Posted on 11/23/2002 7:30:17 AM PST by stainlessbanner
No one, at least no one on FR, EVER suggests that the cause of the north was to free the slaves.
No one ever says that.
President Lincoln had to renounce the emancipation documents of Generals Hunter and Butler in 1862 BECAUSE had he had to yield to the fact that most northerners were just as racist as the southerners. There is little question of this in the record.
But Lincoln could see that, as the war became more costly, that more and more northerners would --acquiesce-- in emancipation because that would bring the war to save the Union more quickly to a conclusion.
This is a lengthy passage, but I think you will find it interesting. Underscored empasis is mine.
"But the notion of independence as a fundamental part of liberty persisted, and became bound up with racism, especially in the South, to create an ideology of black slavery as the necessary basis of white liberty. The first part of this ideology was the mud-sill philosophy expressed by many southern thinkers in the 1850s, most bluntly by Senator James Hammond of South Carolina in his famous King Cotton speech of 1856. "In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life," said Hammond. "It constitutes the very mud-sill of society." Turning to senators from northern states, Hammond said that "your whole hireling class of manual laborors and 'operatives,' as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life . . . yours are hired by the day.'"
Hammond here reformulated the old Jeffersonian theme that liberty required independence—that is, ownership of property. Because most of the unskilled, propertyless workers in the South were black slaves, a larger proportion of southern whites than of northern whites owned real prop- erty. But more important, they all owned the most vital property of all, a white skin. This "Herrenvolk democracy"— the equality of all who belonged to the master race— became the perceived basis for white liberty in the South. It was a reading of the Declaration of Independence that said "all
white men are created equal." As John C. Calhoun, the leading southern political leader, phrased it: "With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals." Alabama's fire-eating orator William Lowndes Yancey declared in 1860 that "your fathers and my fathers built this government on two ideas. The first is that the white race is the citizen, and the master race, and the white man is the equal of every other white man. The second idea is that the negro is the inferior race."* Therefore, echoed another Alabama political leader, "slavery secures the equality of the white race, and upon its permanent establishment rests the hope of democratic liberty." Or as one of the South's leading newspapers, the Richmond Enquirer, put it succinctly in 1856: "Freedom is not possible without slavery."
This idea was by no means confined to the South alone. Many northern workingmen shared it—especially Irish immigrants and other wage-earners at the bottom of the social scale, where they feared competition with blacks, particularly if the slaves were freed and came north looking for jobs. This fear sparked many of the anti-Negro riots in northern cities from the 1830s to 1660s, including the largest of all, the New York draft riots of 1863. This Herrenvolk theme of white supremacy was also a fundamental premise of the Democratic party. Stephen A. Douglas was one of its principal spokesmen, most notably in his famous debates with Lincoln in 1858.
For Lincoln rejected the notion that the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness were confined to the white race. He was not the only American to challenge this dogma, of course. From the beginning of their movement, abolitionists had insisted that black people were equal to whites in the sight of God and equally entitled to liberty in this world. Indeed, the abolitionists and the radical wing of the Republican party went further than Lincoln in maintaining the principle of equal rights for ail people. But because of his prominence as a Republican party leader after 1858 and his power as president of the United States after 1860, Lincoln's were the opinions that mattered most and that are of most interest to us, Lincoln had always considered slavery an institution "founded on both injustice and bad policy," as he told the Illinois legislature in 1837. But he nevertheless indulged in the American habit of describing the United States as a "free country" that enjoyed more "civil and religious liberty' , more "human liberty, human right" than any other people in the history of the world. Even as late as 1861 Lincoln could refer to "the free institutions which we have unceasingly enjoyed for three-quarters of a century.'' But a decade earlier Lincoln had begun to question just how free those institutions were, so long as slavery existed in this otherwise free country. The "monstrous Injustice of slavery," he said in 1854, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." In the 1850s Lincoln began to insist, contrary to the belief of perhaps two-thirds of white Americans, that the Declaration of Independence was not merely "the white-man's charter of freedom." "The negro is included in the word 'men' used in the Declaration," he maintained. This "is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest," and "negro slavery is violative of that principle" because the black man is "entitled to . , . the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. i agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects'—here Lincoln stopped short of the abolitionist affirmation of full equality-but, Lincoln continued, "in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Lincoln did not consider this a new definition of liberty. He believed that Thomas Jefferson and the other founders had meant to include the Negro in the phrase "all men are created equal," even though many of the founders owned slaves, for they were stating a principle that they hoped would eventually become a reality. Douglas maintained that, on the contrary, Jefferson had not meant "all men" to in- clude blacks-nor for that matter any race except Caucasians.
"This government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should never be administered by any except white meh," insisted Douglas over and over again. "The signers of the Declaration had no reference to the negro whatever when they declared all men to be created equal. They . . . [meant] white men, men of European birth and European descent and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race." If a national referendum could have been held on these two definitions of liberty—Lincoln's inclusive one and Douglas's definition exclusive of all but white men—Douglas's position would have won.
But Lincoln persisted against the odds, denouncing Douglas's argument as representing a disastrous declension from the faith of the fathers, a declension that if it went much further would extinguish the light of liberty in America. The Know-Nothings, for example, were trying to deny to white immigrants the liberties of free-born Americans. Here was the danger, warned Lincoln in 1855.
Once a nation decided that its constitutional rights applied only to some and not to all men equally, the torch of liberty would go out. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," lamented Lincoln with reference to the Know-Nothings. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal" We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know- Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some other country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of'hypocrisy."" To dehumanize the Negro—to insist that he was not a man—would boomerang on all of us, said Lincoln on many occasions in the 1850s. "Our reliance must be in the love of liberty...
. . . the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of al! men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. . . . He who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve It not for themselves. . . . Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
The Democratic party of 1859, said Lincoln in that year, had departed so far from the ideas of its founder Thomas Jefferson that it "hold[s] the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property." The only liberty that many whites seemed to believe in was "the liberty of making slaves of other people."
"That is the real issue," said Lincoln in the peroration of his last debate with Douglas. "That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong . . . from the beginning of time. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. . . . No matter in what shape it comes, whether from a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an aplogy for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle." To prevent this principle from "eradicating the light of liberty in this American people," Lincoln pleaded, "let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it, . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, for- ever worthy of the saving."
--"Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, pp.50-54 by James McPherson.
Note that Lincoln was taking in the 1850's a position at odds with 2/3 of the voters. That is why he is the greatest American.
Walt
This might be true after about 1910, not 1865.
Lincoln had no part in the grotesque expansion of federal powers that we all live under. That is absurd.
Lincoln:
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the diffence, is no democracy."
Do you take issue with that?
Lincoln used the powers placed in the Constitution and the laws by the framers. But as he said, because a sick man needs emetics when he is ill, there is no reason to think that he will continue to use them when he is well.
The last thing known to have been written by Lincoln was a short note that said something like:
"passes are no longer necessary to travel to the Virginia side of the river."
The time for emetics was past.
You simply cannot sustain in the record that the out-of-control federal government had anything to do with Abraham Lincoln.
Although Lincoln is constantly blasted on FR and other websites and venues by the neo-rebs, it shouldn't be forgotten that he a) pocket vetoed in 1864 a very harsh piece of reconstruction legislation-- the Wade-Davis Bill, and that b) on the last day of his life, he strongly refused to contemplate treason trials for ANY rebel leader.
He had a great and good heart, and the calumnies of the neo-reb fringe won't change that.
Walt
I guess there is a little money and noteriety in it, because it is not true.
Lincoln, odd as it may seem to you --was honest:
"But there were limits to what Lincoln would do to secure a second term.
He did not even consider canceling or postponing the election. Even had that been constitutionally possible, "the election was a necessity." "We can not have free government without elections," he explained; "and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us." He did not postpone the September draft call, even though Republican politicians from all across the North entreated him to do so. Because Indiana failed to permit its soldiers to vote in the field, he was entirely willing to furlough Sherman's regiments so that they could go home and vote in the October state elections -but he made a point of telling Sherman, "They need not remain for the Presidential election, but may return to you at once."
Though it was clear that the election was going to be a very close one, Lincoln did not try to increase the Republican electoral vote by rushing the admission of new states like Colorado and Nebraska, both of which would surely have voted for his reelection. On October 31, in accordance with an act of Congress, he did proclaim Nevada a state, but he showed little interest in the legislation admitting the new state. Despite the suspicion of both Democrats and Radicals, he made no effort to force the readmission of Louisiana, Tennessee, and other Southern states, partially reconstructed but still under military control, so that they could cast their electoral votes for him. He reminded a delegation from Tennessee that it was the Congress, not the Chief Executive, that had the power to decide whether a state's electoral votes were to be counted and announced firmly, “Except it be to give protection against violence, I decline to interfere in any way with the presidential election.”
"Lincoln", pp. 539-40 by David H. Donald
Walt
The war only happened because Jefferson Davis wanted it to happen. Sumter and Pickens were not the property of South Carolina or Florida. The fact that there were troops in both those places posed no danger to Charleston or Pensacola in particular and the confederacy in general. No hostile action had been taken by either fort towards shipping. There was no reason to bombard them other than Jeff Davis wanted to. And he knew the results of his actions, his own secretary of state had warned him. But he went ahead anyway and the war that followed was his responsibility.
But Lincoln was dead.
There is no doubt that Lincoln wanted a soft peace, and he was the only person who had even a slim chance to pull that off.
I will repeat for emphasis that Lincoln strongly opposed any trial for any rebel.
Walt
Lincoln made his policies very plain in his first inaugural address and elsewhere. The "government will constitutionally maintain itself", Lincoln said, and so it did.
The north "crucified their feelings", to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the laws. The slave power dumped both in the toilet.
Lincoln could not act alone and did not act alone in all this. It was suggested that he be impeached if he DIDN'T react strongly to the secession crisis. When he called for volunteers on April 15, that call was answered to overflowing. --Many-- northerners said it was time to give the rebels some of their own medicine. Beat a U.S. senator at his desk? Impose gag rules on the Congress? Rifle the mails? Demand a slave state for every free state? Dictate the tariff rates?
The north had bent over backwards to placate the south.
Firing on Old Glory was the last straw.
It's not clear to me to what degree Lincoln thought that forcing the issue at Sumter would galvanize the north. Bruce Catton said it had the exact effect he intended.
The neo-rebs detest Lincoln because he was --so- effective in the face of the well matured conspiracy of the slave power.
They would brand as execessive the most reasonable measures for a government threatened with a giant nest of traitors.
It's time to call them on this.
Walt
Read deeper into the real history and you'll see that the "wealth of information" from kooks on both the far right like DiLorenzo, or from the far left like Lerone Bennett, Jr. is nothing but intentional distortion of the historical record to promote contemporary political agendas.
For instance, DiLorenzo portrays the Confederacy as upholding the ideals of the Declaration by attempting to distort Lincoln's actions or racial views as a violation of the Declaration principles. Yet there is in the record, even in the speeches that DiLorenzo only quotes highly selective snips from, Lincoln condemning slavery as a violation of Natural Law on which the Declaration rests. As a politician in the 1850s, Lincoln could no more declare his support for equal rights for blacks than could a Georgia politician, or for that matter a national politician, could in 1950. But Lincoln did publicly oppose slavery, and put his entire being into opposing the further expansion of slavery just as many southern politicians opposed the Klan murderers in out times. It was Lincoln's opposition to expansion, which was shared by the framers of the Constitution through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, that caused the South to despise him. Expansion of slavery was vital to both the economic and class structure of the south.
Politicians of any age are on a relatively short leash in terms of maintaining public support. In the 1850s, people who supported equal rights for blacks included courageous politicians like Thad Stephens and Charles Sumner who were considered to be wide-eyed radicals. They had no broad public support in the North, and their abolitionist views would have made them quite literally criminals in the south where state laws made it illegal to promote abolition. You could be legally hung for supporting abolition if some mob didn't get you first.
Getting back to the Declaration, the facts are that Confederate leaders categorically rejected the Declaration principles as fatally flawed. Read Alexander Stephens "Cornerstone Speech" where he flatly says that Jefferson and the founders had it all wrong, that all men should not be equal under the law, and that the Confederate States of America were founded on the principle that slavery was the natural order.
What DiLorenzo and the other Lost Cause Myth propagandists rely on is the wide spread ignorance of the true cause of the war (the expansion of slavery) and the political realities of the day.
Davis dicated the timing. Since the insurgents had already called for an army of 100,000 men, it was just a matter of time before war between the two sections ensued.
The neo-rebs throw up their hands in mock disbelief because the government took measures that were completely reasonable, irregardless of what Abraham Lincoln stood for.
The neo-rebs profess to be upset because we are not European enough. We're not Balkanized enough to suit them.
Walt
What's your source for that statement?
He actually had to. Without the financial and resource support of the Upper South states which rejected secession to that point, his little cabal of Deep South slaveocrats would have collapsed under its own corruption and ineptitude. Those lazy slave drivers could even figure out how to deliver the mail let along run a nation. Davis had to start a shooting war to get Virginia, North Carolina and he hoped Kentucky on his side by appealing to regional solidarity. He took a crapshoot that ended up costing 600,000 lives. Toombs warned him not to do it but Davis was desperate.
The neo-rebs wail because Lincoln --was-- such an effective politician.
He completely stymied the traitors in Maryland in 1861.
He kept the wavering border states in the Union by gauging with --great-- skill what and when they would accept certaain measures. In 1862 Generals Hunter and Butler issued emancipation documents of verying force. Lincoln had them revoked.
He knew that sentiment in the north was such that it was too soon to go for emancipation. But when he played the compensated emancipation and colonization cards, border state leaders and black leaders were cold to that. The very next day after he met with border state representatives, July 12, 1862, he decided on emancipation as a war measure. And he took that step --when-- he took it --because-- his political sense told him that the north would accept it, this within days after the bloodbath at Antietam.
This is why Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln was "swift, radical, zealous and determined."
Lincoln also used his great --political-- skills to access when and if voting rights for blacks be acceptable to the great mass of whites -- at least in the north. The attempt to legitimize blacks as Americans can be seen in these letters he wrote :
Private
General Hunter
Executive Mansion
Washington D.C. April 1, 1863
My dear Sir:
I am glad to see the accounts of your colored force at Jacksonville, Florida. I see the enemy are driving at them fiercely, as is to be expected. It is mportant to the enemy that such a force shall not take shape, and grow, and thrive, in the south; and in precisely the same proportion, it is important to us that it shall. Hence the utmost caution and viglilance is necessary on our part. The enemy will make extra efforts to destroy them; and we should do the same to perserve and increase them.
Yours truly
A. Lincoln
_________________________________________________________
Hon. Andrew Johnson
Executive Mansion,
My dear Sir:
Washington, March 26. 1863.
I am told you have at least thought of raising a negro military force. In my opinion the country now needs no specific thing so much as some man of your ability, and position, to go to this work. When I speak of your position, I mean that of an eminent citizen of a slave-state, and himself a slave- holder. The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union. The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest? If you have been thinking of it please do not dismiss the thought. Yours truly
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hon Soc of War
Executive Mansion
Washington
July 21, 1863
My Dear Sir:
I desire that a renewed and vigorous effort be made to raise colored forces along the shores of the Missippi [sic]. Please consult the General-in-chief; and if it is perceived that any acceleration of the matter can be effected, let it be done. I think the evidence is nearly conclusive that Gen. Thomas is one of the best, if not the very best, instruments for this service.
Yours truly
Lincoln also proposed --privately-- to the new governor of Louisiana that the new state constiution include voting rights for blacks. A year later, in April, 1865 he came out --publicly-- for the suffrage for black soldiers, because his great --political-- skill told him that the time was right.
It was a direct result of this speech, and this position, that Booth shot him.
President Lincoln, besides ordering the army (note that this is only a few months after the EP) to use black soldiers more vigorously, made many public speeches to prepare the people for the idea of black suffage.
"But to be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose that you do not. ....peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to worth the keeping in all future time. It will have then been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men, who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consumation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, have strove to hinder it. Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us dilligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result."
8/23/63
"When you give the Negro these rights," he [Lincoln] said, "when you put a gun in his hands, it prophesies something more: it foretells that he is to have the full enjoyment of his liberty and his manhood...By the close of the war, Lincoln was reccomending commissioning black officers in the regiments, and one actually rose to become a major before it was over. At the end of 1863, more than a hundred thousand had enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, and in his message to Congress the president reported, "So far as tested, it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any." When some suggested in August 1864 that the Union ought to offer to help return runaway slaves to their masters as a condition for the South's laying down its arms, Lincoln refused even to consider the question.
"Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?" he retorted. "Drive back to the support of the rebellion the physical force which the colored people now give, and promise us, and neither the present, or any incoming administration can save the Union." To others he said it even more emphatically. "This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated. Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it."
--"Lincoln's Men" pp 163-64 by William C. Davis
Lincoln's sense of fairness made him seek to extend the blessings of citizenship to everyone who served under the flag.
His great political skill made him realize that blacks --were--not-- leaving -- he played that card and no one was biting, black or white. That being the case, he knew he had to prepare for the future, and that future involved full rights for blacks.
Walt
Lincoln did make some political mistakes.
He didn't fathom at all that loyalty to the Union could be so tenuous in the slave states. Like most, he thought it would be a quick war--that a stout lesson would teach the rebels the folly of secession. It took him a long time to get over that notion, which is one reason he opposed measures like Hunter's and Butler's emancipation documents.
On the other hand, as my previous note suggested, he did have great political skills. He also had great strategic skills, which you don't hear so often.
I recently read "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton. Catton notes that right after the first battle of Bull Run that Lincoln made some notes on one piece of paper. Those notes ultimately formed the basis of Union victory. It did take him a while to find the right human materials to bring them to fruition.
Lincoln was careful to accept blame for much of the failure of policy. His famous letter saying that events had controlled him and not the other way round is from April, '64. He wrote in a letter late in life that blame for the war was on him as much as anyone, and in his second inagural:
"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
So Lincoln not only was a canny, if not perfect, politican, in the best sense of that word, he was also a good strategist, and he was willing to take responsibility for his actions, the first mark of a great leader.
Walt
Davis wasn't desperate. He was clueless.
Walt
It got a lot more of their menfolk home alive than if it had not been pursued.
Walt
Just to tease the neo-rebs I often ask why on earth the rebels put Washington's image on the great seal of the so-called CSA. They never answer.
Walt
The daylight strategic bombing of Germany, once they got enough aircraft in place in England and Italy, wrecked German synthetic oil production in a matter of days. This is a grat triumph of U.S. arms that is not well known.
Many civilians were killed, but the German air force and army were soon almost entirely out of gasoline. Was that worth doing? Should we have eschewed daylight bombing (which was pretty accurate for the day) on the premise it might kill German civilians? Even if it meant our fighters and bombers and our ground forces had to face fully supplied German forces?
Walt
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