Defending Lincoln

There is a disturbing historical bandwagon being boarded these days by some prominent libertarians and quazi-libertarians -- people who have dedicated their lives to spreading the message of the preciousness of liberty -- people like Walter Williams, Lew Rockwell, Joseph Farah, Paul Craig Roberts, Joseph Sobran, and Charley Reese. The bandwagon that these normally liberty-friendly writers have jumped upon is that of the Southern Confederacy, and the recent disputes about the propriety of flying Confederate battle flags from state capitals have given them ample opportunity to tune up their Rebel yells in support of a political movement that was arguably more hostile to individual liberty than any other in America’s history.

To be fair to these Confederate sympathizers, they are not seeking to glorify slavery, but to make a point about federalism and big government. Their messages vary somewhat, but the essence of their claims is that “the Civil War was not fought over slavery”, but rather over high tariffs and states’ rights (i.e. federalism). Here is a sample of their contentions:

“History books have misled today’s Americans to believe the war was fought to free the slaves.” Walter Williams, Jewish World Review, December 2, 1998.

“Through no fault of their own, most Americans study American history in school. This is why they have so many misconceptions about American history. One of these misconceptions is that the Civil War was a noble struggle against slavery...” Joseph Sobran, Lew Rockwell.com, January 6, 2000.

“The trouble is that most people today really think the Civil War was fought over slavery. It was not.” Joseph Farah, World Net Daily, January 19, 2000.

“The South did not secede to preserve slavery...” Charlie Reese, Orlando Sentinel, January 23, 2000.

“...the Confederates had no desire to go to war...They merely wanted to secede, which means to be left alone, and went to war only to defend their homeland against brutal invasion.” Lew Rockwell, World Net Daily, January 19, 2000.

“The War Between the States was not fought over slavery.” Paul Craig Roberts, Townhall.com, May 10, 2000.

When I was first exposed to this line of reasoning, I did what most libertarians without an intense desire to dig into history may have: I assumed that these writers had thoroughly researched the issues and had ferreted out yet another instance in which the leftist educational elite had shaded history to make their big government heroes look like knights in shining armor riding out of the District of Columbia to make the world safe for democracy.

But then a funny thing happened to me on the way to my assumptions: I discovered that my great great grandfather and two of his brothers had fought for the Union in the Civil War, and that one of my great great great uncles (with whom I happen to share a first and last name), had died in a battle occurring shortly after Gettysburg and was buried at Antietam. Now that I knew that there was a battlefield grave with my name on it where lay the body of a young Union soldier cut down by Rebel bullets in the prime of his youth, the issues of the Civil War suddenly became much more interesting to me. What was it, I wondered, that would compel young men born in Canada to English parents to leave the relative comfort and safety of their family’s Northern Illinois farm to join Mr. Lincoln’s Cavalry.

And so suddenly I became something of a Civil War buff, rummaging through websites and generally seeking out historical records with considerable diligence. In the course of my research I found some fascinating materials, including the history of my ancestors’ unit (History of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, During the Great Rebellion, by Abner Hard, M.D., Morningside Books 1996) . It turns out that this unit was organized at the outset of the war by a Radical Republican Congressman named John Farnsworth with the help of Joseph Medill, the renowned abolitionist owner/editor of the Chicago Tribune. In fact, this cavalry unit was given the name “Farnsworth’s Big Abolition Regiment” by President Lincoln himself.

And as I read their regimental history and another book on the cavalrymen involved in the War of the Potomac (Longacre, The Cavalry at Gettysburg), I learned of the important role that the Eighth Illinois had played in many key battles, including Gettysburg, where they fired the first shots and helped hold off the advancing hordes of Rebel infantryman until Union infantries and other cavalry units could arrive and turn the battle into what many military historians consider the turning point of the war. And I learned that it was while chasing General Lee’s retreating troops back across the Potomac that my great great great uncle had suffered his mortal wounds (along with Medill’s brother William and several other cavalrymen).

But of course that was the personal side of my inquiry and not at all dispositive as to what precipitated the “War of the Great Rebellion”. For these more general issues I turned to more general resources, the most intriguing and enlightening of which were (a) the declarations of secession of each of the Southern states and (b) their new constitution. What could be more directly indicative of the motivations of the Southern Rebels, I thought, that their own statements of purpose and organizing principles.

Somewhat surprisingly, what I found in these lengthy documents was precious little discussion of taxes, tariffs, and federalism, but some shockingly explicative statements regarding the institution of slavery and the value placed upon maintaining the most wicked Southern tradition.

For example, the first of the declarations of secession issued, that of South Carolina ( December 24, 1860) asserted the following:

“We maintain that in every compact...the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely release the obligations of the other...

We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations...

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: `No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.’ ... The same article...stipulates also for rendition by the several stated of fugitives from justice from the other States.

...an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. [Thirteen Northern States] have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them... Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.”

Thus, by their own admission, rather than being standard bearers for states’ rights (as the Confederate sympathizers have asserted), the South Carolinians seceded because they felt that the Federal government had been too reticent to crack the whip on Northern abolitionists and Northern States to maintain the bonds of the Southern slaves. Rather than seeking to be “left alone”, the Rebels had expressed a desire for a stronger Federal government to help them perpetuate slavery. The Southern slaveholders seem to have been of the opinion that their prized institution of slavery could not continue without a massive mobilization of the Federal police state, and with the Radical Abolitionist Republicans having managed to elect a President, the Confederates seemed to have realized that their influence over Federal policy was permanently waning, as the following passages from South Carolina’s declaration of secession suggest:

“The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared ... to be `to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding states. ...they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books, and pictures to servile insurrection.

...[the Northern States] have united in the election of a man to high office of the President of the United States, whose opinions and purpose are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that the `Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. ... On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has been announced that the South [i.e. slavery] shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.”

The statements of secession of some of the other Confederate States were even more shockingly frank in their revealed dependence on and reverence for slavery. For example, in Mississippi’s Declaration, they stated as follows:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

The Texas Rebels even asserted in their declaration that God and the best interests of the slaves were on their side:

“In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.”

The Rebels of Georgia used a more economically framed approach in their declaration:

“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. ... Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union; put it under the ban of the Republic in the States where it exists and out of the protection of Federal law everywhere...”

Although it may seem hideously barbaric to put a value on slavery (here roughly $750 per slave), by doing so the Georgians made it all too clear why hundreds of thousands of Southerners would risk their lives for the institution of slavery, and by their declaration the representatives of Georgia demonstrated the absolutely absurdity of the claims of the present day Confederate sympathizers that the Confederates were fighting not for $3 billion worth of “property” but instead over a few million dollars worth of tariffs.

Another glaring weakness of the “states’ rights” theory of the Civil War is revealed by the Confederate Constitution that was adopted. Essentially the U.S. Constitution with a few minor revisions (including some mealy-mouthed language forbidding “taxes on importations...to promote or foster any branch of industry”), its most interesting provisions are those that dictate total conformity among the States and subsequently acquired territory with regard to the Confederacy’s most cherished institution:

“No bill...or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed. ... In all [newly acquired] territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government.”

When I offered this evidence to some of the Confederate glorifiers, most of them just ignored me. To his credit, Lew Rockwell, one of the most ardent of their number, took time out of his (no doubt hectic) schedule to review the materials I presented and respond. But rather than accept these official documents of the Confederacy as dispositive, Rockwell seems to have simply written them off as irrelevant public relations tools, as his most recent writings on the issue suggest:

“[The Civil War] transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order.

...if you listen to the media on the subject, you might think that the entire issue of the Civil War comes down to race and slavery...

And yet this take on the event is wildly ahistorical. It takes Northern war propaganda at face value without considering that the South had solid legal, moral, and economic reasons for secession which had nothing to do with slavery...

But one issue loomed larger than any other in [1860] as in the previous three decades: the Northern tariff...

Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he did pledge to `collect the duties and imposts’: he was the leading advocate of the tariff and public works policy, which is why his election prompted the South to secede. In pro-Lincoln newspapers, the phrase `free trade’ was invoked as the equivalent of industrial suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It was a customs house...

Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to enforce the fugitive slaves laws, and to support an amendment that would forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or Boston-since dropping off blacks in those states would have been restricted-but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former slaves.

... if we were to recommend one work-based on originality, brevity, depth, and sheer rhetorical power-it would be Charles Adams’s time bomb of a book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In a mere 242 pages, he shows that almost everything we thought we knew about the war between the states is wrong.

Adams believes that both Northern and Southern leaders were lying when they invoked slavery as a reason for secession and for the war. Northerners were seeking a moral pretext for an aggressive war, while Southern leaders were seeking a threat more concrete than the Northern tariff to justify a drive to political independence. This was rhetoric designed for mass consumption . Adams amasses an amazing amount of evidence-including remarkable editorial cartoons and political speeches-to support his thesis that the war was really about government revenue.” Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell.com, May 11, 2000.

So there it is. All that the declarations of secession and the Confederate Constitution’s slavery guarantee amounted to were a vast conspiratorial hoax upon the citizens of the Confederacy. In Rockwell’s reality, the Confederates had a secret plan to end slavery that involved convincing their citizens to fight a war to preserve it. In Rockwell’s reality, the Rebel leaders had “solid legal, moral, and economic reasons for secession”, but instead of relying on those reasons for their rebellion, they perpetuated the biggest lie in political history so they could get their racist, ignorant constituents to go along with their war. The real truth about their secession was not being portrayed in the Confederates’ official documents, but rather in “editorial cartoons and political speeches”. And if you believe that, you’d probably believe that the Declaration of Independence was not about breaking away from English rule, but rather a secret plan to make America safe for the invasion of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones some 200 years later.

So when Jefferson Davis delivered his address to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, according to Rockwell and Adams he must not have really believed his slavery-justifying rhetoric. To wit:

“...under the mild and genial climate of the Southern States and the increasing care and attention for the well-being and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity, the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South; the white population of the Southern slaveholding States had augmented form about 1,250,000 at the date of the adoption of the Constitution to more than 8,500,000 in 1860; and the productions of the South in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man.”

And what are the primary sources for Adams’ “secret Confederate motivation” theory? As it turns out, they consist of a few newspaper editorials in Charleston and New Orleans papers and the theory of an English writer who thought money was the root of all evil -- Charles Dickens, who had debated John Stuart Mill, a bastion of liberty, on the issue. In one of these articles, Rockwell tells us, a New Orleans paper referred to import duties costing Southerners $60-70 million per year. That’s a lot of money, but when you compare it to $3 billion worth of “breeding stock” (i.e. slaves), it is reduced to relative peanuts. And if the duties were the real cause of secession and the war, why didn’t the Confederates approach Lincoln and/or the abolitionists with a deal to free the slaves in exchange for the abolition of all tariffs? The reason of course, is that the slaves were valued at $3 billion because they were generating hundreds of millions of dollars (and perhaps billions) per year in income for the Southern plantation owners. So in a sense, Dickens may have been right about the war being all about money, though it seems likely that there was also a “we just don’t like those damned Yankees telling us what to do” sentiment in the mix.

In addition to ignoring the declarations of secession, another mistake the Confederate sympathizers make in addressing the question of why the Civil War was fought is their overreliance on some carefully chosen quotations from Abraham Lincoln. Drawing conclusions about the war based on Lincoln’s words about preserving the Union even if that meant perpetuating slavery ignores the fact that the Southern secession movement began before he was even in office and seems to have resulted more from the beliefs and actions of the abolitionists who had propelled Lincoln into office than “Honest Abe” himself. Thus, when the Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter, Lincoln was left with few options to preserve both the Union and his popularity among abolitionists but to fight.

The Confederate glorifiers also make much of the fact that most Southerners did not own slaves and many openly opposed slavery (including General Robert E. Lee). But that only proves the obvious point that there was an element of regional loyalty and peer pressure at work in the Civil War at the level of the individual soldier. Significantly, what the Confederate sympathizers ignore in this regard is (a) the large numbers of Southerners who opposed the war or moved north to fight for the Union, and (b) that the Rebel cause was so shaky even in the South that they had to quickly resort to a draft to raise even the paltry number of troops they managed to assemble, while the Union draft occurred much later in the war (and was avoidable even when it was enacted by the payment of what essentially amounted to a defense tax).

To obtain a more balanced approach to analyzing the Civil War than that of Charles Adams and the other Confederate glorifiers, I recommend the work of Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. Although he shares the thesis of the Confederate glorifiers that the Civil War marked the beginning of the era of big government (which in fact was an era that Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted some twenty years prior to the Civil War based on the majoritarian tyranny permitted by our Constitution), Hummel does not glorify the Confederates and vividly exposes their deep affection for big government as well.

So in the final analysis if it is reasonable to conclude that if the Civil War marked the beginning of the era of big government (as the Confederate glorifiers and Hummel argue), then that turn of events seems to have been largely attributable to the immense evil that the institution of slavery posed to the citizenry -- an evil so great that most were willing to acquiesce in the expansion of centralized Federal government power in order to protect them against such things. And even if we strain credulity (to the point at which it may snap back in our faces) and accept the view of the Confederate sympathizers that the Civil War was a “tax revolt”, the lesson is clear: If you are going to launch a tax revolt, don’t pretend that it is really a crusade to preserve an even more heinous form of involuntary servitude.

For one thing, it is indisputable that slavery was a doomed institution by 1860, whether or not the war was fought.

If anything, it was "doomed" by the moral force of the abolitionists, but the war certainly accelerated the process by making it clear to the Northern fence-sitters how destructive slavery was to the whole character of the white citizens of the slave states.

None of us can really say how long slavery would have continued had not the abolitionists and Unionists challenged the Confederates to fight for their "liberty" to keep others in chains. We do know that the Confederates were awfully stubborn re slavery and digging their heels in deeper and deeper as they came to identify the South with its "peculiar institution". No doubt they could have found alternative uses for slave labor if it ever became less valued in the cotton producing industry.

Under the circumstances, the most significant modern consequence of the war is the decline in legal significance of the constitutional relationship among the states and the federal government. The compact of individual freedom that was the foundation of the War of Independence was effectively abrogated.

You couldn't be more wrong on this. Individual freedom was greatly enhanced by the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. Certainly the Confederates gave "states' rights" a bad reputation and that shifted public confidence from state government to the federal government, but the size and degree of intrusion of government into individual liberty in the decades following the Civil War was not substantially increased. That would not happen until the influence of Lincoln's best Supreme Court nominee (Stephen J. Fields) waned in the 1930's following his resignation from the Court.

It is also beyond any argument that the significant motivating factor that led to initiation of armed conflict in the war was collection of tarriffs [sic] which were devastating to the economy of the southern states

Beyond argument only among silly Confederate glorifiers. The Confederates expressed no concern whatsoever about tariffs in their declarations of secession, nor in making their decision to attack Fort Sumter. Tariffs were a pittance compared to the value they placed on slavery ($3 billion). Source. The entire 1860 federal spending was only $63.1 million (2% of GNP).Source. Because they were stealing the labor of negroes, Southerners enjoyed a 2-1 advantage over the North in per capita income (source), so even if the Southern citizens were paying twice the taxes of Northern citizens, the slaveholders would still be getting off cheaply by more than making up for it in stolen labor. And after all, it was their legalized theft of labor and their insistence on keeping it legal that necessitated the Civil War.

...the kind of abuse of the collective power of the majority to exact benefits from the minority that the state power provisions of the constitution were designed to give the minority the power to defeat...

Who was abusing whom? The Southern slaveholders were heinously abusing their collective power of the majority to exact benefits from a minority (i.e. the slaves). That was the kind of abuse that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were designed to prevent.

But the war was a great waste in American history and the argument that the country is worse off today because it was fought has great merit.

"Waste" compared to what? The South freeing the slaves between 1861 and 1865 without a war? Not very likely. How long are you assuming that slavery would last if Lincoln and the abolitionists had said "go ahead and take your slaves and start your own country", and what value are you placing on each of the 4.5 million people years of slavery? What would you be willing to pay to keep your family members from enduring even one year of slavery?

Out of 20 or more slave-holding countries, Haiti and the United States resulted in mass violence/war.

Tocqueville also commented on the uniqueness of Antebellum Southern society:

"In the South there are no families so poor as to not have slaves. The citizen of the Southern states becomes a sort of domestic dictator from infancy; the first notion he acquires in life is that he is born to command, and the fist habit which he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man, irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles..." Democracy in America (Vintage Books Ed. 1990), Vol. 2, p. 394.

The cost of the WBTS was $6.6 Billion (1860) - that dollar amount is said to be enough for the North to buy freedom for every slave in these United States and give them 40 acres and a mule.

It is true that the war was expensive, but so was slavery to the slaves -- and the Confederates were adamant about not wanting to negotiate anything, particularly slavery. As Jefferson Davis explained:

"No human power can save the Union, all the cotton states will go."(See Battle Cry, p. 254.) Even the broder states refused Lincoln's overtures to negotiate a buy out of slavery, and that's when he became a confirmed (uncompensating) abolitionist and proposed the 13th Amendment.

There is little doubt that slavery would have collapsed eventually--economics drive everything and the cotton gin made slavery uneconomic--the end was in sight in the near term.

Sorry, you've got this exactly backward. The cotton gin's invention in the early 19th century was the root cause of the Civil War. It allowed short staple cotton, for the first time, to be economically separated from its seeds. This led to a massive expansion of cotton cultivation into upland areas of the South and thus to slavery becoming profitable.

Slavery was indeed a dying institution in 1800. It was uneconomic and unprofitable. There was little demand for more slaves.

Almost all prominent southerners (including the Founders) opposed its continuance in theory, but none knew how to get rid of it. Once slavery began to become profitable in the 20s and 30s there was a gradual shift, till by the time of secession there was a consensus in the South that slavery was a positive good.

Amazing how financial incentives can change a people's moral philosophy.

I don't believe effective mechanical cotton-picking machines were developed till the 1960s. Picking cotton was the major use for southern slaves.

"We Hold These Truths" by Stephen B. Presser - 'Is the Declaration of Independence part of the federal Constitution? The short answer, of course, is "no." For the Declaration to be part of the Constitution, it would have to have been included in the original document ratified by at least nine of the conventions held in the original 13 states between 1787 and 1789, or added by amendment, which requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and the assent of three quarters of the state legislatures. The Declaration was never ratified by either method. It is also possible to add amendments through a new national constitutional convention, with ratification by state legislatures, but this has never happened.

Some political theorists claim that the principles of the Declaration were incorporated into the Constitution during the Civil War, through some quasi-magical amendment process conjured up, through executive fiat, by President Lincoln. This occurred sometime around when he extraconstitutionally emancipated the slaves in the states that had seceded from the Union or, perhaps, when he delivered the Gettysburg Address. Some law professors have sought to find an incorporation of the Declaration through the Reconstruction amendments; while it is true that those amendments did bring us closer to some ideas found in the Declaration, they could not—either explicitly or implicitly—make the Declaration part of the Constitution. '

So much for your idea of Lincoln's basing his War of Aggression on the Declaration. No where in the Constitution did it ever construe to limit the power of the State ergo the people! The South was paying a disproportionate burden of taxes due to the documents signed in 1790 where the debt for the Revolution was reconsidered and the Southern states had to pick up the tab for the Yankee states who were insolvent. Conveniently the Federal government never set things to rights and the South became a milch cow for the Federal Government to leech off of. Slavery, while an abhorent institution, was merely a rallying cry for Lincoln when he was losing the war during 1862. He didn't give a damn about the slaves, despite your crys of protest, he wanted to preserve the Union, thereby setting aside that which the Founders had originally established ... a small limited Federal Government, with the States retaining the majority of rights of self determination! Stop smoking that Yankee crack, study your history and open your eyes.

If you bothered reading the Confederate Constitution, slave trade was banned except for receiving slaves from the United States.

You're finally admitting it protected slave imports? You have improved a little, at least.

Perhaps he was closer to his yankee brethren in Conneticut that outlawed teaching a slave to read and write in 1836

Jesus, billbears, you crack me up. Connecticut passed a law forbidding the teaching of slaves to read? All 25 or so of them? Literate slaves were a big problem were they? And I suppose it was perfectly legal to teach slaves to read in Virginia or Mississippi or Georgia or South Carolina? Heck, in South Carolina it was illegal for a black man and a white man to look out the same window, so you want us to believe that they could be taught to read?

...versus men like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee that not only taught their slaves but were training them for the day they would be released

Oh so now it's Jackson and Lee teaching them to read, is it? Preparing them for their release, were they? In a pigs ear, billbears. Jackson taught Sunday school, there is no evidence he taught them to read. Six of the slaves in the school were his own. And far from preparing them for freedom, Jackson saw them for what they were to him - property. An investment. He thought so much of their wellbeing that he had no qualms about selling a couple of his slaves in order to buy a house. Prepare them for freedom? Pull the other one, billbears, it has bells on it.

Do a little search on lincoln's 'root,pig, or perish' ideals. He could have cared less.

And what was he to do, billbears? If there hadn't been a rebellion, what could Lincoln had done? Could he have freed the slaves? No, that would require a Constitutional amendment. Could he have gotten such an amendment through the Senate? Hardly, there were 15 slave states, 30 senators. In order to pass an amendment over their objection would have taken 61 votes. That would have required 46 states, something that didn't happen until the very early 1900's. On the other hand there was a war. Would the southern slave owners free them on their own? Not hardly, they went to war to protect the right to do just the opposite. Would free blacks have any sort of rights or freedoms down south? History has shown us that no, they wouldn't. When you get right down to it, billbears, what Lincoln was telling them was that he could get them their freedom and that was about it. And that freedom would come in the face of the most vile racist hatred directed towards them, and it would be even worse for them down south. So all Lincoln could do was tell them that they would have to fend for themselves and make a go of it or die trying. And he was right, too.

So much for your familiarity with the U.S. Constitution, history, and historical literature. For one thing, James McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom , 256) discusses the amendment proposed in 1861.

McPherson's discussion of the Corwin amendment is shaky and incomplete at best. For a better analysis, see "Explicit and Authentic Acts" by David Kyvig (1995) or most thorough discussions of the secession crisis published prior to about 1940. Aside from that, you aren't going to find much of anything thorough or accurate.

He notes therein that 3/5 of the Republican Congressman (i.e. the "Radicals") voted against this amendment (which was passed by the House on February 28, 1861), even though it appeared to be the only thing that may keep the Southern States in the Union and avoid a war.

You fail to mention a key fact. The house passed it on february 28th, but most of the confederacy had already seceded as of the beginning of the month.

Secondly, Lincoln was not even President at that time, having not yet been inaugurated,

No, but he definately applied his industry to securing its passage. Lincoln even helped draft the thing back in December of the previous year, and personally met with Corwin to map out a legislative strategy to get the thing passed. He then endorsed it in his inaugural address and urged its ratification.

Although McPherson characterizing Lincoln as having "passively endorsed" the amendment

McPherson is incorrect. Lincoln was involved in the amendment from its very beginning when Seward introduced it before senate committee back in December. At first, he lobbied the committee members in great secrecy, urging Senator Trumbull not to share his involvement with anybody but the other two senators he had involved in the process - Seward and Hamlin. As the amendment progressed, Lincoln began to back it more directly. After Thomas Corwin brought it up in its final version on the house floor in late february, Lincoln's public lobbying on its behalf was covered extensively in the newspapers. He then devoted a large segment of his inaugural address to endorsing it after it had passed.

So extensive was Lincoln's involvement in the amendment that Henry Adams wrote of it in 1861 crediting its passage to the "direct influence of the new President."

that obviously wasn't a strong enough position to sway most of the members of his own party

Lincoln exerted his influence to gather every last vote he could in favor of the amendment. It barely failed the house on the first time up, and Lincoln worked extensively to switch enough votes to pass it.

and it is questionable whether the required 3/4 of the states would ratify it anyway.

Lincoln didn't think so. He indicated that much in his first inaugural address, going so far as to call it the law of the land.

In any event and perhaps fortunately for the cause of abolitionism, the Confederates refused any compromises

Untrue. In fact, if you study the events of the secession winter, you will find it to be indisputable fact that almost every single compromise proposal of any kind on any issue came from either the southerners, the border state unionists, the northern democrats, and the moderate republicans. The ONLY faction that voted at all cost against every single effort at compromise was the radical republican faction led by Charles Sumner. And in fact, one of the many reasons the Corwin amendment failed was its date - it didn't pass until almost a month after most of the south seceded, and even then failed to address all issues other than slavery. The reason it took so long to pass was obstructionism by the Sumner faction. At one point, Sumner was even inventing claims to have made unheard parliamentary objections during debates on the amendment conducted the day before in order to slow things down and force parliamentary votes.

Back to Sumner's faction, that it proved a major block to practically any form of compromise was a fact conceded even by the top Republican leaders in Congress. Charles Francis Adams (a leading GOP congressman and lincoln's future ambassador to Britain) heavily voiced his frustrations with Sumner. His son Henry remarked that "God Almighty could not move" him. William Seward (a leading GOP senator and Lincoln's future SoS) called Sumner a "damned fool." The southerners, ranging from fireaters to the moderates, repeatedly lashed out at Sumner's obstructionism. Some of them even cited the overall incivility of his faction (as in Sumner and company were using the senate floor for childish namecalling) as the reason why they left the senate.

and attacked Fort Sumter.

The attack on Sumter only came after Beauregard caught word that Lincoln had launched a fleet of warships to increase the fort's garrison by force. The confederates preempted Lincoln's fleet by a day. They fired on the 12th of April, and Lincoln's fleet, which had come to fight its way into the fort but couldn't because the confederates beat them there, arrived on the 13th.

Post 58 may interest you on Lincoln's little pet amendment that so many yankee historians conveniently gloss over and ignore. Despite ravinson suggesting otherwise based upon the historically incorrect account of it by pop historian James McPherson, you are correct about it. It was a Lincoln project, thoroughly endorsed by Lincoln, who was involved in securing its passage literally from day one in committee all the way up to his inauguration.

Yankee historians don't like to say much about it because its a large and embarrassing blemish on their hero Lincoln. Those few who even mention it at all, like McPherson, are vague and get it wrong.

I would even go so far as to say that Lincoln's slavery amendment has been intentionally ignored, especially for the last fifty years. The only modern writings on it are obscure scholarly works, like Kyvig's book, and pro-southern writings like Charles Adams.

The contemporary 1861 accounts of it, almost all of them by yankees, haven't been reprinted in decades. Henry Adams' account was first published in 1909 (50 years after it was written) and has only been reissued once since them during the 50's. The main scholarly work discussing it, also from a yankee perspective, was published in 1892 in GERMAN by a professer at the University of Freiburg. In short, it's not there in the history books because the Lincoln cult would rather it not be there, and when it does appear, they spread disinformation about it.

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