So this was Lincoln’s view: the success of the rebellion would mean that the United States of America would not be just diminished or damaged; it would be destroyed.
Statesmen speaking of reasons-of-state and national interests sometimes seek to intensify a particular national concern by describing it as a vital national interest; on examination these matters rarely turn out to be literally vital—a matter of a nation’s persisting or ceasing to be. For Lincoln, the issue for the United States in the Civil War was indeed vital. Lincoln finished his summary of events by saying that the “assailants of the Government” had by their act at Fort Sumter “forced upon the country this distinct issue, ‘Immediate dissolution or blood.’”
THE WHOLE FAMILY OF MAN
AND TO WHOM did that matter? Perhaps the congressmen, assembling in their special session, would not have attended closely enough to the drone of the clerk’s voice to hear what a grand leap the president now made, but surely Senator Browning, hearing Lincoln himself read it the night before in the executive mansion, must have sat up a little straighter at this point.
In the first substantive philosophical paragraph of his presidency, Lincoln took the issue all the way to its worldwide and historic significance: “And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” Can “discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration…break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth”?
In November 1863, at the dedication of a cemetery in Gettysburg, he would put the point more succinctly and gracefully, asking for a high resolve “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
From the start, Lincoln saw a sweeping, drastic, universal consequence to this assault upon government in the United States. This American case presented the universal issue: Was there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Could such a government be maintained against a “formidable” attempt to overthrow it from within? Could it demonstrate to all the world that such a government could have the strength to prevent a successful appeal from ballots back to bullets? Put negatively, defending such a government against destruction, for the whole family of man and for the “vast future also,” was the moral purpose of Lincoln’s war.
Not only Confederates at the time and neo-Confederates later but also—at least momentarily—some Northern antagonists would not quite see why the success of the secessionists would mean the destruction of the Union. There were antislavery folk who in the purity of their disgust with slavery would say, “Let the erring sisters go; depart in peace.” But not Lincoln.
Republican government—democracy, we say now—requires a tacit understanding between majorities and minorities. Majorities rightly prevail, but they respect the liberty of minorities to agitate to try to replace them; minorities have the right to express and organize in behalf of their view, but when the votes are counted, they must acquiesce. That did not happen in this case, and the implication was immense.
1. Bullets would have replaced ballots, as those who lost an election, instead of accepting the result, revolted and resorted to force.
2. If successful, this act would introduce a principle of continual disintegration that no government could sustain.
3. And that would demonstrate to all the world that republican government, popular government, had a fatal weakness.
The American Civil War is such a mammoth event, and its roots run so deep and its coming had such a long prelude, that we may obscure the point that the overt rebellion came in response to the results of an election. But Lincoln, the man chosen to be the national executive in that election, did not forget that point. And he saw the significance on the world stage:
Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it, our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable [internal] attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world, that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion—that ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections.
Lincoln pointed out the choice that the Confederate constitution makers themselves had to face, as to whether to incorporate this essence of anarchy into the government they were setting up:
The seceders insist that our Constitution admits of secession. They have assumed to make a National Constitution of their own, in which, of necessity, they have either discarded, or retained, the right of secession, as they insist, it exists in ours. If they have discarded it, they thereby admit that, on principle, it ought not to be in ours. If they have retained it, by their own construction of ours they show that to be consistent they must secede from one another, whenever they shall find it the easiest way of settling their debts, or effecting any other selfish, or unjust object. The principle itself is one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure.
One of the key items in the American Constitution that was not changed by Montgomery seceders was the provision that their constitution shall be “the Supreme law of the land,” binding on the states. These seceders thus turned right around and denied the right of secession in the governing instrument of the body they set up. In addition to this general, supreme denial, they took many provisions en bloc from the U.S. Constitution that represented a specific and practical denial of the “sovereignty” of states: under the Confederate constitution, no state could, for example, enter into an alliance on its own, or make a treaty, or coin money. The provisions of the Confederate constitution, wrote John Nicolay many years later, represented “a sweeping practical negation of the whole heretical dogma of state supremacy upon which they had built their revolt.”
Writings about republics—popular government—in the history of the West had often concluded, both from reasoning about how they would work (or wouldn’t work) and from historical examples of collapsed fractious city-state republics, that they could not last. In the very first argument he made in the July 4 Message, after his summary of recent events, Lincoln carried the issue all the way to “the whole family of man.” What the success of the American rebellion would show to the whole family of man was that republican government had a fatal weakness.
STATE SOVEREIGNTY: A SUGARCOATING FOR TREASON
THE JUSTIFICATIONS for secession were of two sorts, often mingled but logically distinct:
1. It was a legitimate act under the U.S. Constitution.
2. It was a revolutionary act, like that of the American and the French revolutionaries, throwing off an oppressive regime.
Lincoln’s arguments were directed almost entirely to the first, and indeed he insisted that only that justification could have persuaded such of the Southern population as was persuaded (not, he believed, a majority in most states) to support secession. But he responded at least implicitly to the second, revolutionary justification also when the dispute was lifted up to the ultimate moral qualities of the contending societies.
The leaders of the rebellion, wrote Lincoln, knew they could never raise significant support for their treason by obviously violating the law. The good people in their section were “possessed of as much moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, and as much pride in, and reverence for, the history, and government, of their common country, as any other civilized, and patriotic people.” So these Confederate leaders “sugar-coated” their treason with the “ingenious sophism” that “any state of the Union may, consistently with the National Constitutio
n, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union or of any other state.” With this sophism they had been “debauching” and “drugging the public mind of their section for thirty years.” By this debauching, drugging, and sugarcoating, “they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their state out of the Union, who could not be brought to such a thing before.”
WHENCE THIS MAGICAL OMNIPOTENCE OF STATES’ RIGHTS?
“THIS SOPHISM derives much—perhaps the whole—of its currency, from the assumption, that there is some omnipotent, and sacred supremacy, pertaining to a State of our Federal Union.” Lincoln made his argument against the assumption that the states had some “omnipotent and sacred supremacy” again, as in the inaugural especially, from America’s short history. He now made the argument, also from the Constitution, from political philosophy, from logic and common sense, and from moral idealism.
The largest part of his argument was historical and constitutional. Lincoln argued that there was and had been no such thing as an independent and freestanding “State” in the brief history of this nation. He produced several summary statements of the history on this point: “Having never been States, either in substance, or in name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of ‘States rights,’ asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself?” Whatever standing the American states had, they had only as creatures of the Union: “The states have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status.” He said, in another brief summary of the history, that the states had achieved their existence and their liberty only through the Union: “The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. By conquest, or purchase, the Union gave each of them whatever of independence, and liberty, it has.” And he said then this key summary sentence: “The Union is older than any of the states, and, in fact, created them as states.”
Lincoln, the lawyer, made a variety of other arguments, with varying ingenuity and persuasive power, including a particularly odd one that would have required the departing states whose land had been purchased with federal money to pay a refund to the United States.
A WICKED EXERCISE OF PHYSICAL POWER
IF THE ARGUMENT for secession as a legal act within the Constitution was just a sugarcoating for treason, the other, revolutionary argument remained. If the states pretended to break from the Union, Lincoln said, “[t]hey can do so only against the law, and by Revolution.”
There were two revolutions they could appeal to: (1) the American Revolution; or (2) a universal right of revolution. The American Revolution of course figured constantly in the Confederacy’s self-presentation. Jefferson Davis would say in his inaugural address that the Confederacy “merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence in 1776 had defined as inalienable,” and paradoxically he said in the same speech that “it is by abuse of language that [the seceding states’] act has been denominated a revolution.”
Others went ahead and embraced the argument of revolution, singing a “Southern Marseillaise” and accepting the designation of Henry Wise of Virginia as the “Danton” of secession. If the rebels claimed to have an abstract, universal right of revolution, they might also have claimed support from the great revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the heady year of 1848, when a revolutionary fervor had swept Europe and large numbers of refugees fled to the land of democratic revolution across the Atlantic, a congressman said on the floor of the House:
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
The congressman who said this, in the course of a condemnation of President Polk’s conduct of the war with Mexico, was the Whig from the Seventh District of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.
Thirteen years later his view of “revolution” had become more discriminate. In 1848 it had been implicit in the celebration of “revolution” that the revolutions in question were moving in the direction of democracy and human rights; Lincoln’s reference to a right to revolution that would “liberate the world” indicates that assumption. Now he confronted a so-called revolution that was no world liberator but rather the opposite, a retrograde step away from human rights. In the argument of his inaugural, Lincoln made a concession, in passing, to a right of revolution, but only when it met a moral test.
If, by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would, if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case.
In the case he faced in 1861, the rebels had no morally justifiable cause for mounting a revolution against the American government, either in the procedural treatment of the “dissatisfied countrymen” or in their moral substance of the alternative society they proposed.
As to their treatment, he had argued in the inaugural:
Is it true…that any right, plainly written in the Constitution, has been denied? I think not…Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied.
All that had happened to the secessionists was that they had lost an election; no vital right had been infringed. Even the fugitive slave provisions, obnoxious though they were to many in the North, had been enforced as well as might be. The secessionists had all the freedoms of the American Constitution to argue and to attempt in the next election to win.
THE MORAL CONTRAST BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE CONFEDERACY
THE OTHER POSSIBLE moral justification for secession as a revolution would be that the social order that the secessionists proposed would be radically superior to the social order they challenged.
Toward the end of the July 4 Message, as in the inaugural, Lincoln celebrated the American republic and set it in contrast to the alternative proposed by the rebels. The rebellion if successful would destroy the American Union, he said, and that destruction would mean the end of what this Union has meant and will mean for the history of liberty in the world:
It may be affirmed, without extravagance, that the free institutions we enjoy, have developed the powers, and improved the condition of our whole people, beyond any example in the world…
Whoever, in any section, proposes to abandon such a government, would do well to consider, in deference to what principle it is, that he does it—what better he is likely to get in its stead—whether the substitute will give, or be intended to give, so much of good to the people.
What kind of a social order was it that the Confederacy proposed to replace the Union?
There are some foreshadowings on this subject. Our adversaries have adopted some Declarations of Independence; in which, unlike the good old one, penned by Jefferson, they omit the words “all men are created equal.” Why? They have adopted a temporary national constitution, in the preamble of which, unlike our good old one, signed by Washington, they omit “We, the People,” and substitute “We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States.” Why? Why this deliberate pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people?
What the Confederacy offered was not an alternative version of the American experiment but a betrayal and violation of it.
THIS IS A PEOPLE’S CONTEST
A COMMON MODERN VIEW of the American Civil War discovers moral meaning in it only with the Emancipation Proclamation. Before that proclamation was set forth, on January 1, 1863, in this view, because Lincoln’s express purpose was “only” to restore the Union, the project had no particular moral elevation but was only a realistic power-political undertaking. Lincoln’s famous letter to Horace Greeley would be presented, with a certain
deflationary relish, as though it gave evidence for such a view. Lincoln wrote to Greeley in August 1862:
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.
Lincoln’s stated desire that the war be limited—that it not “degenerate,” as he put it in his first annual message, “into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle”—might be cited as further evidence of his merely state-preserving purposes. His countermanding of the efforts to free slaves in the districts under their military command by Generals Frémont and Hunter might be further evidence. At its furthest reduction this view would hold that during the first year and a half of the war Lincoln and the Americans had been engaged only in a power-political struggle, like those that appear throughout human history. The foreign secretary of the nation whose appraisal was the most important, Lord John Russell of Great Britain, described the American Civil War dismissively as much like the struggles that had gone on repeatedly in European history in which two states contended, “the one for empire and the other for power.”
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 19
