A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  Lincoln had intended to begin his Inaugural Address with an oblique but unmistakable reiteration of the Republican Party plank that specifically forbade the extension of slavery: “Having been so elected upon the Chicago Platform, and while I would repeat nothing in it, of aspersion or epithet or question of motive against any man or party, I hold myself bound by duty, as well as impelled by inclination to follow, within the executive sphere, the principles therein declared. By no other course could I meet the reasonable expectations of the country.”

  But after consulting in Washington with the compromise-minded Seward, he deleted this paragraph entirely. Instead, Lincoln went further than he had ever gone to attempt to placate his slaveholding critics. As president he would continue to enforce the much-hated Fugitive Slave Act (an announcement abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass greeted with alarm and disgust). He remained committed against interfering with slavery where it existed. He would not even force Republican federal appointees on overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies. But he would not tolerate the dissolution of the Union.

  And he would not sugar-coat—one of his favorite phrases—his unyielding opposition to the spread of slavery, even if he found a less threatening way of expressing it. Redeploying a sentiment he had recently shared in a letter to his old Whig congressional colleague from Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens—now the vice president of the new Confederate States of America—Lincoln insisted: “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. . . . Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better, or equal hope, in the world?”

  Lincoln opted for a tried-and-true lawyer’s brief against secession. Regardless of the “disruption” of secession, Lincoln insisted, both universal law and the Constitution must be regarded as “perpetual.” It was unthinkable that some of the states could destroy a Union that all of the states had created. And since “no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union,” Lincoln argued, “I therefore consider that the Union is unbroken; and, to the extent of my ability, I shall take care that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.” Plainly spoken, this meant that as president, he would use all the power at his disposal to ensure that federal military presence in the South would be maintained, import duties would be collected, the mail would be delivered, and where necessary, federal property would be not only held but reclaimed.

  Lincoln presented a direct defense of his unwillingness to compromise on slavery expansion—“to shift the ground upon which I had been elected”—arguing that such a “surrender would not be merely the ruin of a man, or a party; but, as a precedent, would be the ruin of government itself.”

  On March 4, 1861, Lincoln delivered his Inaugural Address before a vast crowd from the portico of the Capitol. “Fellow citizens of the United States!” he began. He gave pronounced emphasis to the word united to an eruption of “loud cheers.” Lincoln was unyielding. “Physically speaking,” he declared in a loud voice that was said to reach the outer fringes of the vast crowd, “we cannot separate.” The Union was older than the Constitution: it was “perpetual” and could not be dissolved. In any case, “the laws of the Union” would be “faithfully executed in all the states.” And he left little doubt that slaves would never inhabit America’s new territories.

  Lincoln intended a stern warning against disunion, asserting that war would be the South’s fault, not his. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. . . . You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it. You can forbear the assault upon it; I can not shrink from the defense of it. With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’”

  At the urging of Seward and others invited to vet the speech in advance, Lincoln had agreed to give the appearance of moderation. At Seward’s suggestion, Lincoln modified the wording of the challenge—but only slightly. He took out the provocative antiphony “unless you first assail it” after “The government will not assail you,” but he retained the most provocative phrase: “You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” While retaining the charge that Southern intransigence could be blamed for the onset of war, he added a new concluding paragraph that ended with a beautifully crafted plea he likely knew would be expressed in vain: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

  And then a visibly trembling Chief Justice Roger Taney—the man who had done more than anyone living to demean the worth of the black man through the Dred Scott decision—administered to Lincoln the oath of office. As the new president swore on the Bible to uphold the Constitution, the roar of a canon salute erupted from the nearby plaza. The volley, far more than Lincoln’s final, eloquent attempt to soothe the enemies of freedom, proved a portent of things to come.

  Lincoln was hardly surprised when South Carolina fired on the Federal troops in Fort Sumter six weeks later. He all but invited the aggression by openly communicating his determination to resupply, though not to rearm, the garrison. What is not fully recognized is the power of Lincoln’s immediate reaction to the firing, in deeds as well as words. The new, untested commander in chief responded within hours, suspending habeas corpus privileges in Maryland so troops could pass through the slaveholding state en route to the defense of Washington, ordering a naval blockade of Southern ports, and calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to “maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union.” Southern reaction followed quickly: four more states seceded from the Union: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

  Lincoln made no effort to win immediate congressional approval—much less appropriations—to pay for his initiatives. The public reason seemed simple enough: Congress was out of session and out of town. Enemies of the administration predictably bristled at its exercise of executive power in the wake of Fort Sumter. The New Orleans Daily Picayune denounced Lincoln as a “military dictator . . . grasping at the power of a despot.” And the hostile New York Evening Day-Book likened his threat to “save the Union” with “the bayonet” as no less inhumane than French emperor Louis Napoleon’s repressive actions against his own people.

  The new president might have avoided charges of despotism simply by calling Congress back to Washington immediately. Railroad and steamboat technology had made the capital far more accessible than it had been in the days when congressional sessions were preceded by weeks of travel. Instead, Lincoln gambled that once he had ordered resources into the fray, none would be recalled, not even by a Congress populated by dubious Northern and border-state Democrats.

  Lincoln largely avoided a negative reaction from Congress and the harsh judgment of history by again deploying the most effective weapon in his personal arsenal: words. For at least two weeks in June, during which time he saw few visitors so he could focus on writing his formal appeal for support from Congress, he crafted a lengthy, deceptively simple, yet ingenious message for the Special Session. His final text combined lawyerly logic, populist language, and evangelical zeal to accomplish his daunting but essential goals.

  Lincoln argued that secession was plainly illegal and unacceptable and, moreover, a sophistry: treason masquerading as states’ rights. Americans had chosen their president, and even those who had voted for others had the obligation to unite around the new governme
nt. In turn, the government would fight to “maintain its own existence.”

  Using the stirring language that we associate with his best speeches, Lincoln presented a compelling case for suppressing the rebellion. In one particularly sublime passage, he foresaw the approaching war as presenting “to the whole family of man, the question, whether . . . a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” The war would be a fight to sustain the one country in the world that was the model of democracy for the future. In one of the strongest statements of American exceptionalism ever made, Lincoln said: “This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

  Lincoln’s political and economic philosophy guided his response to the Southern secession movement. He refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of secession because to do so would accept the principle that the unique American middle-class nation, “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” could be destroyed by a willful aristocratic minority of slaveholders.

  Here we find the basis for Lincoln’s refusal to accept any further extension of the Southern economic system by limiting it to the existing Southern states. Now he was willing to commit American lives to limit its expansion, to put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Lincoln was not an abolitionist advocating the immediate end to the institution. What he was determined to maintain and spread was the Northern political, social, and economic system that ensured that all men “should have an equal chance,” and that meant arresting the spread of slavery in the hope of placing it in the course of ultimate extinction.

  Lincoln believed that the founders of American society had defined its essence in the famous words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

  Lincoln was at one and the same time an economic realist, a pragmatic politician, and a moral philosopher committed to the rule of law. As early as the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln had a clearly defined position on slavery that he defended on all three levels. As to the morality of slavery, he held that the institution was evil and that a nation dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” could not permanently continue “half slave and half free.” As to economic realism, he understood that a nation dedicated to building a middle-class society could not permanently harbor a substantial slave-based economy. As to pragmatic politics, he said that while the Constitution barred the president and Congress from taking immediate action to abolish slavery in the existing Southern states, there was no barrier to banning the extension of slavery to the western territories.

  With the clarity of distance, England’s great philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1862 in Contest in America, “The day when slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its doom. The slave-owners know this, and it is the cause of their fury.” What animated Mill and the majority of nonaristocrats in Britain was Lincoln’s concept that preserving the Union was essential to prove that a nation based on democracy, equality, and opportunity could protect itself from dissolution.

  Lincoln believed his approach was not only moral, legal, and practical but also consistent with his personal commitment to sustain and implement the principles of American exceptionalism enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. He was determined that the one nation in the world founded on the principle that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would endure in perpetuity. He was willing to take any and all actions to preserve the Union—to ensure that the American experiment in an enduring middle-class economy and society would not fail. The America of the future, he believed, should be based on equality and opportunity, just as it already existed for citizens of the Northern states. In essence, this is why Lincoln was willing to fight a war to “save the Union”—to establish once and for all that America would continue to be a model of middle-class democracy.

  Abraham Lincoln was willing to raise his sword in 1861 because he believed that it was worth fighting a “civil war” to establish once and for all that the United States of America would continue to serve as the model of democracy for the future—that this just and generous nation of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. For Lincoln, this was a commitment to sustain the American Dream of economic opportunity for future generations.

  Four. SAVING THE UNION

  LINCOLN THE LEADER

  AFTER SOUTH CAROLINA troops fired on Fort Sumter, Northern volunteers rallied to Lincoln’s calls to suppress the rebellion. Lincoln committed himself to his role as commander in chief of a nation at war. He understood the need to rally both the troops and the civilian population to support a just war for a just cause. He described the nation as the last best hope of mankind because it was the only nation in the world committed to promoting economic opportunity for all its citizens. At its core, there was a philosophical logic to Lincoln’s vision of an active government in the service of the people. The founding principle of the nation was liberty. The purpose of liberty was to enable individuals to improve their condition. The role of government therefore was to serve that central purpose by, as Lincoln liked to put it, “clearing the path” for Americans to achieve economic success. “Clearing the path” for Lincoln did not mean government “getting out of the way.” It was a frontier metaphor, suggestive of the hard work of clearing forest for a farm or a road, pulling stumps out of the ground with teams of oxen. “The legitimate object of government,” he wrote in a note around 1854, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities.”

  In one sense, the political and economic issues that dominated Lincoln’s age were quite different from those that characterize divisions in our era. In another sense, they were eerily similar. Many of the debates of the 1830s and 1840s focused on whether there should be “more” or “less” government, meaning the federal government. Lincoln—despite, or rather because of, his ardent belief in individual and community economic opportunity—identified himself firmly on the side of those who favored “more.”

  Like political philosophers from the time of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Lincoln saw the first purpose of government as providing for physical security and the common defense. But he also believed that government should take positive action to promote the common good. “There are many such things—some of them exist independently of the injustice of the world. Making and maintaining roads, bridges, and the like; providing for the helpless young and afflicted; common schools; and disposing of deceased men’s property are instances.” He saw “charities, pauperism, orphanage” as government responsibilities. By the standards of his time, when the federal government was minimal, and even state governments often had few resources at their disposal, Lincoln was in favor of activist government, on the grounds that the government should play its proper role in assisting the effort of all Americans to improve their economic condition.

  It was this active role of government that Lincoln alluded to in the most famous phrase from his Gettysburg Address. The essence of the United States was not merely government “of the people” and “by the people,” but also government “for the people”—government in an active role clearing the path for its citizens to advance economicall
y. It was a belief he had already put into practice as an Illinois state assemblyman, when he had promoted the construction of roads and canals and education for its citizens.

  Lincoln went to war in 1861 to ensure that the middle-class society of the North rather than the aristocratic society of the South would define the future of the nation. Now that he was president and now that the country was in the throes of that war, he had to make good on his commitment. Ten days before taking the oath of office, President-elect Abraham Lincoln had spoken to an audience in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in the shadow of the Liberty Bell, where Thomas Jefferson had first presented the Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress in 1776: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln said that day, “that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. . . . Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? . . . If it can’t be saved upon that principle . . . if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle . . . I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”

  Just days before his inauguration, Lincoln was still emphasizing the economic basis for limiting slavery: that each person—white or black—was entitled to the fruits of his labor. A war to “Save the Union” would be a just war—because success in the war would ensure the survival of the upwardly mobile society envisioned by the Declaration of Independence and because the future American society would continue to be the example to the world that liberty, freedom, and economic opportunity were inseparable.

  In his Inaugural Address and in his Special Message to Congress in 1861, Lincoln barely mentioned slavery while extolling the message of equality and freedom in the Declaration of Independence.