Lessons from Lincoln

The American Enterprise Online ^ | January 18, 2006 | Joseph Knippenberg

[neverdem]

Lessons from Lincoln

By Joseph Knippenberg

Last month, I made the argument that the debate over the Bush Administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping would ultimately be resolved politically, not legally or judicially. The question, I argued (following John Locke), was whether “the public good” was better served by a rapid and unencumbered response to new intelligence, or by strict adherence in all instances to legal procedures. When this occurs, the ultimate safeguards of our liberty reside in the character of those acting on our behalf, and in the capacity of our political system to rein them in—either through the legislative process or the electoral process.

 

Inspired by a piece by political scientist Benjamin Kleinerman, I wish to bring some additional considerations to the table. Kleinerman focuses on the paradigmatic case of civil liberties during wartime, evident during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. As you may know, Lincoln pulled out almost all the stops in defending the Union, suspending habeas corpus and imposing martial law. Because such actions weren’t uniformly popular, Lincoln was compelled to respond to his critics. It’s from these debates that Kleinerman extracts a series of lessons we can learn from Lincoln.

 

The first lesson:

 

First, action outside and sometimes against the Constitution is only Constitutional when the Constitutional union itself is at risk; a concern for the public good is insufficient grounds for the executive to exercise discretionary power.

 

Our general temptation, Kleinerman argues, is to be none too fastidious when it comes to procedure. We’re all inclined to be results-oriented, wanting our leaders to be problem-solvers first and Constitutionalists second (if at all). While this attitude might be defensible if our very survival is at stake, all too often it carries over into ordinary politics. What Lincoln’s example offers us, Kleinerman says, is a standard or principle on the basis of which we limit executive prerogative. With such a standard, we don’t have to choose between a government too limited to protect us and one too strong not to be a threat.

 

Kleinerman’s second lesson:

 

Second, the Constitution should be understood as different during extraordinary times than during ordinary times; thus discretionary action should take place only in extraordinary circumstances and should be understood as extraordinary. Since it is only necessitated by the crisis, the action should have no effect on the existing law. To preserve Constitutionalism after the crisis, the actions must not be regularized or institutionalized.

 

Lincoln was careful to claim a warrant of necessity, not mere legality, for his actions, asking, “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” He also insisted that “certain proceedings are Constitutional when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety requires them, which would not be Constitutional when, in absence of rebellion or invasion, the public safety does not require them.” Rather than weave the extraordinary measures into the fabric of our “normal” politics, Lincoln held them apart, preserving the possibility that, at the end of the crisis, our dependence upon and attachment to them would recede.

 

The novelty of our current situation is that our crisis seems to be open-ended. It will be hard for anyone to definitively declare victory in President Bush’s global war on terror. Given the decentralized nature of al-Qaeda, it won’t end with the capture of Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri, or Zarqawi. Stable political settlements—however you define them—in Iraq and Afghanistan most likely won’t prevent those housed within some other failed, ineffective, or tyrannical state from plotting mayhem against us, at home and abroad. An effectively endless string of “extraordinary” risks is becoming the new “ordinary.” Limits on our civil liberties, initially defended as circumscribed wartime measures, become part of our normal lives.

 

Kleinerman’s third lesson offers us some assistance here:

 

Third, a line must separate the executive’s personal feeling and his official duty. He should take only those actions that fulfill his official duty, the preservation of the Constitution, even, or especially, if the people want him to go further.

 

We and our political leaders must be able to distinguish between the merely desirable and the Constitutional, recognizing that the two are not identical, and that the former does not imply the latter. Not everything that is good is thereby Constitutional. An easy example comes from Lincoln’s case. His abhorrence of slavery knew only one bound—the Constitution, which did not give him the power, under ordinary circumstances, to abolish it. Hence he presented the Emancipation Proclamation as an exercise of his “extraordinary” war power, not as an exercise of a power normally available to the federal government. The Thirteenth Amendment, which was necessary to abolish slavery, followed from this understanding.

 

Adhering to this distinction between the good and the Constitutional requires exceptional self-discipline on the part of leaders and citizens alike. It requires a cultivated affection for the Constitution and for what some have called the forms and formalities of Constitutional government. If we are simply results-oriented, if we readily and unthinkingly acquiesce in the cynical view that “everything is political” and allegiance to the Constitution is naive or impossible, then we will lack the moral and intellectual resources required to defend our liberties.

 

I am far from conceding that all who rail against the Bush Administration’s “domestic spying” are justified in their complaints. There’s another element of civic education required as well. Just as we must be clear about the distinction between the Constitutional and the desirable, so also must we cultivate the capacity, as clear-sightedly as possible, to recognize the necessary. If sad necessity is to be the justification for the (limited) abrogation of our liberties, then we had better be able to understand it.

 

What this requires in our citizens and our leaders is a certain level of clear-sightedness or (dare I say it?) “realism” about the world. We have to be able to appreciate the threats we face and understand the appropriate means of dealing with them. We have to be able to conduct our debates, not simply on the basis of Constitutionalism, as if nothing else mattered, nor simply on the basis of national security, as if nothing else mattered. We have to be able to hold the two considerations in balance.

 

In his article, Kleinerman emphasizes public education in Constitutionalism, arguing that the major threat follows from our all-too-ready acquiescence in extraordinary security measures. I would argue that there’s an equally strong temptation to let our guard down, to regard temporarily successful avoidance as terminal success. More than ever, we depend upon the character of our leaders, upon their allegiance to both national security and the Constitution.

 

There is no institutional mechanism adequate to secure and assure these twin allegiances. But there are elections, where we can take the measure of a man’s—or a woman’s—character, asking if he—or she—has demonstrated adherence to Constitutional forms and formalities in ordinary times and if he—or she—has a clear sense of the scope and power of the threats we face.

 

I’d love to say that there’s a law that will make everything better. But there isn’t. All we have is our best assessment of the people upon whom we call to lead us. And we have their solemn vow to “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and…to the best of [their] Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

 

 

Joseph Knippenberg is a professor of politics and associate provost for student achievement at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. He is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online and a contributing blogger at No Left Turns.

Posted:  January 18, 2006

[4CJ]

I know sometime in the past two weeks I've seen a new poster toss out something froma newsgroup. Wlat always was fond of citing such, but I don't think he'll pony up with anything from his new living quarters, I hear he's pretty much chained to the place.

[x]

I see now that it was PeaRidge who responded not you. My apologies.

As for the "you girls" I was reading Doris's collected posts and some of it must have rubbed off on my style:

Come now, you are just rushing around like a dollar hussy trying to post with a bit of humor, and not even two bits worth Dearie.

Now, Miss Non, you must have forgotten Mr Lincoln ordering through the Secretary of the Navy the following ...

Hello again sweetie. I am sure you are sitting at your computer in your period antebellum yankee female dress, powdering your nose.

You are back Little Miss Non-sequitur. Been out playing with your little friends, Whiskeypapa and 3fan?

In keeping with your female logic, go ahead and have the last word........

Your arguments are circular and typically female.

Young lady, here you go again. You must be doing this for the benefit of the lurkers?

A bizarre mixture of gender-bending and feminine self-hatred seem to be part of Doris's modus operandi. If that's not your style -- if you're not part of her koven -- then once again, I apologize, though you ought to understand that if you hang out with Goodwad, people will take you for the same sort of creature.

The other thing you can notice from her collected posts is a real love of personal attacks and insults, so I don't have any problem calling her names. It looks to me like you don't have any room to object on her part, since she's said things rather worse than I have.

There also doesn't seem to be much point in your demanding a response to someone who has stolen and lied. Everything she types from now on is under a cloud. If she carefully documents what she posts and makes clear what is and isn't hers, and where it comes from, maybe people will be more inclined to respond to her garbage.

In any case, I've already made clear that Goodwad has tunnel vision and ignores most of the available information in order to focus only on those factoids that support her case. To say that Lincoln had the option of renouncing what he believed about the Constitution and the nation and surrendering to Confederate demands and that he didn't do so because he wanted the tariff money is fallacious. It ignores the other reasons for his actions.

If Lincoln believed that secession was unconstitutional and that his oath obligated him "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" that's reason enough for him to act as he did. You don't need to drag in the tariff to explain his actions, and his actions don't prove anything about the importance of the tariff to him. One could make money the cause of every war with as much or as little sense as she does in her posts.

Nor is it the case that Lincoln had only to compromise on the tariff to preserve the union or the peace. I don't think any serious historian has ever made that claim, and those who have argued that way haven't been able to make it stick. It's fallacious to pick an issue and argue without evidence that compromise on it could have prevented the war, and then use that to "prove" that it was the real cause of the war.

What Goodwad does is to simply ignore information that goes against her premises, and then act as though she's proven something, when all she's done is weave imaginary castles out of thin air. On the whole it's a shabby performance, but that's what one would expect of her based on her past performance.

[rustbucket]

Thank you for your reply.

When I said, "I'd be interested in seeing your take on Historian's post 92," I mean just that. I'm sorry if you felt I was somehow demanding that you respond.

If Lincoln believed that secession was unconstitutional and that his oath obligated him "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" that's reason enough for him to act as he did. You don't need to drag in the tariff to explain his actions, and his actions don't prove anything about the importance of the tariff to him. One could make money the cause of every war with as much or as little sense as she does in her posts.

Let me throw out some somewhat disjointed thoughts off the top of my head.

The Constitution doesn't outlaw secession, regardless of what Lincoln or a later Supreme Court might have argued. Instead, the Constitution reserves powers not delegated to the Federal government to the states and/or the people. And some of the states in ratifying the Constitution reserved the right to resume their own governance.

Lincoln's self serving argument that the Union preceded the states and created them makes little sense to me. I suspect that he made this argument to counter the right of secession. If the Union preceded the states and the states were never sovereign, then states had no right to secede. But there is plenty of evidence that the states considered themselves sovereign.

With respect to slavery versus the tariff as causes for the war, I think the main issue leading up to the war was slavery. But protectionist tariffs and economic sectional aggrandizement by the North were not inconsequential factors either.

As Texas said in their secession ordinance:

They [the Northern states] have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.

And, as the New Orleans Daily Picayune said in 1861:

Some months ago [i.e., prior to the WBTS and Louisiana seceding] we said to the Northern party, "You sought sectional aggrandizement, and had no scruples as to the means and agencies by which to attain your unhallowed purposes. You paid no heed to the possible consequences of your insane conduct." ... The South was to be fleeced that the North might be enriched.

The South seceded to protect slavery long term. Slavery was the key to their economy and way of life. If the South could take actions to protect their economy, why couldn't the North have done the same for their economy?

It is not that far fetched, IMO, that Lincoln might have instigated war to protect the Northern economy. Tariff income was key to the finances of the Federal government and the protection of Northern manufacturers. An independent South with a lower tariff threatened the heck out of the Northern economy, and plenty of Northern newspapers recognized it if that genius Lincoln somehow did not.

It seems to me that in early 1861 Lincoln was happy to let the Southern states keep slavery if they would stay in the Union or return to it. Witness the proposed 13th amendment that protected slavery. The Southern slave economy generated wealth that the North could extract via the tariff, but with the South gone, the North would have economic difficulty.

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[x]

To analyze the severity of a threat or crisis, you have to look at the other threats or crises going on at the time. A century after our Civil War, one could have said that Castro and Cuba had it in their power to outproduce and undersell the American sugar producing industry. But that's not what Eisenhower and Kennedy were worried about. The military and political dimensions were more important than the economic.

So it was in 1861. The rebel government was building a navy and a large army. It was sending out commissioners to bring the Upper South and the Border States into line. Southern demagogues were quite militant in their rhetoric and Northerners took their words seriously. "Civil war" of a sort had been going on in Kansas for some time, and now it would spread to the border states and other areas. War over the territories loomed and the potential existed for a rebel alliance with the British (in Canada) or the French (then in Mexico). The country's confidence had been shaken by what looked to be the failure of the union and the Constitution. One didn't know if the United States would even have control over its own capital, and further breakdowns along East West lines weren't unthinkable.

In such an environment, the tariff didn't loom as large as it does for some people in retrospect. Armchair historians can imagine an atmosphere of perfect calm in which political players cold-bloodedly unroll a premeditated strategy from move to move, but crisis situations tend to involve emotionality and panic. We had good reason to go to war with Germany and Japan over oil and trade routes in 1941, but it was the emotions aroused by Pearl Harbor that brought us into war. Something similar was true in 1861. It was the emotional atmosphere, not to say outright panic, that brought the war about.

Nor were tariffs as important to secessionist leaders in 1860 or 1861 as they claimed later. I wish somebody had tried to broker peace on the basis of a tariff settlement. Seeing who accepted the compromise and who rejected it would have saved us a lot of pointless discussion later on. I think it's possible to conclude on the basis of the absence of such compromise attempts that the tariff wasn't the main issue. But if that's not a fair conclusion, it's even less fair to assert that the absence of an offer to compromise on the tariff by Lincoln or the North indicates that it's what was really on their minds. That's a bizarre logic that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

As Restorer said, it's strange to imagine going to war to preserve a tax stream and spending several times the amount of money in question in order to win the war. Even if you take into account the fact that no one knew how bloody the war would be, it's still a strange concept. We know that at least in his own mind, Lincoln had ample reason for fighting the war. Most Northerners agreed. Why then postulate some hidden motive when there's no real evidence for it (I discount the very questionable quotations that Southerners circulated about "my tariff" after the war -- that hearsay isn't real evidence)? One could argue that the war also showed that in time of national crisis our government could more or less get the funds it needed, and didn't need to fear default.

Being able to see things as others do is a test of whether we really understand history. It doesn't mean that we agree with them, just that we understand their motivation. I think most of us here can understand the motives that led some Southerners to take up arms against the federal government and their fellow citizens. But to make out that all Northern principles and ideals came down to cold cash indicates a failure of imagination and empathy. I don't think much of Davis or his policies, but I can understand why he acted as he did. Why the refusal to grant Lincoln the same courtesy?

The problem with phrases like "sectional aggrandizement" is that they don't mean the same things now that they once did, and they are often in the eye of the beholder. For a Southerner in 1860, opposition to the expansion of slavery or to the return of runaway slaves very much counted as part of the Northern strategy of "sectional aggrandizement". For many Northerners, the Mexican War and Kansas-Nebraska act were indications of a slaveholders' policy of "sectional aggrandizement."

In any case, I wasn't around at the time, so I could well be wrong, but so far as I can tell there's a lot less to these theories that "it was all about the money" than people think.

[rustbucket]

A century after our Civil War, one could have said that Castro and Cuba had it in their power to outproduce and undersell the American sugar producing industry. But that's not what Eisenhower and Kennedy were worried about. The military and political dimensions were more important than the economic.

I don’t think that’s a particularly good analogy. The American economy in Castro’s time wasn’t/isn’t based on sugar. Now if Castro had the ability to withhold something really important like cigars or rum and thereby ruin the American economy (/sarc), the analogy might make more sense.

The rebel government was building a navy and a large army.

I think perhaps you overestimate the threat of the Confederate Navy in early 1861 at the time when Lincoln was deciding to go for peace or war. On February 19, 1861, four captains and four commodores met with the Confederate Congress’ Committee on Naval Affairs. Here is an excerpt from "A History of the Confederate Navy" by Raimondo Luraghi (page 4, hardback):

The position of the men who were meeting with the Committee on Naval Affairs was strange and offered little hope. They were civilians and former naval officers; indeed, they had not yet entered the service of a nonexistent Confederate navy that lacked even a secretary. At the time of the meeting the South had not a single warship of any importance; the only navy yard available was that at Pensacola, and it was of very modest size, more of a repair and coaling station than anything else. Still worse it was blockaded by a Federal garrison stationed at Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island, which, with a supporting naval squadron, effectively closed the bay.

… According to J. Thomas Scharf (whose data are, however, not fully reliable), the new Confederacy inherited from the U.S. Navy many outstanding officers but no more than some ten auxiliary vessels of little displacement and armed with a dozen cannon of small caliber and low class. All together, they could not muster the battery of even a single Federal sloop.

The Confederate Congress didn’t approve the appointment of a Secretary of the Navy until March 4th. On March 8th, they authorized the Secretary to have a chief clerk, four clerks, and a messenger. Not formidable at all compared to Lincoln’s Navy Department.

I found one other piece of information about a Southern naval yard -- the Norfolk, Virginia, Navy Yard was burned and abandoned on April 20.

Lacking naval yards, the Confederacy contracted to have cruisers built in Europe. Work started on the first of those in June, 1861. It was the Florida, and it did not sail until March 22, 1862. (Source: "The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe or, How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped" by James D. Bulloch, page xxvi, paperback). Bullock was the Confederacy’s man in Europe, and he did not arrive in Europe until June 4, well after the war had started. (Incidentally, he was Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle.)

More later.

[rustbucket]

So it was in 1861. The rebel government was building a navy and a large army. It was sending out commissioners to bring the Upper South and the Border States into line. Southern demagogues were quite militant in their rhetoric and Northerners took their words seriously.

I addressed the early 1861 Confederate Navy in my previous post.

Now let's consider the buildup of the Confederate army. If Northerners could take Southern words seriously, so then might Southerners have taken Northern words seriously.

You may remember my old thread showing how many Southern and Northern newspapers interpreted Lincoln's first inaugural speech to mean bloody war. Unfortunately they were right. (Link to old thread for lurkers: Lincoln's first inaugural)

The South was faced with how to respond to what was widely interpreted as a belligerent and threatening inaugural by Lincoln (see above link). Two days after Lincoln's inaugural, Jefferson Davis called for 100,000 volunteers for a year's military service.

I know that you and I have differed in the past over what Lincoln's first inaugural meant, but the timing above suggests that it might well be an explanation for Davis' troop callup.

I think most of us here can understand the motives that led some Southerners to take up arms against the federal government and their fellow citizens. But to make out that all Northern principles and ideals came down to cold cash indicates a failure of imagination and empathy. I don't think much of Davis or his policies, but I can understand why he acted as he did. Why the refusal to grant Lincoln the same courtesy?

Before the firing on Sumter, Lincoln met with and/or arranged for Northern governors to provide Northern state troops to support him. Some Northern troops were able to move almost immediately to Washington after Sumter.

Was Lincoln wise to prepare for what he thought might be an attack on Sumter and maybe eventually Washington? If he was, then perhaps Davis was also wise to call for troops in response to Lincoln's inaugural?

In your paragraph about the conditions in 1861 that I excerpted above, you also said the following:

War over the territories loomed and the potential existed for a rebel alliance with the British (in Canada) or the French (then in Mexico).

I would note that the French weren't in Mexico until 1862, so the threat of a Confederate alliance with the French in Mexico wasn't much of a threat in early 1861.

Later in the war, some French gunners on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande fired at US Federal troops when the US troops were fighting Rip Ford's Confederate troops. Who knew the South had such allies? Does this count as foreign recognition of the South or just French hatred of all things American?

The country's confidence had been shaken by what looked to be the failure of the union and the Constitution. One didn't know if the United States would even have control over its own capital, and further breakdowns along East West lines weren't unthinkable.

I agree. I think the Union and the Constitution had failed. And the West was being treated economically somewhat like the South was, as a colony to benefit Northern (Eastern) manufacturers. So there might have eventually been some movement by the West to escape such an arrangement.

More later.

[x]

A lot depends on whether one thinks that the secessionists had a right to form a national government and an army. That seems to me to have been a violation of the Constitution and a provocation to the rest of the country. You obviously disagree. I don't think either of us is going to convince the other.

The Confederate Navy was only in its early stages. I doubt that it could in and of itself pose much of a threat to the North any time soon. It was more the mixture of an army, a very bellicose rhetoric and real or feared subversive activity.

If South Carolina and the other states had signaled their intentions and simply asked the US what the terms for leaving would be perhaps things would have turned out differently, but unilateral secession, the formation of a national government and the call for an army did made war far more likely.

Of course, you can always come up with arguments to justify the actions of Davis and the others. But it looks to me that they made the wrong choice at the beginning and then dug themselves ever deeper into the same hole.

The idea of the greedy Northeasterners exploiting the South and the West doesn't fly either, at least as far as I can see. It was true of late 19th century America, but not of the antebellum period. Those troubles were more a result of the war, than a cause of it.

In any case, the Great Lakes States didn't do badly under the tariff. Those states were pretty good at combining agriculture and industry under a protectionist system. It was the new Plains states further to the West that had the greatest complaints.

Some Southerners had a similar view of how to benefit from tariffs. That's why Madison and Monroe had favored protection in the early 19th century. Protective tariffs weren't regarded as essentially exploitative or "sectionally aggrandizing" in those years. It was the cotton boom that led Southerners to the mistaken notion that they could put all their eggs in the same basket and gamble everything on plantation agriculture.

I feel as though we've all been through this before, and going over it again won't add much.

[rustbucket]

A lot depends on whether one thinks that the secessionists had a right to form a national government and an army. That seems to me to have been a violation of the Constitution and a provocation to the rest of the country. You obviously disagree. I don't think either of us is going to convince the other.

You are correct that I do feel that the South had a right to withdraw from the Union and form a national government that was more to their liking. And I feel that they could form an army and have their own foreign policy, etc. IMO, once they had seceded the Southern states were no longer subject to any constraints in the US Constitution. They were no longer part of a Union that had ceased to be conducive to their happiness.

I agree that we will probably not convert each other to the other's viewpoint. I appreciate and learn from calm discussions of history. Thanks for that.

If South Carolina and the other states had signaled their intentions and simply asked the US what the terms for leaving would be perhaps things would have turned out differently, but unilateral secession, the formation of a national government and the call for an army did made war far more likely.

Here again I must respectfully disagree. Why should they ask? Northern states had been blocking the return of fugitive slaves for some years, effectively nullifying the Constitution. They had basically broken a key compromise that permitted the ratification of the Constitution in the first place. I believe that some states would have never ratified the Constitution if it had said that states couldn't leave the Union unless other states said OK.

Lincoln had said that he would enforce the fugitive slave law. I would have been willing to see if he kept his word. However, like Sam Houston, I would have said throw the rascal out of office if he violates the Constitution over this matter.

As I remember, South Carolina sent commissioners to Washington in December or January right after they seceded to negotiate how much they owed of the national debt and what they might owe for forts and other property. They were rebuffed.

Of course, you can always come up with arguments to justify the actions of Davis and the others. But it looks to me that they made the wrong choice at the beginning and then dug themselves ever deeper into the same hole.

I've argued that Davis and company made the wrong decision in attacking Fort Sumter. They should have showered the fort with food and let Lincoln violate international maritime law by stopping foreign ships to collect tariff duties that were due him. But what do I know?

The idea of the greedy Northeasterners exploiting the South and the West doesn't fly either, at least as far as I can see.

I've seen the following referenced but not seen the original newspaper so I can't verify it. The Chicago Times supposedly editorialized on December 10, 1860:

The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole . . . We have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually.

I've done some simple calculations myself to determine the effect of protective tariffs on the transfer of wealth to the North, and the editorial point above seems correct to me. I've also read some of Kettell's Southern Wealth and Northern Profits. I think it was from Kettell's economic analysis by sections of the country that I learned how the West was also affected by the tariff.

As you say, we probably have been through these issues before, so I'll sign off. Thanks again for the discussion.

[rustbucket]

I found one other thing that I ought to mention to you.

You said that the North took the words of the South seriously. Well, here are the words of the March 6, 1861 act of the Confederate Congress that authorized Jefferson Davis to call for up to 100,000 volunteer troops (Source: Link [see page 45]; emphasis below is mine).

The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That in order to provide speedily forces to repel invasion, maintain the rightful possession of the Confederate States of America in every portion of territory belonging to each State, and to secure the public tranquility and independence against threatened assault, the President be, and he is hereby authorized to employ the militia, military and naval forces of the Confederate States of America, and to ask for and accept the services of any number of volunteers, not exceeding one hundred thousand, who may offer their services, either as cavalry, mounted riflemen, artillery or infantry, in such proportion of these several arms as he may deem expedient, to serve for twelve months after they shall be mustered into service, unless sooner discharged.

This act doesn't say that the volunteer troops were intended to invade Washington or the North -- that would have been threatening.

Instead, the volunteers were intended to

- protect against invasion
- maintain possessions (no doubt including forts) within the Confederacy
- secure independence against threatened assault

It sounds like the callup of volunteers might indeed have been in response to Lincoln's inaugural, which was widely interpreted as threatening war as I posted above. I'd never made the connection to Lincoln's inaugural before, but it makes a lot of sense.

[x]

Every politician calling for a larger army says it's for defense. Those who hear them are right to be skeptical. Actions spoke louder than words. The Southern secession commissioners were working hard to win other states to their cause. Nor was Davis the only one speaking on the subject. There was enough Southern saber rattling to give the North reason for concern.

Thomas Prentice Kettell's conclusions were contested. Where he saw the North terribly dependent on the South others saw the situation as -- roughly speaking -- reversed. The South had neglected to develop industry or finance and had delegated those functions to others, leaving them dependent on outsiders and poorly placed for competition in the modern industrial world.

Kettell's critics also disputed the notion that the South bought the imports and hence paid the bills for the rest of the country. Kettell's argument doesn't take into account the circulation of money. The South used its profits to buy goods and services from Northerners who were then in a position to buy things for themselves from abroad.

The argument that the union was fiscally doomed without the South doesn't hold up well. The US didn't have any trouble paying its bills after the Civil War or after cotton markets slumped. The government budget wasn't so large in the early 19th century as it became later, so it's hard to see how secession would have provoked a fiscal collapse of the republic. I don't say that financial matters weren't relevant, but they weren't the primary motivation for Northerners.

I also think some people are getting contexts wrong. In the days of Henry Clay, when the tariff was a major issue, Lincoln could say that the tariff was a central concern of his. In the pleasant atmosphere of 1840 or 1844, the US could afford to devote a lot of effort to questions of free trade or protection. But to argue that the protective tariff was still Lincoln's main concern in 1861, outweighing other preoccupations, is to ignore how much the context had changed in fifteen or twenty years, and how much things had changed in only a few months.

The New York Times has come out with two new volumes of their coverage of the Civil War and of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s. You might want to take a look at their editorial of April 3, 1861, "Wanted--a Policy!" It gives a very clear and dramatic picture of what some Unionists believed and feared in the days before Sumter. There was a feeling that chaos was engulfing the nation and the Constitution and that firm action was needed. The editorial illustrates what I've been saying for a long time. It doesn't seem to be available online, but it's in the book Lincoln in The Times : the Life of Abraham Lincoln as Originally Reported in The New York Times, edited by David Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer, and a PDF is available from the Times historical database.

Of course the New York Times wasn't the only Northern paper in 1861. There were also pro-Southern papers like the New York Herald or the Journal of Commerce. But the pro-Southern sentiments of such papers made them suspect in Unionist or Republican quarters. Some of the quotes that are taken as "representative" of the Northern press were anything but representative of Unionist or Republican opinion.

What I notice is that for some recent libertarians, the events of 1860 and 1861 seem to take place in a seminar room or gentlemen's club. For them it's all a matter of abstract ideas that they believe in. There's very little of the the heat and passion, the real atmosphere of the era, in their writing. They don't see how panic and force were becoming the dominant factors. And they tell us in all seriousness that somehow everything would work out for the best if Unionists had simply given in, and that they should have been able to forsee this. I don't think history is ever that simple, and I really doubt that giving way on everything to pro-slavery forces really would have led to beneficial results.

Anyway, I've done a lot of research on this over the years, and can't put the kind of energy into it than I once did. A few years ago I would have looked up the names of those who contested Kettell's opinions, or typed out the Times editorial myself. But now I've got other priorities and it doesn't really seem to be worth the effort. It's not really leading anywhere and people who really want to find out will take the time and inform themselves.

[rustbucket]

Thanks for the reference to Lincoln in the Times. I'll have to add it to my collection.

I have access to the Times of that period on microfilm in a local library along with about 15 other WBTS papers. However, it is easier to have a hard copy available in my house than to go down to the library and make hard copies from the microfilm.

If you are interested in a wider selection of opinions than those in the Times or Harper's Weekly, you might consider "Civil War Extra, A Newspaper History of the Civil War from Nat Turner to 1863 (Volume I)" and "Civil War Extra, A Newspaper History of the Civil War from 1863 to 1865 (Volume II)."

The newspapers in these volumes are from the collection of Eric C. Caren. They include dozens and dozens of different newspapers, North and South. They are physically large volumes that display a reduced size entire newspaper page. The type size is small but readable.

I ran into one of these volumes in a little bookstore in Beaufort, SC, and bought the other one from Amazon.

In some respects, printed collections like these are somewhat limiting in that they often focus primarily on major battles of interest to the person who collected the papers or chose them for printing. They often don't provide information on other items and issues of interest to me. For example, these volumes did not have anything from the time period of the Merryman arrest or the habeas corpus opinion of Chief Justice Taney.

However, the trouble with microfilm is that there is so much of interest that I spend time reading each page and don't get very far in the film roll.

I'll check out the Times editorial you mentioned the next time I go to the library. I see that one of my microfilm copies of the Times did call Taney "venerable" on March 5. I wonder how they described him later?

I'm glad your words reminded me of these volumes. I started thumbing through them and just found the following in the March 9, 1861, Gazette & Sentinel of Plaquemine, Louisiana:

Latest from Montgomery

War Considered Inevitable -- The Standing Army -- the War Strength

Montgomery, March 5th -- Since the receipt of the Inaugural address of Me. Lincoln, it is universally conceded here that war between the Confederate States and the United States is inevitable. Mr. Benjamin said last night, that in his opinion, there would be a clash of arms within thirty days.

Mr. Conrad concurred in this view of the aspect of affairs. The standing army of the Confederate States will be fixed at ten thousand men. Congress is now engaged in organizing the army. Of course, in case of hostilities, the number of men put in the field will be greater. It is calculated that the states now composing the Confederacy can place 80,000 on a movable war-footing.

[rustbucket]

Typo. "Mr. Lincoln," not "Me. Lincoln."

[x]

Thanks for the information. Northern Editorials on Secession and Southern Editorials on Secession are two collections from the 1930s and 1940s, republished in 1964, and available in some libraries. Some public libraries also carry the historical database of the NY Times with everything the paper has published since 1851. The catch is that it gives you a PDF, which is fine if you want to see what the articles and the paper actually looked like, but is a hassle if you want to pull out quotations quickly.

And there are some good quotes to pull from the April 3, 1860 Times editorial, especially in the paragraph that begins: "The fact is, our government has done absolutely nothing towards carrying the country through the tremendous crisis which is so rapidly and so steadily settling down upon us." The best quotation may be this: "No great community can drift into ruin without losing character as well as prosperity. It must, at least, make an effort at self-preservation, if it would avoid the contempt inseparable from imbecility."

What some people don't get is the real time aspect of the crisis. It's not as though there was a platonic will of the people that only needed to be expressed once to determine if Virginia or Maryland, Kentucky or Tennessee remained in the Union or joined the Confederacy. Everything was in flux. Today's decision could be reversed as events changed things. Davis and the Confederacy were very clearly trying to influence the decisions of the states, and Northerners saw the process moving out of their hands and their Unionists allies in the Southern states abandoned.

You could say that Davis and the Confederates also were afraid of losing out, but then or now, if some part of the country decides that they want to leave, their fears are less critical than those of the country we've lived in for so many years. If you want major changes, you've already upset things, and probably owe a some deference to the country you grew up in. At least that's my point of view.

Probably Lincoln and other Northerners exaggerated Unionist sentiment in some Southern states. But they were right that such sentiment existed, even if it were somewhat less widespread than they thought, and they were right that Davis was trying to provoke secessionist sentiment in states which hadn't yet voted for secession, even in states which had voted against it.

David Donald says that Lincoln was not at all crazy about the Times editorial. According to Donald, Lincoln kept it in a file labeled, "Villainous articles."

[4CJ]

Kudos for yet another admirable post. You're shattering their myths with a fevor that is truly to be admired. I am in awe ....