Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Keeping Douglas’ popular sovereignty in mind, Lincoln added, “I will not allege that the Democratic Party consider slavery morally, socially and politically right, although their tendency to that view has, in my opinion, been constant and unmistakable . . . up to the Dred Scott decision, where, it seems to me, the idea is boldly suggested that slavery is better than freedom.

  “The Republican Party,” Lincoln continued, “hold that this government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil to the Negro, to the white man, to the soil, and to the State . . . They will use every constitutional method to prevent the evil from becoming larger and . . . will oppose, in all its length and breadth, the modern Democratic idea, that slavery is as good as freedom, and ought to have room for expansion all over the continent.

  “This is the difference,” Lincoln concluded, “as I understand it, between the Republican and Democratic Parties.” And Lincoln repeated his same description of the Democrats in the sixth debate with Douglas at Quincy and in the following debate at Alton.10 Nor did Douglas contest his opponent’s understanding of the core division between the parties; unlike his successor Democrats of today, Douglas had no interest in concealing his own position or in blaming the defense of slavery solely on the South.

  The strategy of the Democrats, both in the 1858 Senate contest and in the 1860 presidential campaign, was to launch racist attacks against Lincoln and the Republican Party. Democrats routinely called Republicans “Black Republicans,” “nigger lovers” and “wooly heads.” We can find online Democratic posters contrasting the prototypical dignified Democratic white man with the menacing, stereotypical Republican Negro. In 1858, the Democratic Chicago Times warned that if Lincoln were elected senator, Illinois would become “the nigger state of the Northwest.”11

  In 1860, Democrats spread the false rumor that Hannibal Hamlin, himself a former Democrat who had quit the party in disgust over its pro-slavery position and was now vice presidential candidate of the Republican Party, was half black. A Democratic campaign banner in New York claimed that “free love and free niggers will certainly elect Old Abe.”12 Both in 1858 and 1860, Douglas appealed to racist sentiments among the electorate in accusing Lincoln of supporting intermarriage and social equality between the races, not to mention of favoring blacks having the right to vote and to serve on juries.

  Lincoln’s response to these attacks shows the manner in which he embodied the philosophical statesmanship of the founders. Indeed, Lincoln’s plight was eerily similar to that of the founders. Just as they inherited slavery, and had to figure out what to do with it, Lincoln was running at a time when racist prejudice against blacks ran strong nationwide, and he had to figure out how to handle it. There was virtually no constituency that believed blacks should be allowed to intermarry or to have social equality with whites.

  Even Americans who agreed blacks should not be deprived of their natural rights—that they should not be enslaved—strongly opposed the idea that blacks should be immediately granted civil rights, which they saw as an entirely different matter. Natural rights are the prerogative of every human being—conferred, if you will, by nature or by God—while civil rights are granted by the consent of a community that has every right to withhold them if it chooses.

  If Lincoln were perceived as promoting intermarriage, social equality or civil rights for blacks, his electoral defeat both in the 1858 Senate contest and in the 1860 presidential election was certain. Lincoln had the choice, as the founders did, of going down in flames or taking the strongest antislavery stance that was viable to secure the consent of the governed. This stance would involve accommodating racist sentiment—while not encouraging it—just as the founders accommodated slavery—while not encouraging it—and thus achieving a result that would help create the conditions for the ultimate defeat of both racism and slavery.

  Consider the artfully conditional way in which Lincoln responded to Douglas: “Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal, but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of anyone else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.”13

  Notice how little Lincoln concedes here to racist prejudice. He doesn’t say that he rejects racial intermarriage. He merely rejects the equation that holds that a man who opposes slavery necessarily endorses racial intermarriage. Lincoln rightly points out that this is a fallacy; one can be for one without being for the other. What Lincoln does here is refuse to be drawn into a side debate about miscegenation. He keeps the focus on the actual policy issue dividing the parties, which is slavery or more precisely the extension of slavery.

  Admittedly, Lincoln in his Charleston debate on September 18, 1858, said “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races.”14 Lincoln also said he did not support the right of blacks to vote or to serve on juries. Later, toward the end of the Civil War, Lincoln actually did support—albeit through the democratic process, which is to say, through popular consent—the extension of those rights to blacks. Yet in 1858 Lincoln took a position that modern progressives have interpreted to suggest that he too was a white supremacist.

  Why, then, would Lincoln bow to racial prejudice in this way? Let us recall Lincoln’s admonition to a group of blacks on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation that freedom would still leave blacks free in a country whose citizens rejected them as equals. If that was true in 1862, it was certainly true earlier.

  So in denying his intention to give blacks the right to vote and serve on juries, Lincoln was refusing to do what he could not in any case do. For Lincoln, as for the founders, the American people were not yet ready to confer civil rights or social equality on blacks, and thus the granting of such rights must await the readiness of popular consent. Lincoln bowed to popular prejudice because even prejudice must be considered part of the “consent of the governed,” and because he wanted to be in a leadership position to tame that prejudice in the future.

  The progressive attack on Lincoln as a white supremacist fails. Nowhere did Lincoln ever say he considered whites to be inherently superior to blacks. The left today condemns Lincoln for taking the course he did without being able to recommend a better one. Blacks secured the right to vote and to serve on juries in large part because of what Lincoln did in assembling a Republican coalition to win the Civil War, and Lincoln’s ability to do that was made possible only by his patient determination to get to first base before charging on to second.

  We can draw from the reasoning above the astonishing conclusion that it was even in the interest of blacks for Lincoln to deny their right to social equality in the 1858 and 1860 campaigns because the alternative course—the one seemingly advocated by modern-day progressives—would have ensured his defeat and consigned him to political oblivion. And that would have surely resulted in a much longer delay for blacks to secure their freedom, let alone any additional rights and privileges that would be granted through amendments to the original Constitution.

  THE CONFEDERACY’S NORTHERN ALLIES

  The Civil War was a deliberate attempt by the Democratic Party, both in the North and the South, to kill America by carving her into two. Had secession worked, Lincoln would have been viewed as a failed president. The North and the South would have come to terms over the bifurcation long before 1865. Slavery would have continued, and on a firmer foundation than before. White supremacy would have continued to be its bedrock, and would have reigned unchallenged throughout the United States. Lincoln’s dark warning about all of America becoming a plantation might have proven prophetic in his own lifetime.

  The Democrats’ attempt on America’s life is the simple truth about the Civil War that is
left out of every historical account and textbook. Progressive historians like Eric Foner and Barbara Fields don’t even go near it. Even the most reliable and objective accounts of the war—such as those of James McPherson and Harry Jaffa—at most allude to it. So powerful is the influence of progressive historiography that virtually all accounts of the Civil War succumb to the North-South dichotomy that is at best a partial and oversimplified account of the truth.

  Once again, the key to the whole truth is the role played by the Northern Democrats. We must begin by noting their indispensable role in any possibility of the South winning the war. In 1861, the North had twenty million people and the South nine million, four million of whom were slaves. Besides this four-to-one population advantage, the North dominated the manufacturing and munitions industries and had complete naval supremacy. These facts were known by every intelligent Southerner at the outset of the war.

  How, then, did the South hope to succeed? The answer is that the Democrats of the South hoped to fight hard and long enough to debilitate public opinion on the Union side and thus strengthen the political hand of their fellow Democrats in the North. They were counting on the Northern Democrats to thwart Lincoln and the Republicans and ultimately to defeat them, so that Democrats North and South could then make a peace that permanently protected slavery.

  In 1862, fresh from his success at Second Bull Run, Robert E. Lee prepared his Army of northern Virginia to invade Maryland. “The present,” Lee wrote on September 8, 1862, to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, “seems to be the most propitious time since the commencement of the war for the Confederate Army to enter Maryland.” Lee had successfully repelled Union attempts to penetrate the heart of Virginia. Now he wanted to capture and hold Union territory. One might think that his motives were military, but in fact they were largely political.

  “It is plain to my understanding,” Lee wrote to Davis, “that everything that will tend to repress the war feeling in the Federal States will inure to our benefit.” Ever the cautious tactician, Lee added, “I do not know that we can do anything to promote the pacific feeling, but our course ought to be shaped as not to discourage it.” Voters would go to the polls in November 1862 “to determine . . . whether they will support those who favor a prolongation of the war, or those who wish to bring it to a termination.”15

  Progressive accounts of the Civil War dwell needlessly on the South’s efforts to draw England and France into the war on the Confederate side. In reality, both were far-fetched prospects and the Southerners knew it. Lee’s letter does not even mention foreign intervention. Rather, Lee focuses on Northern public opinion and the forces that he knew were working diligently to steer it in the upcoming election against Lincoln and the Union armies, namely, the Northern Democrats.

  Lee chose Maryland carefully. He knew that there was strong pro-Confederate sentiment in that state, and citizens of Baltimore had rioted against Lincoln in April 1861. Many secessionist members of the legislature, as well as the mayor of Baltimore—every one of them a Democrat—had been locked up for weeks that fall. Lee hoped that his incursion would embolden the pro-Confederate Democrats in Maryland to withdraw the state from the Union, dealing a crippling blow to Lincoln and the Republicans.

  Thus Lee’s military actions in the second year of the war were closely attentive to the effect they would have on Northern Democrats. And Lee’s assessment proved to be at least partly sound. Maryland did not secede, but the Northern Democrats did very well in the 1862 midterm election, winning several states that had gone for Lincoln just two years earlier. Undoubtedly both Lee and Jefferson Davis monitored those results. From their point of view, the Northern Democrats were going to be the ones who would help them save the plantation.

  FIRE IN THE REAR

  Lincoln, for his part, understood the grave threat posed by the Northern Democrats. In January 1863 he told Republican senator Charles Sumner that he feared the “fire in the rear,” which is to say a faction of Northern Democrats, even more than he feared the Confederate army.16 Here Lincoln was not thinking of his old political nemesis Stephen Douglas. Douglas, in what was surely his finest moment, vigorously opposed secession. He undertook a dangerous journey south to Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia to attempt to convince his fellow Democrats not to break from the Union. But Douglas died unexpectedly in June 1861, shortly after the war commenced.

  Nor was Lincoln concerned about the Democratic Party as a whole, at least not initially. The Democratic Party in the North had split into two factions, the so-called War Democrats and the Peace Democrats. Many Northern Democrats—including hundreds of thousands of German and Irish immigrants—fought gallantly for the Union, and the battlefield heroism of the Irish Brigade, including its Regiment 69 charge at Fredericksburg into incoming cannon fire, became legendary among Tammany Irish families back home in New York and elsewhere.

  Lincoln was worried about the Peace Democrats, a group that included former Ohio congressmen Clement Vallandigham and Alexander Long, former New York governor Horatio Seymour, New York City mayor Fernando Wood, and Indiana senator Daniel Voorhees. In line with Lincoln’s statement about them, Republicans called the Peace Democrats “Copperheads,” likening them to deadly snakes who seem harmless enough until they strike without warning.

  The Peace Democrats were strengthened by early Confederate successes in the Civil War. They sought to rally public opinion against what Vallandigham called a wicked and senseless conflict. “Stop fighting,” Vallandigham urged Lincoln and the Republicans. “Make an armistice . . . Withdraw your army from the seceded states.”17 Such a recipe, in Lincoln’s mind, would surely spell the death of the union or at least of any union worth preserving.

  Lincoln could take solace, at least in the early years of the war, from the support of the War Democrats. Yet this group was not without its problems as far as Lincoln and the Republicans were concerned. War Democrats opposed secession as unconstitutional rebellion and treason. They were, in this respect, union men. Yet for the most part, they had no intention of fighting a war over slavery. They communicated this unambiguously to Lincoln.

  Lincoln needed the allegiance of the War Democrats. As historian David Herbert Donald tells us, Lincoln was fully cognizant that he had been elected in 1860 with a minority of the vote, and that only the schism in the Democratic Party that produced two separate candidates—Douglas in the North and Breckinridge in the South—had divided the Democratic vote and enabled his victory. Lincoln knew that notwithstanding its advantage in population and resources, the North needed a united front of Northern Democrats and Republicans to defeat an undivided South.18

  This is why Lincoln, in his famous letter to Horace Greeley, wrote that “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, 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.”19

  Lincoln framed the war as a war over union rather than a war over slavery in part to keep the allegiance of the War Democrats. Remarkably, Democrats today invoke Lincoln’s words to portray him as insufficiently antislavery, even though he was politically constrained to speak that way to keep a majority of Democrats on the side of the Union.

  The second reason for Lincoln’s tactical decision to define the Civil War as a war over the union was to prevent the border states from seceding. The border states—Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri—all had slaves. In fact, there were 450,000 slaves in those four states. Yet they had opted not to secede, even though powerful forces in those states continued to push them to join the Confederacy.

  Lincoln did not believe he could afford to lose these states and still win the war. He once joked that he hoped that God was on his side, but without Kentucky, he wasn’t sure that was even enough. Thus Lincoln believed he would
best hold the border states, and thus serve the antislavery cause itself, by pretending that this was not a war fought over slavery. Yet of course Lincoln could have avoided the war and saved the union had he embraced the Crittenden proposal or simply adopted Douglas’ doctrine of popular sovereignty. The fact that he refused to do so proves that Lincoln was willing to go to war to prevent slavery from spreading into the territories.

  Once Lincoln was convinced he had secured the loyalty of the border states, he candidly acknowledged that the root cause of the Civil War was in fact slavery. “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed,” Lincoln wrote in his Annual Message to Congress in 1862, “Without slavery, it could not continue.” In a later correspondence with a group of British workingmen, Lincoln said the rebellion was “an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal” and that the ensuing war was a test of whether a free government “can be maintained against an effort to build one upon the exclusive foundation of human bondage.”20

  In saying this, of course, Lincoln was doing no more than agreeing with the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, who insisted that they were fighting on behalf of racism and slavery. Davis, for instance, told the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, that the goal of the Republicans was one of “rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless,” and thus it was worth going to war to save slave “property worth thousands of millions of dollars.”21

  In what has come to be known as the Cornerstone Speech, delivered on March 21, 1861, Alexander Stephens said that while the American founders considered all men created equal, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea . . . its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery—subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth.”22 What could be clearer about the defining issue that produced the cataclysm of the American Civil War?