[Peace-discuss] The Lincoln cult

[John W.]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 12:40 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

Explain "ideological."
>
> In fact, slavery was abolished in the federal city (Washington DC) and
> slaveowners were compensated at the rate of $300 per slave -- i.e., their
> freedom was purchased.
>
> Although there were of course many citizens of the Confederacy who didn't
> own slaves, you're right that "the economy of the south was totally
> dependent on slavery" in that the elite lived on the surplus value extracted
> from workers whom they owned; in the North, the elite lived on the surplus
> value extracted from workers whom they rented.
>
> The civil war was a clash between two competing systems for the
> exploitation of labor.  Lincoln was the front man for the rental system,
> which wanted no competition.
>
> It's not hard to see why.  Which do you take better care of, the car you
> own or the car you rent?  --CGE



I take equally good care of both.  Among other reasons, it's the Golden
Rule.  Am I stupid?  Wait...don't answer that!




> Morton K. Brussel wrote:


>  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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