[Peace-discuss] The Lincoln cult

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Lincoln birthday celebrations seem to have included little attempt to learn
from the past. Lincoln is celebrated -- by few more than the current president,
who insists upon a resemblance -- but there's little critique of the devastation
over which Lincoln presided.  The end of chattel slavery is taken to be a
retrospective justification of his launching of the war.  (The actual economic
and social position of American slaves and their families in the years after
the Civil War is less attended to.)

I can find only one statement of a contrary view by a present-day American
politician:

"Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of
slavery. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war.   Slavery
was phased out in every other country of the world. It should have been done as
the British empire did -- buy the slaves and release them. How much would that
cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans?  And the hatred  lingered for 100
years.  Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a
civil war."

Lincoln was not a principled opponent of slavery (altho' he may have become so).
His position before secession was that the federal government did not possess
the constitutional power to end slavery in states where it already existed; he
supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have explicitly prohibited Congress
from interfering with slavery in states where it existed.

In the midst of the war, Lincoln wrote (to Horace Greeley), "My paramount object
in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy
slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and
if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save
it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do
about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the
Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to
save the Union."

And what was "saving the Union" about?  All would admit today that the *effect*
of Lincoln's policy was to establish a much more powerful central government in
the United States.  (Hence the old line that the Civil War was about a verb:
"the United States is" vs. "the United States are.")  But the *cause* of the war
was the conflict between two ruling groups who exploited labor differently -- by
slavery in the South, by the wage-contract in the North. They came into conflict
after the Mexican War and the vast increase of US territory that followed it.

"Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the
Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the prospect
of competing against a forced-labor system.  But favoring free soil did not mean
agitating to free the black man.  The majority of Western farmers were not
abolitionists ... Their objective was to exclude both the white planter and the
black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace.  That goal, and the
attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the
abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party." (W. A. Williams)

The Radical Republicans (and Lincoln) were not necessarily abolitionist and only
adventitiously democratic. They just wanted the trans-Mississippi empire farmed
with wage-labor, not slave-labor.  (Hence the central Republican party plank was
"no extension of slavery.")

Options other than war were available to Lincoln, and he was aware of them. 
Advice came from the most distinguished American military figure of the day, 
Gen. Winfield Scott (1786-1866). He served on active duty as a general longer 
than any other man in American history and may have been the ablest American 
commander of his time; he devised the Anaconda Plan that would be used to defeat 
the Confederacy. In a letter addressed to  Governor Seward on the day preceding 
Lincoln's inauguration (March 3, 1861), he suggested that the president had four 
possible courses of action:
    --adopt the Crittenden Compromise (which restored the Missouri Compromise 
line: slavery would be prohibited north of the 36° 30′ parallel and guaranteed 
south of it);
    --collect duties outside the ports of seceding States or blockade them;
    --conquer those States at the end of a long, expensive, and desolating war, 
and to no good purpose; or,
    --say to the seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace!" (Scott was 
retired from the service Nov. 1, 1861, and was succeeded by General McClellan.)

I think a true democrat (therefore necessarily a socialist) would have opposed
the war in 1860 -- but obviously not because s/he would have supported slavery.
When Karl Marx wrote on behalf of the International Working Men's Association
to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election (1864), he gave as his principal
reason that, with the distraction of slavery removed, the struggle between
capital and labor was clearer: slavery had been the reason Northern workers
"were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European
brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has
been swept off by the red sea of civil war."

One of the few recent scholarly studies not to observe the Lincoln cult is
William Marley's "Mr. Lincoln Goes to War" (2006).  From a review:

"Focusing on the North's road to war in 1861, he argues that Abraham Lincoln
made armed force a first choice, rather than a last resort, in addressing the
Union's breakup ... Marvel describes the president's course of action as
'destructive and unimaginative.' The confrontation at Fort Sumter ended any
chance of avoiding conflict, he writes ... Lincoln's early and comprehensive
infringement of such constitutional rights as habeas corpus set dangerous
precedents for future autocratic executives."

Illustrating the important principle that the poets often get there first,
Gore Vidal's "Lincoln: A Novel" (1984) made a similar argument a
generation ago. But the theme was absent from this week's celebrations.

--CGE