The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  Throughout much of the war, Lincoln faced the problem of how to motivate enough men to abandon their homes and livelihoods to go to war. Reunifying the nation was the first cause that inspired hundreds of thousands of men to enlist. But enthusiasm for the Union waned steadily as the war stalemated and the death toll soared. So the president took a gamble and insisted that the emancipation of slaves was crucial to winning reunification—promising not to return slaves who escaped their rebel masters would steadily drain a vital source of Confederate power. Although he cited military necessity rather than morality to justify his Emancipation Proclamation, he privately reveled in inflicting a blow against an institution that he had always detested. Lincoln not only liberated the slaves, he opened the American army to enlistment by all able-bodied black men.29

  This forced the South to face a strategic and moral dilemma, perhaps best articulated in January 1865 by Gen. Robert E. Lee: “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions. My opinion is that we should employ them without delay.”30 In practice this meant enlisting blacks in return for granting them freedom. While southern leaders discussed this possibility in the war’s last desperate months, they ultimately rejected the idea, along with all other forms of emancipation. South Carolina fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett explained that “slavery and independence must stand together. . . . To abandon our most essential institution is to abandon . . . that very thing for which we began the fight.”31

  An ideology can be a source of power by unifying and mobilizing a population. Myths are often vital elements of an ideology. During the Civil War, rebel soldiers insisted that they fought for states’ rights rather than slavery. In reality, slavery was the only real “right” that was at stake in that war. And, with murderous irony, with only one in four southerners actually a slaveholder, the other three were fighting for the slaveholder’s way of life rather than their own, usually hardscrabble, lives. But the power of the ideology of slavocracy overwhelmed such realities in the minds of most southerners.

  Another southern myth was their belief in the superiority of their fighting skills. Most southerners cheered the bombardment and capture of Fort Sumter even though they knew it would likely lead to civil war. They had overwhelming faith in their ability to whip the Yankees. In this they emphasized the importance of soft-power assets like leadership, morale, and fighting skills over hard-power resources like population, factories, railroads, and ships.

  It may seem extraordinary to well-informed people that a century and a half after the Civil War ended, some people still dispute its cause. For the vast majority of professional and amateur historians alike the truth is a no-brainer. Had slavery not existed, the southern states would have had absolutely no reason to secede, let alone war against the United States.32

  Yet from the firing on Fort Sumter through today, there have been those, a few even armed with doctorates in history, who reject this view. Contrary to the statements of the South’s leaders, neo-Confederates assert that the war was not over slavery but over states’ rights. While this belief is grounded in mythology rather than history, it remains popular across the South and beyond. It may be easily refuted intellectually but not emotionally.33

  States’ rights is the belief that the United States is not a sovereign nation but simply an association of sovereign states. States’ rights, however, was an excuse and not a reason why eventually eleven southern states committed treason by seceding from and warring against the United States. Southern leaders asserted states’ rights to justify whatever measures they took to defend slavery. Had slavery not existed, the belief in and assertion of states’ rights would have been moot.

  An ideology can be a source of weakness as well as strength. The South’s states’ rights doctrine was ultimately self-defeating. Slavocrats waved this banner to justify secession from and war against the United States. Yet their Confederacy was just that—an alliance of states in which each claimed sovereignty. The resulting disunity prevented the South from mobilizing all its potential power as each state jealously horded its financial, human, and natural resources. The United States suffered the same debilitating weaknesses during the Revolutionary War when a confederacy of thirteen sovereign states revolted against the British Empire.

  Reflecting and shaping the states’ rights ideology is the American tendency to want something for nothing. Southerners wanted independence but did not want to be taxed to pay for it. So instead the Confederacy borrowed and printed money. The inevitable result by the Civil War’s end was that a Confederate dollar was worth about as much as a Continental dollar, which Congress mass printed during America’s war for independence.

  Rebel apologists cite the tariff as an issue that deeply split the industrializing North from the agrarian South; northern manufacturers lobbied for protective tariffs on cheaper-priced, better-made foreign—mostly British—imports. They then point out that a civil war nearly erupted during the Nullification Crisis of 1833, when South Carolina nullified or declared that it would no longer recognize or permit federal officials to collect the tariff in its territory.34 In reality the northern and southern economies complemented rather than conflicted with each other. This bond was most powerful between northern textile factories and southern cotton plantations. As for tariffs, disputes over the rates peaked in 1833 and steadily declined in importance over the next three decades.

  The economic problems that slaveholders and other southerners faced were largely self-inflicted. Slavocracy blinded adherents to the economic sacrifice most southerners made to uphold their way of life. Slavery depressed wages for free laborers. The hatred of the tariff along with all taxes was self-defeating. Although a low or no tariff keeps import prices low, it also leaves the federal government with fewer resources with which to subsidize infrastructure like railroads, canals, and roads, which promote the creation and distribution of more wealth over the long term. Yet slavocrats opposed federal policies that developed infrastructure because tariffs and taxes were needed to pay for them.

  In reality, all American consumers of foreign goods would have loved to pay lower prices by reducing or eliminating the tariff. Yet most northerners accepted the tariff not just because it provided vital revenues but also because it nurtured industries that strengthened the nation. Most southerners grudgingly accepted the tariff for revenues but hated it for any protection that it might render American factories.

  The disdain for northern manufacturing went beyond whatever impact buying higher-priced goods made in America had on southerners’ pocketbooks. Slavocrats wanted to believe that northern workers were far worse off than the blacks laboring in their fields. This belief was easily refuted by asking, as Lincoln did, how many northern factory workers escaped their plight by volunteering to become slaves for southern planters.

  The southern fear that northern politicians sought to abolish slavery was pathological—all evidence revealed that it was simply unfounded. Lincoln and most other Republicans continually tried to reassure slavocrats that, while they hated slavery, they accepted the reality that the Constitution protected it and they had no desire to change that. They merely wanted to prevent slavery’s spread to the new western territories. Yet ironically, by acting on their paranoia and rebelling, southerners forced President Lincoln and America eventually to fulfill their prophecy.

  Alas, most of those who so zealously advocated states’ rights for themselves were quick to deny it for others. Slavocrats scored a major victory in 1850 by enacting the Fugitive Slave Act that forced people in free states to assist masters and their posses in recapturing escaped slaves. Those who refused to cooperate could be fined up to $1,000. Those who helped escaped slaves could be sentenced to prison.

  In reality, slavery not only overshadowed all other issues as the nation’s most divisive issue but ultimately was the only issue that prompted the slave state
s to rebel and attack the United States. Frederick Douglass offered timeless words of moral clarity for the Age of Lincoln’s core issue: “There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while today we should have malice toward none, and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong.”35

  Revolutions involve rapid, systematic change. By this definition, the United States did indeed experience a revolution during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln spearheaded this revolution through his policies that crushed the rebellion, ended slavery, imposed the Hamiltonian agenda, and initiated the transformation of the southern states into liberal democracies in which blacks had civil rights and, eventually, into a region in which the notion of “American” would be an increasingly important part of its identity. Not all parts of any revolution move at the same pace. The first three parts of Lincoln’s revolution took years to accomplish; it took more than a century for the South, along with other racist parts of America, to realize the liberal democratic ideals upon which the United States was founded.

  Lincoln himself believed in evolution rather than revolution, in compromise rather than unilateralism, in due legal and political processes rather than brute force, and above all in the Declaration of Independence’s values and the Constitution’s institutions. He continually sought to be a moderate voice and bridge between extremes. Nonetheless, he recognized that the forces he was unleashing were indeed revolutionary All along he was guided by the understanding that “the right of revolution is never a legal right. . . . At most it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause, revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.”36

  Slavery’s abolition was truly revolutionary in itself. Yet how significant was a revolution that converted four million slaves mostly into four million serfs? Nearly all blacks remained mired in poverty as their status changed from slave to sharecropper. Abolition clearly was just the first step. The legal, political, and cultural struggle to transform the figurative fate of all black Americans from, in William Lloyd Garrison’s words, “the auction block to the ballot box,” would be just as challenging, bitterly fought, and even more prolonged.37 Racism remained embedded in American life, North and South, East and West. The black codes imposed by white supremacists straightjacketed the ability of African Americans to advance economically or politically.

  A second phase of Reconstruction began seventy years after the first phase ended. It took two decades of hard struggle by blacks and liberal whites in the 1950s and 1960s before the legal promises of the 1860s were fulfilled with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. As for economic equality between the races, even today average black income is only about three-quarters that of whites and Asians and lags behind that of Hispanics. The election of the first black president in 2008 and his reelection in 2012 surely reveal how far the nation has come, but these events tend to obscure all the blood, sweat, and tears shed during the intervening decades, especially the first century.

  The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment were the first two decisive national legal strides along the long, arduous, often violent road of liberating African Americans and integrating them into the nation’s political, economic, and social mainstream. Lincoln’s role was critical in pushing these measures through the political system. These stunning achievements reflected his mastery of the art of power. All along he struggled to bridge liberals and conservatives, restraining the former from surging so far ahead that they provoked a political backlash and urging on the reluctant latter to catch up. In wielding the art of power, knowing when to act is as critical as knowing how to act. When Senator Charles Sumner demanded why Lincoln did not announce the Emancipation Proclamation on July 4, 1862, he replied, “I would do it if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and three more states would rise.”38 Yet another critical element of the art of power is a leader’s ability to convince others that by following him they serve themselves. Lincoln’s struggle to get most congressmen and citizens to back emancipation boiled down to a slogan as pithy as it was appealing: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”39

  The North experienced an ideological conversion. Before the Civil War most northerners were indifferent or fatalistic toward slavery. The Republican Party’s leaders repeatedly tried to reassure southerners that they had no intention of challenging slavery in the states where it existed but sought only to limit its spread to new territories. The South’s rebellion and attack on Fort Sumter inspired a tidal wave of American nationalism across the North. Hundreds of thousands of men joined the army to reunify the nation; relatively few fought with the hope that victory might lead to slavery’s abolition. But, largely through Lincoln’s leadership, over the next four years the American cause was transformed from solely reunification to reunification and abolition.40

  During his decades in public life, Lincoln’s views on race evolved with his views on all other vital issues. He went from solely opposing slavery’s extension to supporting its total abolition, from advocating compensating owners and colonizing blacks overseas to seeking no compensation or colonization and limited suffrage for literate blacks and soldiers. Had he lived another decade he would have sooner rather than later embraced the liberal Republican insistence on equal rights for all. But when he died, his view of most black Americans was certainly racist not just by today’s standards but by those of the Radicals of his own time. Yet, while he was darkly pessimistic about whether genuine racial equality was possible or even desirable, he extolled the merits of educated black men.

  Abraham Lincoln was the first president to invite black men to the White House for talks or festivities. Frederick Douglass recalled their first meeting. As he was ushered in to see the president, he was surprised that Lincoln bore

  no vain pomp and ceremony about him. I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man. . . . Long lines of care were already deeply written on Mr. Lincoln’s brow, and his strong face, full of earnestness, lighted up as soon as my name was mentioned. As I approached and was introduced to him he arose and extended his hand and bade me welcome. . . . Proceeding to tell him who I was and what I was doing, he promptly but kindly stopped me, saying, “I know who you are, Mr. Douglass; Mr. Seward has told me all about you. Sit down, I am glad to see you.”

  Douglass was moved that Lincoln “treated me as a man; he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.”41

  Nonetheless, Douglass’s feelings about Abraham Lincoln and his legacy were decidedly mixed. Eleven years after he last spoke with Lincoln, he did not mince his words in a speech dedicating the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument in Washington City on April 14, 1876. He declared that Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s president” and that “we [blacks] are at best only his step-children.” Yet he was more judicious in assessing Lincoln’s priorities and thus his policies: “Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the Americans and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment that he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”42

  America’s revolution during the Age of Lincoln went far beyond racial issues. Lincoln inaugurated a profound cultural revolution in how Americans saw themselves. Across the entire country the United States was increasingly referred to using “is” rather than “are,” thus denoting the transformation of many identities into one.43 President Grant noted that progress in a September 1875 speech, then peered into the future: “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the divi
ding line will not be Mason and Dixon, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”44

  The Civil War shifted the regional and ideological balance of political power within the United States decisively from South to North. During the seventy-two years from 1789 to 1861, southern slaveholders served as president for forty-nine years, as twenty-three of thirty-six Speakers of the House of Representatives, as twenty-four of thirty-six presidents pro tem of the Senate, and as twenty of thirty-five Supreme Court justices. During the next fifty years, there were no southern House Speakers or Senate presidents, while only five of twenty-six Supreme Court justices were Democrats.45

  Another vital dimension of Lincoln’s revolution was the role of government in the nation’s development. The Republicans capitalized on their domination of the White House and Congress by establishing in law and policy the entire Hamiltonian agenda of developing America by investing in railroads, canals, ports, and roads; solidifying the financial sector through policies that encouraged productive investments and curbed speculation; supporting manufacturing with protective tariffs; building a transcontinental railroad through land giveaways; and expanding minds through public education and the National Academy of Sciences. This agenda’s philosophical foundation was the idea that a muscular, problem-solving federal government working with the private sector could expand the economy far more swiftly and profoundly than if the Darwinian market was left to itself.

  If Hamiltonianism had a flaw, it was conceptual. There was an intellectual contradiction in the version of Hamiltonianism developed by Henry Clay and implemented by Abraham Lincoln. Clay coined the term “self-made man” and upheld himself as its personification. This notion appeals to anyone who has risen in wealth and status seemingly by his or her own efforts. Indeed, it is among American culture’s core values, celebrated as “individualism” by Benjamin Franklin a century earlier and as “rugged individualism” by Theodore Roosevelt later in the nineteenth century. Yet in the same breath, Hamiltonians expounded the value of the public and private sectors working together to develop the economy and thus create more opportunities for more individuals to realize their unique potentials and dreams. How “self-made” is anyone in such a nation?