided to pay the Southern slaveowners for their slaves, but if that Wa Po article is true, and these slaves were worth more than all the factories and railroads in the north, then we literally would have had to bankrupt the rest of the Country to send stimulus to the South.

I can fully understand (for now) the North accepting Secession (which isn't really showing leadership so much as accepting realities), but I don't see how anyone could have threaded the political needle at that time without basically rolling over on the South's will to spread slavery west and non-Citizenship North, or engaging in the greatest federal redistribution of wealth of all time to Southern plutocrats.  Neither of those are leadership, either, IMO.

I don't think anyone could have come out of that time looking like a great leader.

[MediumTex]

I don't think anyone could have come out of that time looking like a great leader.

Ironically, though, many did, including Lincoln:



I get that he did the best he could with a difficult situation, but it's a bit like saying that if your wife wants to leave you, you may have to beat her up because you can't stand the thought of your happy family being broken apart.  The fact is that if you look through history political unions break up all of the time, and a massive war isn't a necessary part of the process.

The Union was only about 70 years old at the time of the Civil War.  What was the big deal about a few states seceding?  Are we saying that the right to secede wasn't implicit when they joined the union in the first place?  Did they forfeit that part of their sovereignty?  I don't think that was their understanding.

[Pointedstick]

I think it's important to look at both sides: "states' rights" was important to the south because slavery was important. The south likes to focus on the former, the conventional narrative is that it was all about the latter, but the truth is that they were deeply intertwined.

The southern states felt like their "tradition" of slavery was under attack, which it was. They latched onto the anti-federalist philosophy as a way of providing intellectual ammunition to their arguments beyond "well, we want to keep slaves because that's the way we do it and we like it that way." So this political idea of decentralized power happened to give them the ability to do what they wanted, but that doesn't mean that their support for it was a complete farce. People and societies always support philosophies because they provide a justification for what they already wanted to do.

But I think you're right, moda, that in the end, slavery was more important to them then the states' rights principle was. If they felt that the federal government was on their side, they would have eagerly embraced federal power, as they did with Wilson who did his best to pack the entire federal civil service with racists.

To play devil's advocate to MT a bit more here, another factor was the USA's international standing. Europe was fully expecting our republican experiment to fail, and I think Lincoln believed that letting the south secede (which they had been moving towards for a while) would be admitting failure to a bunch of nations that were standing there fully prepared to say, "See? I told you so!" and then follow up with an invasion force. I deeply disagree with his decision to fundamentally alter the social compact by forcing the southerners to remain in a political union they wanted to leave, but I think there's another angle to this story than just a country bumpkin blundering around misreading the cultural zeitgeist.

[MediumTex]

I think it's important to look at both sides: "states' rights" was important to the south because slavery was important. The south likes to focus on the former, the conventional narrative is that it was all about the latter, but the truth is that they were deeply intertwined.

The southern states felt like their "tradition" of slavery was under attack, which it was. They latched onto the anti-federalist philosophy as a way of providing intellectual ammunition to their arguments beyond "well, we want to keep slaves because that's the way we do it and we like it that way." So this political idea of decentralized power happened to give them the ability to do what they wanted, but that doesn't mean that their support for it was a complete farce. People and societies always support philosophies because they provide a justification for what they already wanted to do.

The ironic thing, though, is that the same federal government that professed to be so concerned about the welfare of African Americans in the South had no qualms whatsoever in coming decades of engaging in a far more brutal oppression of Native Americans in the West (i.e., the goal of the Confederacy was never the wholesale extermination of African Americans, while the federal government's policy toward Native Americans was to kill as many of them as possible, by any means necessary).

Does anyone else notice this tension?  Maybe it was a lot simpler and came down to this: In both the Civil War and the genocidal campaign against Native Americans that followed, the U.S. government was basically saying: "We don't like to be challenged by anyone, anywhere, anytime.  Ignore this at your own peril."

Come to think of it, the U.S. government has been doing that sort of thing ever since.

[MediumTex]

You know, the more I think about it, when you consider the U.S. rationales involved in the Civil War and the later genocide of Native Americans, you find two very flexible rationales for U.S. foreign action:

1. "We are only acting to free an oppressed population from a group of tyrants," and

2. "We are only acting to make an area safe for our preferred form of political and economic arrangements."

In either case, it is basically a pretext for the expansion of federal power.  I'm not saying that this hasn't in some cases been a force for good--I'm just saying that it is an incremental concentration of political and military power that if left unchecked has throughout history always seemed to lead to bad outcomes.

[moda0306]

I thought we agreed the North engaged in the war to preserve the strength of the Union, and that freeing slaves was secondary...

[Pointedstick]

I think it's pretty obvious that the federal government didn't give a rat's ass about freeing the slaves. The abolitionist Republicans did, and their first elected president Abraham Lincoln did, but he's specifically written about how his primary goal was preserving the union:

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_L ... ancipation

The south supported states' rights and secession because they wanted to preserve slavery; the north opposed them because they wanted to preserve their power.

[moda0306]

A pretty interesting article on whether states had the right to secede.  I'm sure there are better out there.  Seems like it's not even addressed in the constitution, and while I tend to agree that if political difference reach a certain point, one group should have a right to leave another, I can't help but agree with with Lincoln's assertion that you can't simple dodge in and out of a Union.  There's a free-rider aspect to the whole thing, and the US government had property in these states.... that the states and the federal government were unbreakably linked.

http://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/ ... uth-secede

Pointed,

Very well put. I think we're in agreement.  SOME northerners vehimently opposed slavery and pounced on the political opportunity.  I wonder, though, who the real pushers of westward wars with Indians were?

[arizonafan1]

Gents-

by far the best discussion I have "heard" in a long time.  all of you have brought up profound points, the most interesting for me being the links provided by moda.  seeing it in "their" own words was eye opening.  I wish I had known of these Declaration of Causes of Seceding States for Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Mississippi prior to a recent history class, for the instructor made it clear that it was his opinion that slavery (to the Civil War) was to quote him, "inconsequential" and any discussion of slavery was propagated by the uninformed.  I also appreciate the civility of the discussion.  well done gents.

[moda0306]

Arizonafan,

I really have no horse in this race, even though most people here would probalby see me as a bit of a lib (my lib friends see me has a cold-hearted conservative... I think I'm just a dick who likes playing devil's advocate ).  I really just want to learn as many truths about this time period as I can.  I understand that people end up in situations that reinforce their racist preconceptions so I don't hold some massive hatred towards the South or "victims of their time."  However, I really don't think the secession movement had to do with much else besides slavery.

I was amazed as I read and searched those documents!!  I mean I kind of thought slavery was more a part of it than some were trying to illustrate, but I think PS said it best...  States have their role in limiting central government power, but the South hijacked the movement for little more than maintaining slavery.

In fact, I'm starting to get pretty curious as to whether, other then limitations on slavery, the Republicans were really expanding the role of the Federal government all that much at all... Did your instructor have some alternative ideas as to what the federal government was actually doing that supposedly pissed them off so much?

Gawd help me if I hear "TARIFFS!" one more time .  

[MediumTex]

If anyone is not familiar with the attack on Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856, the following account will give you a flavor for how charged the slavery issue was years before the Civil War broke out:

May 22, 1856
The Caning of Senator Charles Sumner

On May 22, 1856, the "world's greatest deliberative body" became a combat zone.  In one of the most dramatic and deeply ominous moments in the Senate's entire history, a member of the House of Representatives entered the Senate chamber and savagely beat a senator into unconsciousness.

The inspiration for this clash came three days earlier when Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts antislavery Republican, addressed the Senate on the explosive issue of whether Kansas should be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state.  In his "Crime Against Kansas" speech, Sumner identified two Democratic senators as the principal culprits in this crime—Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina.  He characterized Douglas to his face as a "noise-some, squat, and nameless animal . . . not a proper model for an American senator."  Andrew Butler, who was not present, received more elaborate treatment.  Mocking the South Carolina senator's stance as a man of chivalry, the Massachusetts senator charged him with taking "a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean," added Sumner, "the harlot, Slavery." 

Representative Preston Brooks was Butler's South Carolina kinsman.  If he had believed Sumner to be a gentleman, he might have challenged him to a duel.  Instead, he chose a light cane of the type used to discipline unruly dogs.  Shortly after the Senate had adjourned for the day, Brooks entered the old chamber, where he found Sumner busily attaching his postal frank to copies of his "Crime Against Kansas" speech.

Moving quickly, Brooks slammed his metal-topped cane onto the unsuspecting Sumner's head.  As Brooks struck again and again, Sumner rose and lurched blindly about the chamber, futilely attempting to protect himself.  After a very long minute, it ended.

Bleeding profusely, Sumner was carried away.  Brooks walked calmly out of the chamber without being detained by the stunned onlookers.  Overnight, both men became heroes in their respective regions.

Surviving a House censure resolution, Brooks resigned, was immediately reelected, and soon thereafter died at age 37.  Sumner recovered slowly and returned to the Senate, where he remained for another 18 years.  The nation, suffering from the breakdown of reasoned discourse that this event symbolized, tumbled onward toward the catastrophe of civil war.

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[Hobbery]

In a debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, honest Abe said this:

"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 forever 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."

I love that quote.  You guys might enjoy some articles by Tom DiLorenzo on this topic.

[moda0306]

I think Abe literally went through a transformation in how he felt about blacks throughout the Civil War.  I don't know what he possibly could have gained politically by trying to pass the 13th Amendment before the end of the war, when I think the obvious political move would have been to make peace by any means necessary.

I hear things awful about what the North did in the South, but it seems to me Lincoln tried immensely to keep and regain peace with them after the fact... though people willing to start a war over the mere thought of losing slavery probably don't see it that way. 

Long-story-short, if Lincoln was a brutal racist (arguably was by today's standards and some of the things he said), and the South hated him for being a slave-sympathizer abolitionist (they did), then how horribly racist must the people of the Southern states been?  I definitely agree with losing a bit of our hero-worship with Lincoln, but let's do that only after losing this obsession with the idiocy of prioritizing states rights and property rights (in terms of people being property) over individual rights.

[Pointedstick]

I love that quote.  You guys might enjoy some articles by Tom DiLorenzo on this topic.

To be clear, and for the benefit of any who may be reading, you love that quote for the picture that it paints of Lincoln, rather than out of any agreement with the sentiment expressed, right?

[MediumTex]

moda,

I appreciate what you're saying, but did Lincoln's war create enough of an improvement in the life of the average black southerner to justify its enormous cost in the form of dead soldiers, maimed soldiers and a nation that was almost destroyed?

If it was up to me I would outlaw slavery in a second, but Lincoln didn't have that choice. The choice he had was to wage a war whose bloody cost was known, but its benefits were unclear.

I think that a lot of southern blacks a hundred years after the end of the Civil War felt like things still weren't a lot better compared to 1865.

I do, however, think that enormous strides have been made in this country since the 1960s in the areas of civil rights and race relations generally, which I think speaks well of our whole society.