by Michael Liss
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. —Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
Did we need to have a Civil War? Couldn’t the two sides, geographically defined as they were, simply part before the shooting started? Did Lincoln intentionally choose war for any one of a variety of unworthy reasons that stopped short of necessity, including even something so mundane as a fear of losing face? Or was he faced with an intractable situation for which there was no simple, satisfactory answer—a type of political Trolley Problem?
These questions were suggested by the recent comments from a 3 Quarks Daily reader to a 2020 article by Thomas Wells. While I don’t agree with the premise of Lincoln’s “culpability,” it is an issue that has been continuously debated by historians and opinion writers almost from the moment South Carolina forces shelled Union soldiers led by Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter.
In fact, the debate raged both in public and behind closed doors even before the South Carolinians reduced the Fort on April 12-13, 1861. Depending on who does the telling, either Lincoln shrewdly baited the Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter, thus unifying much of the North for a shooting war, or belligerent South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter without good cause, thus unifying much of the North for a shooting war. If you are interested, I’d recommend James D. Randall’s discussion in his 1945 Lincoln The President, but, in either telling, at the end of the day, the war that followed Sumter was not inevitable, but the product of both sides’ choices.
To put this into context, let’s note that, before the adoption of the 20th Amendment, Presidential terms ran from March 4th (instead of January 20th) and Congressional terms from March 4th to January 3rd. So, for nearly four months after Lincoln’s election on November 6, 1860, the White House was occupied by James Buchanan, a “Doughface” Southern sympathizer from Pennsylvania. His Cabinet was dominated by people with like-minded views: John Floyd of Virginia was the all-important Secretary of War, who the not-given-to exaggeration Ulysses S. Grant later accused of moving around supplies and men to advantage the South. Floyd stayed until December 29th. Howell Cobb (Treasury) of Georgia, future President of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, remained in office until early December. Jacob Thompson (Interior) of Mississippi, soon a “secession commissioner” to North Carolina, stayed into the new year. Three powerful men, no longer serving their country, but staying in the government to influence policy in opposition.
Buchanan himself was 70, his energies flagging. He was an entirely pitiful figure in late 1860, lacking the willpower and leadership skills to command the Cabinet, to reorganize his government to meet the crisis, or to prepare for what clearly would be a clash over federal installations in what would soon be the seceding states—like those in Charleston Harbor. Unwilling to act, he retreated into words, burying himself in the preparation of a Presidential Message he somehow believed would rise above the din. For almost a month he labored, consulting, revising, revising again, trying desperately to balance interests, but largely leaning (hard) South. His end product satisfied no one. The North is to blame for the current state of affairs. The North must satisfy Southern demands. The North must accept the hated Dred Scott decision. The Union is indivisible; there is no right to secede; the South should not be leaving, but the Federal Government (particularly the Executive Branch) has no power to make them stay.
I’ve written about Buchanan’s actions before, but the one truly interesting thing he suggested is that a National Convention under Article V of the Constitution be convened to discuss the matter. It’s a possible Hail Mary—history, at least to that point, had shown the country capable of discussion and adjustment on several occasions—most notably the Constitution itself, the 1820 “Missouri Compromise” (which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, and banned slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30’ parallel, except for Missouri), and the Compromise of 1850 (which admitted California as a free state and the Territory of New Mexico—a much larger land area than the ultimate state line—as potentially slave ones). The last two were imperfect but workable compromises that gained legitimacy from the gravitas of the men who negotiated them. The Missouri Compromise was shepherded by Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House. The Compromise of 1850 was driven by the three Giants of the Senate, Clay (then seriously ill), former Vice President John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, with the critical assistance of Stephen Douglas when Clay was unable to continue. It was Douglas who broke up an omnibus bill that lacked the votes to pass as a combination package into five separate bills, each with a differing constituency sufficient to gain a majority on its own.
1860 was not 1850. The country had been acquiring territories all through the 1840s, encompassing nearly 1.2 million square miles. The discovery of gold in 1848 had drawn so many settlers to California that it had to be admitted as a state in 1850, but now it was time to organize the rest and exploit their wealth. Could North and South compromise again with the stakes so high? Did the country have both the will and the leadership to accomplish it?
The Giants of the Senate had all passed away, Calhoun in 1850, Webster and Clay in 1852, their tremendous contributions having never been acknowledged with a term in the White House (all tried, all failed). The great irony of American politics is that often those who accomplish the most are under-rewarded. Negotiation requires give and take, and concessions create enemies. Sometimes it also requires a strategic withdrawal on a controversial issue so as to clear a bottleneck.
Such was the Compromise of 1850, with its (detested by the North) Fugitive Slave Act and its failure to fully address the deteriorating situation in Kansas and Nebraska. The former was an annoyance, the latter a serious problem.
In 1854, Stephen Douglas stepped into it with both feet. With American expansion, there was a growing need for East-West transportation, and that meant rail transportation. The route Douglas proposed needed a political and legal structure for organizing an immense tract of land then called the Territory of Nebraska, what we now know as Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, and North and South Dakota. Southern Senators made it clear to Douglas that their support for his Kansas-Nebraska Act was predicated on repeal of the Missouri Compromise line restricting the expansion of slavery. Douglas knew it would be controversial and told them so, but he was hungry for an agreement, and for a train route that would go through his home state’s Chicago, so he went for it. As to slavery, he persuaded enough Senators that his idea of Popular Sovereignty would give voters in what would be the newly minted states the right to choose, slave or free.
It is worth stopping here for a moment to consider Douglas’s position. History frames him mostly a foil to Lincoln. Rivals in Illinois, rivals for the Senate, rivals in a series of seminal debates, and finally, rivals for the Presidency. Douglas was more than that. He represented a manner of thinking that had significant hold in the country, including the North, and particularly among the moneyed interests. The plight of the slave, pitiable though it may have been, just wasn’t high on a list of priorities. If it had to be bargained away for something he (or they) valued more, so be it.
I don’t know that it’s possible to look into Douglas’s heart, but there were a couple of strands to his (and his supporters’) thinking that carried a lot of weight. The first was the facially attractive idea that the citizens of each state should choose how they wanted to live—if they won’t support slavery in law, it won’t be able to take root. That’s democracy! Popular Sovereignty works if you are truly a moral agnostic about slavery. It is abhorrent to those who aren’t. The second was a kind of physical democracy—that topography, climate, the presence of water and fertile lands would determine whether slavery can be supported in the new territories. Just as a state’s voters may either embrace or reject slavery, it will be the land itself that ultimately determines the viability of the institution.
The cold logic of Douglas’s position essentially questioned why free states placed such an emphasis on the status of slavery, when there were other important things that had to be done. America needed a transcontinental railroad. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was necessary to get it, and therefore it needed to pass. It did, creating two new territories, but at a huge cost. “Bleeding Kansas” exploded in endless acts of violence and intimidation as the two sides vied for control. More than 50 people died. Another victim was Henry Clay’s old Whig Party, which showed itself completely without purpose, and dissolved the same year.
Finally, it enraged (and re-engaged) a former Congressman who had returned home to Illinois to practice law, Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln had some thoughts about the law, and slavery, and shared them in series of opposing speeches with Douglas. The most important of the three came at Peoria on October 6, 1854. For more than three hours, he held forth, taking his audience through history to their present day. One paragraph stands out to me:
The Missouri Compromise ought to be restored. For the sake of the Union, it ought to be restored. We ought to elect a House of Representatives which will vote its restoration. If by any means, we omit to do this, what follows? Slavery may or may not be established in Nebraska. But whether it be or not, we shall have repudiated—discarded from the councils of the Nation—the SPIRIT of COMPROMISE; for who after this will ever trust in a national compromise? The spirit of mutual concession—that spirit which first gave us the constitution, and which has thrice saved the Union—we shall have strangled and cast from us forever.
I can’t tell you whether this is just rhetoric, but I suspect it isn’t, and is instead a reflection of his inner feeling. Lincoln had an unusual gift for words, but not necessarily the type that were the stock in trade of the rhetoricians of the time. Rather, he had the capacity to convey the rationality of his thinking, the genuineness of his convictions, and the moral and intellectual framework of how he arrived at the positions he took. Douglas’s destroying the work of Clay was part of an accumulation of injustices that could destroy the capacity for accommodation—and Lincoln’s confidence in it. Imagine what he must have been thinking when, in early 1857, a conservative, pro-South, pro-slavery Supreme Court released its decision in Dred Scott. Taney went beyond declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional—he effectively opened all states, Free or Slave, to the presence of slavery.
So, when we talk about Lincoln’s willingness to compromise, when we say he should have done more before hostilities broke out, one can understand his reticence, and particularly so when he was merely President-elect.
Richard Hofstadter makes a crucial point, one that I think centers Lincoln’s Trolley Problem dilemma: “Before Lincoln took office, the issues upon which he was elected had become obsolete. Seven states of the deep South had seceded. The great question was no longer slavery or freedom in the territories, but the nation itself.” Lincoln’s positions on slavery were clear and consistent. He had laid them out in debates with Stephen Douglas, at Cooper Union, and as expressed in the Republican Party Platform. He accepted slavery where it existed, rejected the idea of further expansion, and would otherwise follow existing law, even odious existing law like that of the Fugitive Slave Act. That is what he believed, that is what he was elected on, but those were now obsolete positions, except as part of discourse related to sustaining the Union. The problem was that the seven seceding states had taken their ball and gone home. Buchanan had done nothing to stop them. More were about to leave. Lincoln needed to act, but how?
To reconstitute the Union, Lincoln understood immediately, could involve diplomacy and more concessions from the Free States, but might also need a degree of coercion. Northern opinion was firmly behind Union, but less aware of (and more resistant to) the necessity of the use of force. This is not to say that there weren’t some hard-liner voices in the North wanting immediate firmness—“Oh, for an hour of Jackson!” (recalling Andrew Jackson’s faceoff with John C. Calhoun and South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis in 1831/2)—but the majority preferred firmness only as long as it didn’t break anything.
Efforts, serious and good faith ones, were made by members of both sides to find a more peaceful resolution. The most famous, the “Crittenden Compromises,” illustrate the problem with which Lincoln was grappling. Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky was a distinguished public servant and a true patriot. He had been Governor of Kentucky, United States Attorney General, and served several terms in the Senate. He was a serious man, widely respected, and neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Crittenden put forward a package of six Constitutional Amendments and four Senate Resolutions. To encapsulate them, the first and most consequential was the resumption of the original Missouri Compromise boundary between slave and free, but extended to the Pacific. New States would be permitted entry as slave or free as their constitutions provided (a nod to Stephen Douglas). Fugitive Slave Laws would be enforced, and the North’s “Personal Liberty Laws” would be abolished. The African slave-trade ban would be rigorously enforced. In states where slavery existed, Congress would be forbidden from abolishing slavery in federal posts there, and also forbidden to abolish slavery in Washington D.C., so long as Virginia and Maryland kept slaves. Finally, and to give some finality, the Amendments could not be further repealed or amended.
It’s hard to read some of these as “compromises,” but taken as a whole, while they leaned towards the South’s position, they did reflect real effort to find a solution. Among the Senators who expressed interest and even support was William Seward, one of the founders of the Republican Party, and soon to be Lincoln’s Secretary of State (Seward eventually voted no). The problem with the aggregate substance of the Crittenden Compromise (and this was echoed later in a “Peace Conference” held in February 1861) was that, on the biggest issues, neither side could be satisfied without what amounted to capitulation by the other.
Time was up for a compromise that would reunify the country. Lincoln was left with a conundrum. It was clear that his election was the proximate cause of secession. What peaceful options did he have besides either surrendering his Presidency, or surrendering the principles that got him elected in the first place? He just could not agree to the territorial extension of slavery, despite the prohibition north of the line. The expansion of slavery to territories was anathema to him, and to most of the North. Even if he had made that leap, and quietly signaled his agreement, I haven’t seen a credible argument that could state with certainty that Lincoln could have sustained the Union with such a sacrifice.
Instead, a Lincoln embrace of Crittenden’s proposal would have shattered his party, and, beyond the partisan considerations, effectively ended the American Experiment. Never again would elections be seen as both decisive, and temporary, as the Founders had intended.
So, saving the Union through concession was impossible. What about the other alternative, the other route for the Trolly to take to avoid violence and loss of life, the route of saying goodbye? Jefferson Davis insisted that was all the South wanted, to be given its leave to go.
For a moment, put aside questions about Davis’s sincerity, or the purported ease of the split (it most certainly would not have been simple), and ask ourselves, was it a viable option? Should Lincoln, using the prestige of his office, and the power vested in him, make that choice on behalf of the (remaining) country? He certainly would have been scorned as a Buchanan and worse. Would the act of choosing the Trolley path of repudiating his sworn responsibilities to the Constitution and the integrity of his promises to his voters (and that was, after all, what was being demanded) ultimately be for the common good?
This conversation is difficult to have in the abstract because of two yet-unacknowledged elephants in the room. Over 620,000 soldiers, North and South, lost their lives in the line of duty. As a result of that enormous sacrifice, the great moral abomination of slavery was ended, then and forever. At the time Lincoln was making his decision and Jefferson Davis was making his, neither man could have known that.
As Lincoln himself said in his Second Inaugural Address:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
This wonderful passage is not a throw-away; it is Lincoln looking backwards, in self-reflection, and speaking absolute truth, certainly about himself, and also about any credible voice at the time.
The reading of history, the appreciation of history, does not always lead to certainty, and if your preference is to blame Lincoln for the road not taken, it is a perfectly defensible choice. As regular readers know, I’m a Lincoln man, so I am going to leave you with a bit more of Richard Hofstadter: “Now he could see the truth of what he had long dimly known and perhaps hopefully suppressed—that for a man of sensitivity and compassion to exercise great powers in a time of crisis is a grim and agonizing thing.”