That the Civil War was fought over slavery has become a central myth of the United States. It is, rather, more accurate to see the War as a profound repudiation of the nation’s founding in the War of Independence.
“We have no more right to meddle with slavery in Georgia than we have to meddle with monarchy in Europe,” proclaimed the Providence Daily Post on February 2, 1861. Abraham Lincoln had no objection to such an observation. In his fourth 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln declaimed: “I will say that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.”
These views were not anomalous. Indeed, in his March 4, 1861, inaugural address, Lincoln assured the nation that he was agnostic toward slavery: “I declare that I have no intention, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” In an 1862 letter to the New York Tribune, Lincoln wrote: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it…”
Lincoln had no desire to live among blacks, as he affirmed innumerable times. In an August 14, 1862, conference at the White House with a group of freed slaves, Lincoln exhibited what today we would call unashamed racism, claiming that “on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.” The number of such statements proliferates, as any reading of Lincoln’s speeches & writings or the multi-volume “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln” edited by Roy Basler will make clear — a task any serious scholar should undertake. We recall, too, that the first state to legalize slavery was not South Carolina but Massachusetts.
Slavery was a secondary matter in the prosecution of the Civil War. Nigel Hamilton in “Lincoln vs. Davis” points out that the success of the Union war effort hinged on Lincoln’s segue into adopting emancipation as the path to victory, a document issued on January 1, 1863, or almost two years into hostilities from the date of April 12, 1861, when the War officially began. It was only when the fortunes of the war were at their lowest ebb for the Union that Lincoln shifted his strategy to proclaiming emancipation, thus working to deprive the Confederates not only of their productive granary and European support, but most critically of moral grounding.
Woodrow Wilson well understood this tactic. “It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage,” he wrote, “by transforming the contest from a war waged against States fighting for their independence, into a war against States for the maintenance and extension of slavery, by making some move for emancipation as the real motive for the struggle.” Lincoln admitted in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase that the Emancipation Proclamation was not constitutional but only a “war measure.”
The war was intended to cement an essentially loose coalition of states into a centralized union predicated on economic advantage and Federal power, accruing to the North. In the same vein, Paul Calore’s “The Causes of the Civil War: The Political, Cultural, Economic and Territorial Disputes between North and South” unpacks the roiled concept of states’ rights and the political and economic friction between the agricultural society of the South and the growing industrial one of the North, between a free-trade South and a protectionist North. While the founding fathers of the United States had believed firmly in a small and limited Federal Government, Lincoln strove to advance a large central government predicated on the concentration of power.
Desmond Morton, in his extensive “A Short History of Canada,“ recounts what most Canadians knew at the time, that “the real issue in the Civil War, as contemporaries understood matters, was not slavery but states’ rights.” Protecting the interests of the provinces was the main reason federalism—rather than first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s preferred “single legislative union” (à la Lincoln) — was adopted at Confederation in 1867. The provinces, including French Canada, were to be semi-independent units, as Canadians recognized the states to have been before Lincoln’s successful effort to change the character of a voluntary Union.
At bottom, then, the Civil War was a war against secession, a war to preserve the Union intact, which, by Lincoln’s own accounts, was his primary purpose. True, the question is vexed as many authorities believe the founding document was written in the context of the struggle for independence from Britain, not the departure of individual states within a newly formed nation. But it seems reasonable to assume that the Founders would not have invested an American president with powers native to a British monarch. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in “Democracy in America,” “If one of the states chose to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so.”
“The cause of the Civil War,” writes William Appleman Williams in “America Confronts a Revolutionary World,” “was the refusal of Lincoln and other northerners to honor the revolutionary right of self-determination—the touchstone of the American Revolution… Insofar as the war was fought to preserve the union, it was an explicit rejection of the American Revolution. Slavery neither explains nor justifies Northern suppression of secession.”
The truth about Lincoln seems almost impossible to get through the collective noggin of America. In his most recent volume on Lincoln’s motives, president of the Mises Institute and former Loyola College economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo heads a chapter with a quote from one of America’s finest intellects and documentary filmmakers, Dinesh D’Souza, to the effect: “Lincoln never acknowledges black inferiority.” The claim is diametrically opposed to the truth. We know that Lincoln considered black inferiority a fact of nature and publicly “acknowledged” the sentiment numberless times.
That “someone as intelligent as D’Souza,” DiLorenzo comments, “could be so easily misled…is typical of what generations of Americans have been taught about Abraham Lincoln’s views on race.” The truth about Lincoln, the Civil War, and its aftermath has been dissembled and equivocated so often and for so long a time that even the best minds have been adulterated.
The pivotal question is this: Why not peaceful emancipation? DiLorenzo points out that “Dozens of countries ended slavery peacefully during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only in the United States was warfare associated with emancipation.” By 1840, all the slaves in the British Empire had been freed. A table provided in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s go-to volume “Time on the Cross” gives the facts: Between 1813 and 1854, eleven countries in the Americas alone ended slavery peacefully, either through manumission or occasionally some form of compensated emancipation. The only undoubted good that came from the American war was abolition, but the result, according to scores of authorities, could have been achieved by other, less sanguinary means. The resolution would not have been perfect, plainly, but better than the pestiferous hate-fest and moral hostage-taking we live with today.
I suggest that the unnecessary and massively destructive Civil War left a smoldering crater in the national psyche that led to a large demographic unable to put the war behind them. Like a lithium-ion fire, it continues to blaze, and even should it subside for a time, it will leap into existence again. The war remains a festering wound, a suppurating and possibly incurable lesion in the flesh of the nation. It did not end slavery; it enslaved an entire nation to perpetual recrimination, invidious social conflict, a scalene desecration of the South, flag-and-monument defilement, and a massive, bureaucratized, over-regulated administration.
A civil war of that magnitude is not readily compartmentalized or relegated to the libraries. We should consider that America’s ostensible “original sin” was not slavery in itself, as many have claimed, iniquitous as that was and shared with a profusion of nations, but a feral and barbarous and surely unnecessary “total war” exceeding the casualties from all of America’s other wars put together. It wiped out a generation of young men, decimated an entire country, pre-empted the inevitable triumph of emancipation, and planted a centralized, managerial, tax-based State, a syndicated educational behemoth, a State-controlled National Bank with the power to print fiat currency, an immense, brachiated Corporate presence, and a sedimentary judiciary on Constitutional soil.
In brief, it spread a chemtrail of discord and vituperation throughout the nation’s institutions and cultural arena, leaving the Union it was intended to save divided to this very day. This is the legacy of the war that should never have been fought.
Note: This article is a short summary of a monograph, America’s Original Sin, currently in progress.
