Lessons from Lincoln

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

If so, you're laughably easy to please. What has Doris done? She's strung together belligerent quotes from Northern politicians purporting to prove that the war was about tariffs. Blood-hungry quotes from Southern politicians aren't hard to find either, but in and of themselves they don't prove that the war was or wasn't about tariffs or slavery or state's rights or anything else. You need more evidence than "up and at 'em" rhetoric to prove a case about what caused a war.

Then she goes on to take Lincoln's concern for maintaining the procedures of the federal government -- the mails, the tariffs, forts, and the courts -- as evidence of some narrow obsession with the tariff alone. Anybody who knows the history will see through her posturing pretty easily. You can find quotes from 1941 or 1942 saying that oil and bases were important to the US government, but they don't prove that the Second World War, was about oil or bases, any more than the Civil War was about tariffs.

I'll grant that the early Confederate Navy wasn't much of a fighting force in early 1861, but Doris ignores that the rebel army, militias, and agents constituted the biggest threat to the US in fifty years or more. Thus, much of the panic in the free states was understandable.

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The "interlinear" style of analysis doesn't do much for discussion. Any yokel can convince herself that she's a genius by this simple method:

Cut and paste whatever you want to "refute" and put it in quotes or italics.

Then type out something loosely related to it, and assume that you've disproved whatever you want to. Then you can cackle about you clever you are.

Somebody or other is bound to be taken in.

Now, be sure to inform x that Chandler was one of many that put Lincoln into office. It was to the Republican party leaders, the radical abolitionists, and to the Banking community that he owed his party's existence.

Let me confess Doris, I get so confused sometimes. For years I have heard from the Lost Cause Out of Context Quote Brigade (c) that the sin of slavery should not be directed at Southerners since it was all those Damn Yankee Bankers who shoved slavery down the throats of those poor people in Dixie and it was those same damn Yankee bankers who really owned all those slaves and made all the money from those plantations while the Southern population were all dirt poor hard scrabble farmers without two pennies to rub together. I mean how many posters here have told us about the dozens of their "kin" who were raped and hanged by Sherman and not one of those kin ever owned a slave? They were all too poor for that, and unlike those damn Yankees, they all just loved their Negro brothers and sisters. Yet somehow, those same dirt poor farmers who didn't have two pennies to rub together paid all the tariffs on imported good that kept the Federal government afloat.

And now here you go telling us that it was really those Yankee Bankers (the same folks who owned all the slaves and owned all the plantations and cotton) who decided to team up with Evil Abe and the damn Yankee Abolitionists, and they schemed and plotted to destroy the plantations and free all the slaves and kill the dirt southern farmers who paid all those tariffs that kept the Federal government afloat.

I know things can be complex, but please. The next time you're down at the IHOP for the national League of the South Convention, would you guys huddle over a bowl of grits and get your story straight?

The requested URL /~a2578/porter.pdf was not found on this server.

Your PDF doesn't work. That's pretty typical. You're a rather slippery worm: you don't give your sources. You don't say who said the things you cite, when they supposedly said those words or where you got the quotations. "A northern Republican," "this was said," and "this quote" aren't adequate citations, and any decent scholar concerned with truth in research would recognize that. Do you even know where these quotations are from? Or is it just that you can't be bothered to verify your sources?

Without the context it's hard to tell if an alleged quotation represents mainstream opinion or just one eccentric's view. Maybe that's the point. Your plagiarism has already been documented. I wouldn't put inventing quotations and facts beyond you. At any rate, you've got a real love for taking things out of context.

As I recall, we don't know the Baltimore clergyman's actual account of Lincoln's words. The report attributed to him was published by E.A. Pollard in a Baltimore newspaper before he fled to Richmond, where he became a leading newspaper editor in the Confederacy. It's hearsay. After the war, Pollard became the leading "lost cause" propagandist. Given the standards of the newspapers of the day and the passions of the moment, Pollard's account isn't the most reliable one could have. All the more so, since other papers didn't carry the same story.

The other account, from John B. Baldwin, who served in the rebel army, wasn't published until after the war. That it was "lost cause" propagandist Robert Dabney who published Baldwin's purported memoir may also give reason for caution in crediting the account, but it's not the main reason for concern. It was also quite controversial, for different reasons, and that controversy throws a cloud over Baldwin's assertions. There were objections about whether Lincoln had actually made the offer Baldwin said he did, and there are real questions about whether Baldwin's account represents what Lincoln said to Baldwin or what Baldwin wished had happened. Baldwin paints himself receiving confidences from the President that no stranger would hear and giving advice to him that few new acquaintances would make. He represents himself as an anguished prophet who knows what will happen if war breaks out. Skeptics will be forgiven for not granting his account full credence.

So Pollard's and Baldwin's aren't the most reliable accounts. And to quote Raphael Semmes or Robert Dabney or Lyon Tyler on what Lincoln said in 1861, when they wasn't there -- that's the purest hearsay, which proves nothing.

I can't say what Lincoln might have said in private conversations in 1861, especially on the basis of such questionable "evidence." So I don't know if he might have brought up "his tariff" on this or that occasion. What's objectionable, though is this mindset that assumes in advance that the tariff was Lincoln's paramount interest and ignores other evidence to concentrate wholly on this questionable thesis.

We can find Southern politicians speaking endlessly about their "security" or "safety" or "prosperity" or "honor" or "liberty" -- notions which are pretty closely related to slavery, the expansion of slavery, and White supremacy. The connection there is a lot closer than any connection between Northern anxiety about the Union and the Morrill Tariff.

Fairness and courtesy have required that we at least consider the notion that "Southern rights" or "Southern honor" couldn't simply be reduced the defense of slavery. There's all the more reason not to consider Northern concern with union and liberty as simply a preoccupation with tariff revenue.

If you want to make the Civil War a wholly materialistic and opportunistic struggle for wealth and power, it's by no means clear that the Unionists come off looking worse than the rebels.

You can find the original quote several other places

Not presented in exactly the same way, with the same verbiage. That, as your namesake learned, is simply plagiarism. The phrase, "wrote Michigan’s radical, coarse-grained Senator Zachariah Chandler" was the giveaway.

historians quote each other

Note the word "quote." As in "quotation marks" Now, if you want to make the claim that Pea Ridge, in the other cited post, similarly lifted some real historian's phrasing and presented it as his own, sans marks, then you've accused him of plagiarism. Fine by me.

Or your could try here: http://www2.truman.edu/~a2578/porter.pdf

Ooh, a link to a senior term paper from an fairly obscure college in Missouri. We still don't have an origin for the quote. Was it spoken on the floor of the senate? A search of the Congressional globe doesn't turn it up. In a letter? The term paper's footnote cites a 1941 book, TH Williams' "Lincoln and the Radicals."

Now, be sure to inform x that Chandler was one of many that put Lincoln into office

So now Lincoln's alleged dictatorial powers extended to installing senators? And in 1857, three years before Lincoln himself would be elected? I'm surprised you're not quoting the guy who claims Chandler was part of the Illuminati plot to assassinate Lincoln when he seemed to be going too easy on the south.

And by the way, Stevens' use of the word prosperity...

If you're going to call Thaddeus Stevens' abolitionist credentials into question, good luck. I take the quote to mean that, with slavery, the United States would never enjoy "economic well-being" because slavery was a cancer in the laws and economy of the nation.

The South was a massive economic threat, and they all knew it.

The south was a threat, period. A nation founded on slavery and a tiny economic and political elite, with an ingrained military tradition, actively working to break other states away from the Union, acting outside the bounds of the Constitution, seeking alliances with foreign powers, seizing federal property and opening fire on US toops. Of course it was a threat.

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.

I managed to get back to the library yesterday for the first time in about six months. I found the editorial you mentioned. In it the Times did try to make a boogeyman out of the South. [caps below are theirs, paragraph break is mine]

… we cannot conceal the fact that the new Government of which JEFFERSON DAVIS is at the head, has evinced a marvelous degree of energy, and is rapidly assuming the proportions of a solid and formidable Power. Within less than six months they have adopted a Constitution, organized a Government, put all its machinery into working order, established a commercial system and put it in operation, laid the basis of a financial department, organized an army, secured enormous stores and munitions of war, and put themselves in a position to offer a very formidable resistance to any attempted coercion on the part of the United States.

… JEFFERSON DAVIS will soon have an organized army of 30,000 men at his command – suppose he decides to march into Mexico, or Virginia, or upon Washington, -- what organized means have we to resist his schemes? They have adopted a revenues system for the express purpose of depleting and damaging our commerce – what have we done to offset it? .

They seem to forget that the South raised that big an army in response to Lincoln's inaugural.

I though the main reasons for dropping the tariff was to reduce what the Southern people had to pay for goods and so make their life and the overall Southern economy better. They just removed the Northern leech from their back.

Continuing on from the Times editorial:

The people [of the US] look to their Government for guidance in every great emergency. They look to it for courage for vigor, for indomitable energy, for all the great qualities which give success to nations and glory to success. And when Government fails them, they are powerless. They have no other leadership – no other means of union – no possibility of making their wishes known or their will felt, but through the action of the Government to which they have intrusted [as spelled back then] their welfare and delegated their power.

People do look to the government for action, I'll admit. But people are not as helpless as this editorial makes them out to be.

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."

You mean April 3, 1861.

I think I read in a later edition of the Times the point that the North's population was some 2 million more than the whole country was just 15 years before. The earlier US survived just fine. But, of course, it had Southern cotton to export.

Let's look at the tariff question again and how it impacted the South. In the same April 3, 1861, edition of the New York Times that you quote above is the following from the London Times of March 26, 1861. The London Times was commenting about Lincoln's inaugural speech. I've made what was in italics in the original article into bold type below.

The great questions in dispute relating to the Territories are left without any attempt at settlement. The Tariff has been decided in a manner to render the return of the seceding States almost impossible and the retention of the Border States exceedingly difficult. The South seceded from an Union where native manufacture were supported by a moderate protection. Will it return to an Union in which native manufactures are, by an advantage taken of the absence of the Southern representatives, defended by something like a prohibition, the whole weight of which must fall on the planting and agricultural States.

It is difficult to believe that such a reunion can take place; it is difficult to believe that it is even desired. The South has shown no sign of any wish to return on any terms into the Confederacy it has left; and the North has employed the short interval of secession to raise up a new barrier against reunion in the shape of an illiberal tariff, all the benefits of which will be on one side and all the burdens on the other.

Spurred by your suggestion to look up that editorial, I continued looking through later editions of the Times and came across the following from an April 6, 1861, article entitled "The Issue at the North." Bold type and the second paragraph break below are mine.

… There is no disposition, on the part of the great body of the Northern people to wage war upon Slavery, or to countenance any aggressions upon Southern rights.

But the question assumes a very different shape. Slavery has nothing whatever to do with the tremendous issues now awaiting decision. It has disappeared almost entirely from the political discussions of the day. No one mentions it in connection with our present complications.

No man, anywhere in the North, proposes for a moment to interfere with Slavery in any Southern State. No man proposes to exclude Slavery by Congressional action from any Territory. No man proposes to interfere in any way with the execution of the Fugitive Slave law, or in any way to interfere with the equality of the States, or the rights, privileges and immunities of the citizens of all the States, in regard to the institution of Slavery.

If the Times says so, it must be so.

As I recall, we don't know the Baltimore clergyman's actual account of Lincoln's words ... All the more so, since other papers didn't carry the same story.

Actually we do. Dr. Richard Fuller, pastor of Seventh Baptist Church in Baltimore, led a group representing the 5 Christian Associations of Young Men in Baltimore, in a meeting with Lincoln in Washington on 22 Apr 1861. That meeting was wrote up both in the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Exchange the next day, and in the Baltimore Dispatch on the 26th (the same accounts were published in the National History of the War for the Union, Civil, Military and Naval: Founded on Official and Other Authentic Documents published in 1861, and in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1862). That's more than one newspaper account.

Edward A. Pollard was not the editor of the Baltimore Sun, The editor of the Baltimore Sun in 1861 was Henry Rives Pollard, a brother of the aforementioned Edward. Incidentally, Edward Albert Pollard was a "merciless critic" of President Jefferson Davis, and was editor of the Richmond Examiner from 1861 to 1867.

John F. Lewis testified that Lincoln "informed Mr. Botts that he [Lincoln] had made this proposition to Colonel Baldwin." Botts being John Minor Botts, who wrote that "Mr. Lincoln related the above facts [regarding his conversation with Baldwin] to me." This incident occurring during Botts four hour meeting with Lincoln 7 Apr 1861.

The Baldwin meeting which occurred 4 Apr 1861, the Botts meeting 3 days later, and that of Reverend Fuller and a plethora of witnesses are separate incidents; in all three Lincoln bemoans the lack of revenues flowing into Northern coffers with the exodus of the Southern states.

In general, people aren't as helpless as the Times editorial makes them out to be. But conditions in 1861 were far from what they were in ordinary times. Government doesn't need to put it's nose into all of our affairs, but in times of crisis when its not on top of things, the results can be panic, and that was the case in 1861.

Why did the British care about US affairs? The tariff accounted for a large part of that interest. It's not surprising that British newspapers and observers emphasized tariffs in their coverage of American politics to a degree that few Americans would. It's also not surprising that financial papers, especially those with an interest in the cotton trade would focus on the issue of protectionism. But just as one might go wrong today by taking the views of French or German or Russian newspapers as authoritative about the motivations of the Bush administration, so too, foreign papers could be deceptive as regards what was on the minds of Americans in the 1860s.

Aren't we all agreed that Northerners didn't go to war in 1861 to free the slaves? Is that even worth discussing? Does it prove that they went to war for tariff revenue? It doesn't. The striking thing, though, is that three or four years into the war, a large number of Northerners were convinced that the war had to result in an end to slavery.

According to the Cyclopaedia of American Biography, E.A. Pollard was news editor of the Baltimore Sun at the beginning of 1861. I don't know if he had another editor or editor-in-chief above him, but if the Cyclopaedia is right, it's likely he would have been responsible for printing the account. Pollard may have been critical of Davis, but he was decidedly pro-Confederate and was instrumental in constructing a defense of the Rebellion in post-war historical studies.

His brother, Henry Rives Pollard, was also active in Richmond in the newspaper business during the war. Francis Key Howard, editor of the Baltimore Exchange, was also notably pro-Confederate or pro-Southern or pro-slavery in his outlook. That doesn't mean that what these men printed was wrong simply because of their views, but given the low standards of the partisan papers of the day, what they believed and wanted is certainly something to take into account.

I didn't realize that other Baltimore papers carried the story. It wasn't carried in other US papers I looked into. But the fact that two papers cover the same event or that an account in one paper might be copied in another is certainly no evidence that the first version was right. I'd still argue that we don't have Fuller's actual account or a first-hand account of the meeting by an unbiased observer, but I'll keep my eye out for anything that might fit that description.

Baldwin's account of his secret meeting with President Lincoln came under scrutiny over an offer to surrender Sumter (if Baldwin and other Virginians could keep that state in the union) that Lincoln allegedly made to Baldwin. Whatever the result of that controversy Baldwin's account of his own meeting, written after the war, is too questionable to be taken as evidence.

Baldwin goes out of the way to make himself out to be a prophet scorned by Lincoln. It's hard to believe that he said the things he remembers having said. Given such selective or distorting memory, it's likely that he could have been wrong about the other details.

If I recall correctly, John Minor Botts had a separate meeting with Lincoln, and while he backed Baldwin up on the supposed deal, he didn't have anything to say about the other details of Baldwin's account of the meeting. I'm having a hard time unravelling the controversy, but whatever Botts had to say about one specific claim Baldwin made, he doesn't come across as a positive character witness for Baldwin.

I don't argue that Lincoln was totally unconcerned with tariffs and revenue. And I'm not saying that he didn't consider a lot of different courses of action with regard to Sumter. But the caricature that you guys come up with -- Lincoln wholly concerned with his revenue to the exclusion of other concerns -- just isn't a valid representation of how things were.

If you are offended by the portrayal of Southern leaders as wholly preoccupied with keeping men and women in chains, you might consider just how distorting and reductive the neo-Confederate view of Lincoln and the unionists is.

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