Allan Pinkerton, President Lincoln, and Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand,
Antietam, Maryland,
Alexander Gardner, photographer,
October 3, 1862.
Monday, February 12, 2007
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
Alas! it is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
—Lord Byron
As far as I know, noone has ever considered Lincoln’s war against the South in the light of traditional Just War Theory. Fort Sumter was not a causus belli, merely an excuse. The reduction of the fort was bloodless and the garrison was allowed to depart with honors, nor had the garrison been terribly harrassed and beleagured in the way that was reported in the Republican press. Every other federal military post in the seceded states had already passed peacefully into possession of Southern authorities. (Except for Fort Pickens at Pensacola, and there the Union military and Florida officials had made a truce preserving the status quo until the situation was settled by the politicians.) To justify his position Lincoln was forced to pretend that the constitutional and legally elected governments of seven states and the expressed will of their people was merely a “combination of lawbreakers” that he could on his own authority suppress.
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According to Just War Theory, which in general rests upon assumptions that war should not be a tool of politics but be defensive action, damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave, and certain, and all other means of response must be shown to be inadequate. Does the surrender of Fort Sumter justify Lincoln’s call for troops to invade the South under this perspective? When vast opportunities for negotiation and peaceful settlement were available and underway and had the support of large numbers of influential citizens in every part of the country? Just War theory requires that war not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be fought and have a reasonable prospect of success. Does the vast destruction of life and property and constitutional freedoms justify Lincoln’s war under this view? The prospects for success? Success was acheived only by a previously inconceivable vastness of mobilization, casualties, and debt, and, even so, was long in doubt. Let’s not even mention Lincoln’s violations of Just War theory in systematically terrorizing the noncombatant population of the South.
And then, we have the Great Emancipator. He took a raft trip down to New Orleans as a young man and had his eyes opened to slavery, which he vowed to strike against. There is no evidence for this Road-to-Damascus experience. What we do know is that Lincoln shared in the property of his wife’s slaveholding family and on at least two occasions was counsel for slaveholders seeking return of runaways. It seems clear that he used the N-word all his life and that he was a white supremacist like all other Midwesterners of the time (and later). The only options he offered to emancipated blacks were to be sent out of the country or to “root hog or die,” in any case to stay out of the North. In answer to these facts, the apologists have imagined a Lincoln who wanted racial equality but had to adjust his public words in order to advance a recalcitrant people as far as they were able along the path of righteousness. Or else, we are told, he mysteriously “evolved” into an egalitarian, perhaps using the same magic by which the Supreme Court “evolves” the Constitution.
Then there is Lincoln the innocent party, who, after having been chosen by the people, found himself with the terrible burden of a rebellion against his rule—it being inexplicable why anyone would resist such diviine rule unless depraved by innate wickedness like Southerners. This innocent-victim business rather ignores some things—that his sectional candidacy and minority electoral victory were deliberately provocative, that he made no effort in word or deed to preserve peace but rather maneuvered for an excuse to invade the South.
Then, of course, he had to carry on his shoulders the terrible burden of the war itself. After all, though usually disappointed by those around him, his was the divine mission to save government of the people. by the people, and for the people from perishing from the earth. Despite his martyr’s burden he never wavered in his unexampled Christian benevolence and mercy, even toward his enemies. Although he was a military genius, he was time and again deprived of victory by bad generals.
One hardly knows where to begin in dealing with this rampant balderdash. Who appointed those generals? General Sherman himself observed that many of Lincoln’s appointments looked like they had been made to purposely lose the war. In fact, Lincoln’s conduct is understandable only if you perceive the real pattern of consistency—that his primary objective was to keep himself and his party in power and that the war was the instrument for that objective. This was the tender-hearted leader who auhroized ruthless terrorism against women and children, refused generous offers of prisoner exchange while declaring medicine a contraband of war, accepted Grant’s costly policy of losing three men for every one Confederate killed, was not above keeping his own son out of harm’s way, and invited his own fate by clandestinely organizing the attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis.
I do not know whether Lincoln was personally corrupt in that he made money from his office. I do know that he was politically corrupt—that he took to previously unimagined levels the use of government jobs and contracts to buy political support and by design made the government a machine for doing favors for the wealthy and well-placed that has remained the hallmark of the U.,S. Government to the present day. Historians again give Abe a free pass. He was somehow the innocent victim of the corruption of the day. Mysteriously, the Great Barbecue blossomed without his awareness or complicity. But in fact, corruption was implicit and endemic in his political platform and his political conduct. This is not noticed because we are so used to what he created, but it would have shocked earlier generations and did shock honest people at the time. Just one example: until Stanton made him stop, Lincoln freely signed and gave out to his financial supporters what were called “cotton certificates.” This gave them leave to conduct an illegal and immoral trade with the enemy. A brisk business developed on the coast of Confederate Texas where Republican industrialists traded gold, medicine and other goods for Southern cotton.
There is a simple and obvious thing which we must always remember but is almost always left out of discussion of the War to Prevent Southern Independence. What happened in American in the years 1861–1865 was, rhetoric aside, a brutal war of conquest. The South was invaded, laid waste, a fourth of its men killed off, and its people deprived by force of their American right to self-government and subjected to military rule. At the same time peaceful critics of Lincoln’s government were suppressed in fashion previously unthinkable to Americans. The Union of the Founding Fathers was not saved. It was destroyed and replaced. The Gettysburg Address covered up the revolution by a rhetorical feat of having it both ways. By religious-sounding language and evasion and misrepresentation of fact, Lincoln made his destruction of the Union seem to be simultaneously a preservation of the old and sacred and “a new birth of freedom.”
Mel Bradford was wise and correct, I think, that Lincoln is best discerned through his rhetoric. Lincoln provided the rhetoric by which the rational republican discourse of earlier generations of Americans was replaced by sermonistic verbiage of the pseudo-religion of Americanism, like “saving the world for democracy.” Perhaps the ultimate limit of this poisonous style has been reached by George W. Bush, who uses words like “freedom” as magic incantations devoid of content.
Lincoln’s rhetorical model has an irresisstible appeal for political conmen and wanabee intellectuals, two types which America produces prolificically. One of the most acute examinations of Lincoln was that of the poet Edgar Lee Masters, who came from Lincoln’s home territory. He characterizes the Gettysburg Address as embodying “a refusal of the truth,” designed to disguise the real agenda of Lincoln’s war as well as its horrors. Masters believed that the American national character had been permanently disfigured by Lincoln’s refusal of the truth and that Lincoln’s real goal and real accomplishment was the empowerment of the state capitalists who had been held somewhat in check since Hamilton’s day. The truth was that the goal and result of the war was not expressed by the Gettysburg Address but by a Boston capitalist’s brag that one hundred rich men in New England controlled more votes in Congress than any Southern state.
The Lincoln fable is the Gordian knot of American identity. When we saw away at it we threaten the very heart of a people’s consoling idea of its self. If the Lincoln fable is not true, American is living a lie and has been for a long time. In one of his essays on Lincoln’s legacy, Bradford observed that America had long lived by what I have called the Lincoln fable. We would continue to do so, he said, at our peril. In our time of Lincolnian imperialism and executive arrogance covered by Lincolnian rhetoric, Bradford’s warning is ever more true and urgent.
This article was drawn from a paper presented at the Abbeville Institute conference on “Re-Thinking Lincoln,” July 7-15 at Franklin, Louisiana. Audiotapes of this and presentations by Thomas DiLorenzo, Donald Livingston, H.A. Scott Trask, Joseph Stromberg, and others can be obtained from www.abbevilleinstitute.org.
Clyde Wilson is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, editor of
The Papers of John C. Calhoun, author of Carolina Cavalier, and a contributing
editor for Chronicles.
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