[Peace-discuss] The Lincoln cult

Fri Feb 13 16:32:12 CST 2009

Another evaluation of Lincoln, less ideological and more balanced in  
my view, can be found written by Eric Foner in The Nation:

  http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/59455.html

Also, consider looking at the Moyers interview with Foner:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02062009/profile2.html#sites

The author of the piece below says

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? .

Given that the economy of the south was totally dependent on slavery,  
I wonder how long this would have taken --- and how much it would have  
cost.

I find the statement glib.

--mkb

On Feb 13, 2009, at 3:30 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 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
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