Thanks.
Recently I’ve seen strong parallels between southern and “moderate” attitudes towards slavery in the 1850s and liberal attitudes towards communism in the 1960s thru 1980s.
In each case it was those who denounced a great moral evil who were held responsible for any disruption that arose. If everybody just pretended slavery (or communism) wasn’t evil then we could have peace in our time.
Anybody remember the uproar when Reagan called the USSR an “evil empire?” Most of those who criticized him at the time didn’t even bother to dispute the accuracy of his characterization, they were just infuriated that someone had dared to use forbidden language.
There was remarkably similar reaction to Lincoln’s rather more restrained statement that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Didn’t he know saying such things could lead to secession and civil war? Lincoln’s most effective counter-punch to his critics was to point out that they had an argument not with him, but with a somewhat higher authority, Christ, who first used the expression.
One significant difference between the reactions to Lincoln and Reagan is that Reagan’s policy was to drop the decades-old policy of containment and to drive communist forces back where possible.
Lincoln was only trying to reestablish the recently dropped policy of containment of slavery and prevent its further expansion.
Indeed.
Most people don't seem to realize exactly how hotheaded and ill-considered secession was.
The reaction to Lincoln's election among Democrats in 1860 was as hysterical and stupid as the reaction to Bush's election among Democrats in 2000.
Sometimes, in a republic, your favorite candidate does not win. That's one of the risks of living in a free society.
Lincoln's position was simple: he was not in favor of creating new slave states - he believed the existing roster of slave states was sufficient.
Not a particularly extreme position at all. And he was not really in a position to do a lot about that policy goal, since he would have been a Republican president with a Democrat majority in the House and Senate.
Yet the original Confederacy seceded before Lincoln was ever sworn in.
No honest analysis of the situation in 1860 would say that the architects of the Confederacy really believed that Lincoln would be an effective President capable of enacting even his own stated agenda, let alone any laws that would have injured slavery in the Southern section.
The reason why they acted without even having the specious justification that was later claimed was because the writing was on the wall: slavery was not catching on in the territories, the free state population was much larger and growing rapidly - close to 90% of all immigrants came to free states.
Informed Southerners knew that by 1870 there would be several new free states and that the 1870 and 1880 censuses would, at the then-current pace, reduce the South's Congressional delegation to a size where it could no longer automatically derail legislation perceived detrimental to its sectional interests.
Calhoun knew this in 1850 - hence his "concurrent majority" plan to give the South a legally-enshrined veto.
There was no legal way the South could stop the inexorable movement of demography. So they decided to act illegally before their self-created numerical and financial disadvantage grew any greater.