Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Far from settling the slavery question, Scott v. Sanford only aggravated it. The game of balances had gone far beyond the point where a simple declaration from the Court could end it. The new Republican Party replied that a decision so defective in constitutional logic and so repugnant to popular opinion could never be binding as law, and Abraham Lincoln denounced Taney’s attack on the natural right of blacks to freedom as a turning of the Declaration of Independence upside down. “Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all,” Lincoln declared, “but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not recognize it at all.”70 Meanwhile, Stephen A. Douglas was coming up for reelection to the Senate in 1858, and it was clear that the Illinois Republicans would be quick to challenge Douglas on how he could reconcile popular sovereignty—and the right of territories to vote slavery in or out according to their popular majorities—with Taney’s declaration that neither Congress nor a federal territory had the authority to ban the transportation of slaves to those territories.

  President James Buchanan, relieved at not having to deliver an opinion on the slavery controversy himself, happily announced his full intention of applying the Dred Scott decision to the trouble in Kansas, and welcomed the application of the pro-slavery legislature for the admission of the Kansas Territory to the Union as a slave state.71

  CHAPTER THREE

  YEAR OF METEORS

  It seems only human nature to hang the label irrational on what we do not understand, since it is easy for us to assume that something must be irrational if our ingenuity is unequal to the task of deciphering it. That may actually reflect more on the limits of our ingenuity than on any supposed irrationality in what we are studying. For that reason, it should come as a practical and fundamental warning not to impute irrationality to people in the study of history (or any other human endeavor) too quickly.

  Nevertheless, the behavior of Northern and Southern politicians in the ten years before the Civil War is often described as irrational by many historians, as though the Civil War was a product of an undiagnosed madness, or a paralysis of communications so great as to make the tower of Babel the only worthwhile comparison. The great Allan Nevins described Southerners “in the final paroxysm of 1860–61” as being “filled with frenzy,” while Northerners turned “grimly implacable” over slavery. “The thinking” of North and South alike, concluded Nevins, “was largely irrational, governed by subconscious memories, frustrated desires, and the distortions of politicians and editors.” Dominated by “stereotypes” of each other, Northerners and Southerners were possessed by “fear,” and “fear was largely the product of ignorance, and ignorance—or misinformation—largely the product of propaganda.”1

  Nevins’s was only the mildest of historians’ voices in the twentieth century who blamed the war on irrationality. Sometimes the irrationality took the form of an “egocentric sectionalism,” as it did for Frank Lawrence Owsley; other times, as for James Garfield Randall, it was a kind of political dementia that caused a systematic failure in the American political system and “incredible blundering” by a generation of incompetent politicians. Avery Craven believed that “sane policy” had been abandoned in the heat of unreason, and that “uncalled-for moves” and “irresponsible leadership” had doomed the nation to civil war and the wanton destruction of compromises that might have augured a better American future. 2 It did not relieve the bleakness of this interpretation that all of these historians had come of age as the Progressive movement was withering on the vine and American entry into the First World War was turning into a sucker’s bad bargain. Just as it was easy to believe that irrationality had brought on the Great War and the rise of even more lethal forms of political madness, it was not difficult for embittered Progressives to cast the same dim light on the Civil War. The Civil War was, in these arguments, just one more function of political irrationality, with personal blundering in one case, structural folly in another.

  The difficulty with this accusation of irrationality arises from the ease with which it permits us to discount the meaning of politics in a democracy, and perhaps even democracy itself, since the Progressives had a distinctly uneasy relationship to democracy. As much as Randall, Craven, and Owsley were not wrong to discover exaggerated rhetoric, policy blunders, and brainless leadership causing serious abrasion between North and South, it is only from the comfortable point of view of another century that all the rhetoric seems exaggerated, all the policies inarguably blunders, and all the leadership uncomprehending of the abyss toward which they were pedaling.

  Looked at on their own terms, both the South’s fears of territorial and economic strangulation and the North’s fears of a “slave power” conspiracy are anything but irrational, and only someone who refuses to think through the evidence available to Americans in the 1850s would find either of them at all illogical. “Is it nothing to yell about,” asked South Carolinian William Gimball in a letter to Elizabeth Gimball in 1861, “that we are prevented from carrying our property into the common territory of the United States? Is it nothing to yell for that the government is to be in the hands of men pledged to carry on the ‘irrepressible conflict’ against us? Is it nothing that they send incendiaries to stir up the slaves to poison & murder us? Is it nothing that our brothers at the North rob us of our property and beat us when we reclaim it?”3

  On the Northern side, Abraham Lincoln is not usually considered a candidate for irrationality, but he was convinced of the existence of a “slave power” conspiracy and in one of his most famous speeches accused a U.S. senator, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and two presidents of being its aiders and abettors. John Bigelow, whom Lincoln would appoint as his chargé d’affaires in Paris in 1861, reduced the contest between North and South to “a struggle… between the aristocratic or privileged element in our government and the democratic. The two cannot live in peace together.”4

  Similarly, only the benefit of hindsight allows us to write off the succession of compromises, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the last-minute attempts to broker compromise under the nose of secession and disunion in 1861, as evidences of widening failure. Until the firing of the very first gun, Northerners and Southerners were driven not by irrationality but by the clearest political logic on offer. “As long as slavery is looked upon by the North with abhorrence; as long as the South is regarded as a mere slave-breeding and slave-driving community; as long as false and pernicious theories are cherished respecting the inherent equality and rights of every human being, there can be no satisfactory political union between the two sections,” declared the New Orleans Bee in December 1860. While the premises of that proposition may be questionable, the logic that flowed from them was not. “If one-half the people believe the other half to be deeply dyed in iniquity; to be daily and hourly in the perpetration of the most atrocious moral offense,” continued the editor of the Bee, “how can two such antagonistic nationalities dwell together in fraternal concord under the same government?”5 Far from reeking of irrationality, secession and disunion were perfectly coherent and logical political choices within a political system that all along had confirmed that secession and disunion were viable options.

  By the same token, the political system did not break down—the Southern states simply decided that it had fallen into the wrong hands and that they would no longer choose to use it.6 Far from losing confidence in that system, Northerners and Southerners struggled for workable compromises right down to the last minute, even while the room for creating nation-saving compromises narrowed beyond all hope of maneuver, and they continued to agitate for them almost all the way through the war in the form of Northern and Southern peace movements. If there is anything that is genuinely appalling in the political context of the Civil War, it is the dominance of the most glittering and hard-edged political
rationality. It was the hard edge of that rationality that, in the end, made a final compromise impossible.

  THE LITTLE ENGINE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  The Dred Scott decision was a deep embarrassment for Stephen A. Douglas. The doctrine of popular sovereignty, on which Douglas had pegged his hopes for achieving sectional peace (and achieving his own nomination to the presidency), initially assumed that the inhabitants of any given territory could, if they wished, exclude slavery simply by passing the active legislation necessary to ban it from their midst. The Dred Scott decision, however, made it clear that no one—not Congress, not the inhabitants of a territory, not even a territorial legislature—had any power to keep any United States citizen from taking property (which had now become a euphemism for slaves) anywhere a citizen wanted and erecting the slave system in any territory of the Union. If the decision was pressed far enough, it might also open the way to claiming that no state could ban slavery, either.

  Douglas was nothing if not resourceful. He “was a wonderful man with the people … When he came through the State, the whole Democratic party was alive and ready to rally to his support.” Once the initial shock of the Dred Scott decision wore off, Douglas announced that the Court’s decision would not contradict the operation of popular sovereignty after all. True, a territory could not pass legislation actively banning slavery; but the people of a territory could passively make it impossible for slavery to exist in their territory by refusing to enact the usual array of slave codes and police measures that slave states needed in order to keep slavery intact. The right to take slaves into the territories, claimed Douglas in a speech in Spring-field in the summer of 1857, was “practically a dead letter” without “appropriate police regulations and local legislation.” Withhold those, and slavery had no chance of surviving within a territory’s boundaries. By Douglas’s logic, Dred Scott not only left popular sovereignty intact but left it as the only weapon remaining by which slavery could be legally kept out of the territories.7

  This line of reasoning did nothing to stanch the hemorrhaging of Douglas’s reputation within the Democratic ranks. Southern Democrats, who were overjoyed at the Dred Scott decision, were furious at Douglas’s refusal to submit tamely to the Supreme Court’s dictum. What was more, the new president, James Buchanan, had welcomed the Dred Scott decision as a convenient way of declaring the Kansas problem settled. Buchanan, surrounded by a mostly Southern cabinet, was irritated that Douglas was threatening to spoil that settlement by suggesting that anti-slavery Kansans might yet have the means to obstruct a pro-slavery settlement and prolong the Kansas turmoil. As Douglas approached senatorial reelection in Illinois in 1858, it became a real question as to whether Buchanan’s vengeful willingness to manipulate party patronage against Douglas might not prevent Douglas from returning to the Senate.8

  The Republicans had been thrown into similar disarray by the Dred Scott decision. They had assumed that their task was the creation of a congressional coalition large enough to block any attempt to admit Kansas or any other new territory as a slave state, and perhaps even restore the rule of the Missouri Compromise. Now the Court’s decision had pulled the rug out from under them by declaring that neither Congress nor anyone else had the authority to create such an obstacle. For that reason, desperate Republicans—especially in the East—began to hearken to the song of Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas’s argument that popular sovereignty (at least in its passive form) was now the only workable means of keeping slavery from the territories convinced many Illinois Republicans that, especially for the 1858 senatorial race, it was time to stymie Taney and Buchanan and throw their support behind Douglas.

  There was, however, one Illinois Republican who dissented from this view of Douglas, and that was Abraham Lincoln. In 1858 Lincoln was forty-nine years old, one of the most outstanding lawyers in Illinois, and equally one of the most prominent state Republicans. Lincoln had come by his successes the hard way. Born in a crude log cabin in 1809 in Kentucky, Lincoln had known little before his twenty-fifth birthday but the poverty and hardships that formed the substance of backcountry life. “There was an unbroken wilderness there then,” he recalled in an autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1859, “and an axe was put in his hand; and with the trees and logs and grubs he fought until he reached his twentieth year.” Lincoln had also imbibed anti-slavery opinions almost with his mother’s milk, since his parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, were both members of an ultra-Calvinistic Baptist sect that banned slaveholding members from their fellowship. In fact, the spread of slavery across Kentucky was one of the motivations for Thomas Lincoln to uproot his family and move first to Indiana and then finally to Illinois.9

  Their views on slavery may have been almost the only things Thomas and Abraham Lincoln had in common. Thomas Lincoln was content to be a farmer, only marginally literate—Lincoln recalled that his father “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name”—but at least moderately successful in his calling. Abraham, however, grew up with a passion for self-education and social betterment. He rejected his father’s raw Calvinistic religion; his reading turned instead to religious skeptics—Thomas Paine, Constantin Volney, Robert Burns—and the Enlightenment’s rule of reason. His stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, whom Thomas married after the death of Nancy Lincoln in 1818, recalled in 1865 that “Abe was a good boy,” but he “didn’t like physical labor—was diligent for knowledge.”

  He read all the books he could lay his hands on. … Abe read histories, papers & other books. … He had a copy book—a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and this preserved them. He ciphered on boards when he had no paper or no slate and when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again. … Abe, when old folks were at our house, was a silent & attentive observer—never speaking or asking questions till they were gone and then he must understand Every thing—even to the smallest thing—Minutely & Exactly—he would then repeat it over to himself again & again—sometimes in one form and then in another & when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he became Easy and he never lost that fact or his understanding of it. Sometimes he seemed pestered to give Expression to his ideas and got mad almost at one who couldn’t Explain plainly what he wanted to convey.10

  In 1831 Abraham Lincoln struck out on his own, trying his hand at anything that offered him a way up the ladder. He tried clerking and postmastering in a store in the village of New Salem, Illinois, but succeeded at neither, and in 1832 he took his first turn at politics.

  Politically, Lincoln found himself almost instinctively drawn to the Whigs rather than the Democrats. The Whigs celebrated the Union, deplored the loud demands of the states for first loyalties, and called for an enabling role for government in the economy, railroads, and internal improvements, with protective tariffs as incentives. The Whigs were the party of up-and-coming men, the businessmen, the self-improvers and self-transformers who did not want to be bound by the old loyalties of the past, and who saw at the core of American democracy the opportunity to transform themselves. Lincoln believed that what made the United States “at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world” was that, in America, “every man can make himself.” Whigs such as Lincoln embraced this self-making model as the guarantee of “hope to all, and energy, and progress and improvement of condition to all.” So Lincoln took Henry Clay (a fellow Kentuckian) as his political idol, as Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman.” His first electoral platform—he ran for the state legislature but only came in eighth in a field of thirteen candidates—was dedicated to the need for tax-funded internal improvements. “He was,” said Stephen T. Logan, his second law partner, “as stiff as a man could be in his Whig doctrines.”11

  In 1834 Lincoln won his first seat in the Illinois state legislature as a Whig, and served four successive terms there. In the process, he helped lead the Illinois legislature into the sponsorship of transportation projects and, in 1837, the passage of a $10 mi
llion appropriation for railroad construction. His first major speech in the Illinois legislature praised the operation of the Illinois State Bank for having “doubled the prices of the products” of Illinois farms and filled farmers’ pockets “with a sound circulating medium,” noting that the farmers were “all well-pleased with its operations.” Democratic attacks on banks and bank charters, Lincoln explained, would never hurt “men of wealth,” who are “beyond the power of fortune,” but they would “depreciate the value of its paper [currency] in the hands of the honest and unsuspecting farmer and mechanic.”12

  Having helped to put much of this program in place, Lincoln saw it promptly turned to ashes. A national economic depression, caused in large measure by the Democratic assault on the banks, crushed the American economy in 1837. Illinois had financed its railroad appropriation on bank borrowing, and the collapse of the banks saddled the state legislature (and the unforgiving taxpayers) with an indebtedness that took years to pay off.13

  This did nothing to discourage Lincoln’s urges for social betterment and education. While still a state legislator, Lincoln began teaching himself law out of an assortment of borrowed law books, and in 1836 he was licensed to practice in the state circuit courts. The choice of law as a profession was part and parcel of his Whiggish economic aspirations, since lawyers were (in the phrase of historian Charles G. Sellers) the “shock troops” of market capitalism, and from John Marshall’s Supreme Court on down, American lawyers were becoming the guardians of commercial contracts and property. It was in pursuit of the market—and of the financial and social respectability that came with it—that Lincoln moved to the Illinois state capital, Springfield, and entered a law firm there with another young lawyer, John Todd Stuart. Even then Lincoln was not content. “That man,” wrote his later law partner, William Henry Herndon, “who thinks Lincoln calmly gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln. He was always calculating and planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”14