Posted on 05/09/2005 9:35:24 PM PDT by CHARLITE
For the most part, I agree with Peter Lawler’s critique of the recent New York Times column by David Brooks on Lincoln and the evangelical abolitionists. But Lawler says one thing that is dead wrong and needs to be corrected. Lawler writes that “Lincoln opposed abolitionism before the Civil War because he believed it was unconstitutional; the Constitution only opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories. Abolitionism was a revolutionary principle, and it could finally only be justified by Lincoln after civil war had begun.” While Lawler is correct in observing that Lincoln was no abolitionist, his argument plays into the hands of Lincoln’s detractors who argue that Lincoln really cared nothing about black freedom and only accepted the principle of emancipation out of desperation.
Lawler’s argument also misses a point that Lincoln understood very well: The key to ending slavery where it existed lay not with the national government but with the states. Lawler needs to read Allan Guelzo’s remarkable book, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America.
Guelzo argues persuasively that Lincoln’s “face was set toward the goal of emancipation from the day he first took the presidential oath.” To achieve this goal, he planned to pursue a policy of legislated, gradual, compensated emancipation from the very outset of his presidency. He believed he could convince Congress to appropriate funds for compensating slave owners to gradually free their slaves. His plan was to begin where slavery was weakest: in the northern-most slave states, especially Delaware.
The key to his strategy was to prevent the expansion of slavery into the federal territories while working to convince the legislatures of slave states to changes their statutes relating to slavery. After all, the Constitution left the issue of slavery to the states. This state legislative strategy also offered the best chance for keeping the issue of emancipation out of the federal court system, where an unfavorable judgment, a likelihood as long as Roger Taney was chief justice, could set back its prospects.
This strategy also explains what seems to be his total lack of concern about the consequences of the proposal at the beginning of his term for an amendment foreclosing forever the possibility that the federal government could interfere with the institution of slavery, even by future amendment. Lincoln’s detractors have pointed to this amendment as more evidence that he didn’t really care about ending slavery. But he was willing to accept it because he didn’t think it really mattered and it certainly didn’t interfere with his own strategy for ending slavery.
Thus while he was willing to accept this proposal as a way of bringing the seven states that had seceded back into the Union fold at the time of his inauguration, he adamantly refused any compromise on the expansion of slavery. In a series of letters written to Lyman Trumbull, William Kellogg, Elihu Washburne, and Thurlow Weed in December, 1860, Lincoln adjured them to “entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery.”
Lincoln’s strategy relied on the economic principles of supply and demand. He believed that if he could prevent the expansion of slavery into the federal territories and prevail upon state legislatures, beginning with the northern-most slave states, to accept gradual, compensated emancipation, the demand for slaves would fall while the supply would increase in the deep south. The combined effect would be to reduce the value of slave property. By thus “shrinking” slavery, he would make it uneconomical and once again place it back on the eventual road to extinction that he believed the Founders had envisioned.
The outbreak of war derailed the original version of his grand scheme, but even after the war began, Lincoln believed that if he could convince the legislatures of the loyal slave states to agree to compensated emancipation, he could end the rebellion, restore the Union, and begin the end of slavery. He reasoned that the combination of military success against the Confederacy and compensated emancipation in the loyal slave states would lead to the collapse of the Confederacy, which had staked its hopes on eventually incorporating the so-called border states.
But neither condition came to pass: Lincoln’s proposals for compensated emancipation were rejected by the border states, and the army of the Potomac under Gen. George McClellan was driven back from Richmond after coming close to capturing it. Lincoln concluded that he did not have the time to pursue his preferred legislative strategy in the border states and that therefore something stronger and more precipitous was needed to bring the war to a successful conclusion.
The Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln’s response to the failure of Union arms and compensated emancipation. The time had come, as he wrote to Cuthbert Bullitt, to stop waging war “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water.” Thus after Lee’s invasion of Maryland was turned back at Antietam, Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22 that gave the Confederates 100 days to submit to the Union or face the prospect of immediate emancipation.
Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.
Bingo! Right on the money! "Neo-confederate mythology" is exactly the main issue. The most hardcore will either publicly attempt to ignore the adverse realities of the slavery machine for the cotton empire. Also today's most ardent neo-confederates whitewash or soft peddle the 100 years of post Civil War, state mandated, degrading segregation, along with painting the perpetrators of mob rule and brutal lynchings as somehow being the 'real victims'.
Another question should be why are the arch neo-confederate spin masters so intent on deliberately masking their current & future agenda(s)?
Idiot.
Great posts, Pelham.
Man, you grey boys are sensitive. I was just kidding about Robert E. Lee...
Because most Freepers would be "violently opposed" to anyone attempting to rip the United States apart, but that is exactly the agenda of these League of the South trolls that populate these threads.
Lincoln could not free slaves in the North with the Emancipation Proclamation because its authorizing legislation, the Confiscation Act of 1862, pertained to slaves held by rebels.
And only a small percentage of Germans worked in concentration camps during WWII. What's your point?
This element and other like it, should be considered subversive groups and a threat to the American Republic.
Excellent point!
If Lincoln was the worst bigoted beast the world, as the neo-confederate propagandists continue claiming, then he would have led the pro-slavery insurrectionists to expand slavery throughout the United States, as was attempted, and failed.
So far you have offered up only your opinion, and not a single word of Wilson's. Where's the beef?
If I did I'd probably think you were the soul of wit. But it's my opinion that when someone begins with a paltry attempt at insult, it's because it's the best he has to offer.
Webb's statistics are for slave holding states as a whole and include those 4 states that did not participate in the rebellion.
And where did you get that nugget? It's not in Webb's text. Did you make it up? If not, pony up the footnote that shows his source.
A much more reasonable figure than your 5%
The 5% figure is Webb's, not mine. I thought you were familiar enough with his writing that you could even add missing information, as with "the 4 states that did not participate in the rebellion."
I'm not sure what your point is here.
The point was Webb's.
Those are Douglass words. He doesn't retract them in the later part of the speech, rather he gives Lincoln credit for ending slavery. Apparently you find the first section objectionable, and can't figure out how to rid yourself of it other than to charge those who cite it with "outright lies". Tactically, I don't think employing the ad hominem makes your case any better. You're still stuck with explaining away what Douglass was saying in that first section.
Apparently we have wandered into a cabal dedicated to searching out secret hardcore neoconfederates. It's something like a snipe hunt led by Thaddeus Stevens and John Brown.
It took 67 posts to get the first Nazi reference, albeit an oblique one.
Since Washington and Jefferson were part of the small percentage of Americans who owned slaves, do you want to make them honorary concentration camp guards as well? Or do they somehow get an exemption? And if they are exempt, give us the reasoning.
Washington and Jefferson did not kill U.S. troops in defending a slave regime. Your Confederate heroes did. That's the difference.
Killing U.S. troops, whether for slavery or for Allah, will get no defending from me. That's your speciality.
Sure. Here is a Link to the 1860 census information. It has the raw data there. Here is another Link where the math and the breakdown have been done.
I have no need to "explain it away." Doglass was exactly correct in his reading of Lincoln. You Lost Causers invoke simplistic nonsense that if Lincoln was not a radical abolitionist, he must have been unconcerned with slavery. You attempt to destroy the man by painting false choices is childish.
The abolitionists, for all of their fever, could not have ended slavery. They did not have the popular support to do so and Lincoln understood that. In 1860, he favored a gradual means of ending it which began with isolating it in the states where it then existed. That first meager step was correctly understood by the slave power to be a clear and present danger to their economic and social power, and they revolted as a result. As a result of the war, popular opinion shifted dramatically and people correctly saw that slavery was the cause and that a nation could not endure, half-slave and half free, and Lincoln promptly capitalized on that shift in opinion to end slavery.
As Douglass said, Lincoln only went so far as the people would allow.
It's even simpler than that. If the Republican party platform had been adopted, no new slave states would have lead to slavery having minority support in the Senate. And back then a filibuster couldn't be wielded willy-nilly. All business stopped.
Killing U.S. troops, whether for slavery or for Allah, will get no defending from me. That's your speciality.
"That's your specialty" What is this, a schoolyard? Ad hominem isn't a substitute for argument, but perhaps it's the best you can muster.
As to the problems with your argument, there were no "U.S. troops" for Washington to kill, so that claim is ahistorical. But there were British troops and Washington killed plenty of them. Washington was still a British subject, a rebel and a traitor against his government, terms the Union would apply to the Confederates 90 years later, when like the Crown they sought to crush a rebellion.
As to Washington and Jefferson not defending a slave regime, both were slaveowners and slavery was part of the United States "regime" that they helped bring to independence.
A further problem with your argument is that the last British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, in 1775 declared all slaves free who were loyal to the Crown and willing to fight for it. It is the first American emancipation proclamation, and rebels like Washington and Jefferson were fighting on the side of slavery against the forces of emancipation.
A strawman argument. No one on this thread suggested that Lincoln should have been an abolitionist. That bit of simplistic nonsense is yours alone. Apparently bringing up aspects of the historical Lincoln, such as his support for colonization and his preference for maintaining the Union ahead of addressing slavery, upsets you. If so you had best stick with the mythic Lincoln, as facts are irrelevant in his case.
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