Tag: Abraham Lincoln

If The Thing Be Pressed: Two Weeks In April, 1865

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Appomattox Surrender, by Louis Mathieu Guillaume, 1892. National Parks Service.

April 1, 1865. For the South, the end is nearing. It was already obvious on March 4, when Abraham Lincoln delivered his magnificent Second Inaugural Address. Four weeks later, it is more obvious. For all the bravery of the Confederacy’s men and all the talent of its military leadership, its resources are almost gone. A great test, possibly a decisive one, awaits it at the Battle of Five Forks, Virginia. For more than nine months, Union and Confederate forces have been punching and counterpunching around the besieged town of Petersburg. The stalemate has cost more than 70,000 casualties, expended stupendous amounts of arms and supplies, and caused great civilian suffering, but, to Grant’s endless frustration, success has eluded his grasp. This time would be different. At Five Forks, one of Grant’s most able generals, Philip Sheridan, defeats a portion of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under General George Pickett. The price, for an army with nothing more to give, is nearly fatal—1,000 casualties, 4,000 captured or surrendered, and, even more crucially, the loss of access to the South Side Railroad, a major transit point for men and material.

April 2, 1865. The strategic cost of Five Forks is driven home. Robert E. Lee abandons both Petersburg and Richmond. Jefferson Davis and his government flee, burning what documents and supplies as they can. Lee moves his army West toward North Carolina, hoping to escape Grant and join up with Confederate forces under General Joseph Johnston. The loss of Richmond is much more than symbolic—it had also been a critical manufacturing hub, and it contained one of the South’s largest hospitals—but Lee realized Richmond was a necessity that had become a luxury. To stave off a larger defeat, he had to save his army. The last hope for the Confederacy depended on it. If Lee and his men could stay in the field, move rapidly, inflict damage, prolong the conflict, then they still had a chance. Lee thought it possible, but he was running out of everything—clothes, food, ammunition, and even men. It wasn’t just casualties that caused his army to shrink. Estimates are that at least 100 Confederate soldiers a day were simply deserting, driven by fear, hunger, and plaintive words from home.

April 3, 1865. Richmond and Petersburg fall, as United States troops occupy both. A day later, the fantastical happens. Lincoln, accompanied by son Tad and the most appallingly small security contingent, visit Richmond. The risk is stupendous—the city is burning, the harbor is filled with torpedoes, and potential assailants lurk literally anywhere. But the scene is incredible. It’s Jubilee for the slaves, some of whom fall to their feet when they recognize the tall man in the top hat. Now freed men, they gather, march, shout, and sing hymns. To tremendous cheers, Lincoln walks to the “Confederate White House,” climbs the stairs, and plunks himself down in a comfortable chair in what had been Jefferson Davis’s study. Read more »

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

A Constitutional Republic, If You Can Keep It

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

The principles of Jefferson are the definition and axioms of free society…. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. —Abraham Lincoln, April 6, 1859 Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others.

Constitution of the United States. National Archives Museum.

An extraordinary man. Two extraordinary men, whose lives were bound together by a common thread of devotion to an idea of self-government in which all men are created equal. It is true that they did not understand it in exactly the same way (you cannot ignore the stain of slavery). Yet, the kind of people who rejected Jefferson’s core concept had—in his time, in Lincoln’s time, and now—a purpose: in Lincoln’s words, “supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste and legitimacy.”

We are less than two years away from the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s defining words, and yet it seems we are less certain, less secure, perhaps even less committed to the idea of self-government.

There is a stunning AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that was just released, which reported the finding that “[o]nly 21% of adults feel U.S democracy is strong enough to prevail no matter who wins the election in November.”

Just exactly what is the “U.S. Democracy” that may not prevail? Before we go further, we ought to get some nomenclature misunderstandings out of the way. Let’s introduce Democracy’s cousin, the “Constitutional Republic.” Yes, we live in a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy. No, that’s not a concluding and conclusive argument any time someone wants to make government more representative, more answerable to the voters, or less beholden to privilege. Opponents of change who invoke the phrase “mob rule” just highlight the fact that what’s at stake isn’t high principle, but rather a desire to “supplant[] the principles of free government, and restor[e] those of classification, caste and legitimacy.”

There are no “pure democracies,” even if we frame it that way out of convenience. To quote from a 2017 essay by Ryan McMaken, Executive Editor at the (very not liberal) Mises Institute:

[I]f anyone wants to argue against majoritarianism, he should simply do so. There is no need to rely on a half-baked usage of the writings of ‘the Founding Fathers’ who clearly supported a political system in which majority votes play a big part in selecting elected officials, and which is obviously a democracy according to the modern usage of the term.

In actuality, we have always had a constitutional republic, rather than a democracy. That we call it Democracy changes absolutely nothing. It’s the substance of the argument that ought to matter. The Founders did not first put an electric fence of privilege around the Constitution, and then bind for eternity all succeeding generations. Rather, they understood that Madison’s intricate document was imperfect, but it created a mechanism (through Amendment) to update it. It’s not easy to pass an Amendment, but it has been done many times, and in the service of expanding individual liberties and “Democracy.” Read more »

Monday, January 29, 2024

Lincoln’s Trolley Problem: Fort Sumter And Beyond

Posted on by Michael Liss

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.

Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor, 12th & 13th of April, 1861. Hand-colored lithograph, Currier & Ives.

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. Read more »

Monday, March 27, 2023

A Complex Man: Lincoln At The Lyceum

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. —Abraham Lincoln, departing Springfield, Illinois, for his Inauguration, February 11, 1861

Amphora depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx of Thebes. Greek Classical Period. 450-440 B.C.

“A task greater than that which rested on Washington.” Lincoln as Oedipus? George Washington as Laius, to be slain by his son? There are a lot of myths that have sprung up around Lincoln. Some put him in the company of saints. Others, mostly coming from a Lost Cause perspective, place him a lot closer to Hades. Still, it seems a deep dive into myth to ascribe to a resentment of George Washington the life force that vaulted Lincoln from poverty and obscurity through sectional and then national prominence, then to the White House, and from there to winning the Civil War and freeing millions from bondage.

Yes, it’s the Oedipus myth, say a group of historians, including George Forgie, Dwight Anderson, and Charles Strozier. To Lincoln’s eternal damnation, he unquestionably had an Oedipus Complex, according to the renowned critic and essayist Edmund Wilson. Not so, forcefully, and even a little angrily, argue Richard M. Current, the “Dean of the Lincoln Scholars” (“Lincoln After 175 Years: The Myth of the Jealous Son”) and Garry Wills (Lincoln At Gettysburg).

The “source code” for this dispute largely derives from a speech given by Lincoln on January 27, 1838: “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. The “Young Men” part applies to Lincoln as well. He is just short of his 29th birthday, and a Member of the Illinois House of Representatives from Sangamon County. If anyone in his audience that day (besides, perhaps, Lincoln himself) thought that he might be a future President of the United States, that listener’s name is lost to history. Read more »

Monday, December 7, 2020

A Tale of Three Transitions: Part 1, Buchanan to Lincoln

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

November 6, 1860. Perhaps the worst day in James Buchanan’s political life. His fears, his sympathies and antipathies, the judgment of the public upon an entire career, all converge into a horrible realty. Abraham Lincoln, of the “Black Republican Party,” has been elected President of the United States.  

Into Buchanan’s hands falls the most treacherous transition any President has had to navigate. The country is about to split apart. For months, Southerners in Congress, in their State Houses, in newspapers ranging from the large-circulation influential dailies to small-town broadsheets, had been warning everyone who cared to listen that they would not abide an election result they felt was an existential threat to their Peculiar Institution. Lincoln, despite what we now consider to be his notably conservative approach to slavery, was that threat. 

The task is made more excruciating because the transition, at that time, was longer—not the January 20th date we expect, but March 4th. Four long months until Lincoln’s Inauguration. Thirteen months between the end of the regular session of the outgoing Congress and the first scheduled session of the incoming one, unless the President calls for a Special Session. Each day, the speeches become more radical, the threats blunter. Committees are formed in many states to consider secession. By December 20, South Carolina leaves the Union. It is followed in short order by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, on February 1, 1861, Texas. The Upper South (Tennessee, North Carolina, and all-important Virginia) holds back, as does Arkansas. Unionist sentiment is strong enough to keep them from bolting, but the cost of their loyalty is that nothing aggressive be done by Washington to bring back the seceding states. In reality, that means an acceptance of secession for those that cannot be wooed back. 

Buchanan is not the man for the job. Read more »

Monday, March 2, 2020

Radical Reconciliation: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

He is an enigma. He sits up there in his marble chair, set in a Greek temple, literally larger than life, and he defies us to understand him.

Many have tried. More than 15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, to say nothing of countless columns, essays, Masters and Doctoral theses. So familiar is the recitation of his story that there is an unmistakable sense of déjà vu when you pick up yet another, turn to a random page, and, after a few words, half-wonder whether the author was unconsciously participating in a form of soft plagiarism.

Yet, if there is any guide to the inner Lincoln, the double-minded Lincoln, the one who could prosecute an incredibly destructive war while engaging in countless acts of mercy, it has to be in the Second Inaugural Address, the one we remember mostly for its closing paragraph, “with malice towards none….”

In this speech, barely 700 words, is the distilled essence of what Lincoln learned through the wrenching years of seeking, and then possessing, the Presidency. He exposes his own inner anguish as he reconciles it. In doing so, in taking responsibility, accepting nuance, and embracing a broader vision, he sets a standard for “Presidential.”

He does all this in about seven minutes. Read more »

Monday, May 27, 2019

In Your Hands, My Dissatisfied Countrymen: The Jaquess-Gilmore Mission

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” —Jefferson Davis, July 1864

By the time Sherman’s armies had scorched and bow-tied their way to the sea, by the time Halleck had followed Grant’s orders to “eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their own provender with them,” and by the time Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan was finished squeezing every drop of life out of the Confederacy, there had to be those who wondered what possible logic would lead intelligent men like Jefferson Davis to make such a catastrophic choice.

Yet, the South almost won the gamble. With secession, they had challenged the core of the American Experiment, the democratic principle of equal rights, general (male) suffrage, government by a majority, and a peaceful transition of power when that majority so indicated. They also posed an existential question for the North: Was adherence to a principle, even a cherished one like the Union, worth lives and property?

The Civil War is fascinating on so many levels, but what made it fundamentally different than any other conflict that preceded it was that, for the first time, two peoples with the ability to exercise electoral oversight engaged in a protracted armed conflict. This implied something new. The simplest mechanisms of civic beliefs: the right to disagree publicly, to organize, to place elected leadership on notice that their jobs could be at risk, would all play an unexpectedly crucial role in the manner in which the war began and was ultimately prosecuted. Read more »

Monday, April 4, 2016

Some of the People All of the Time (On Trump’s Legion)

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

You can fool all the people some of the time
and some of the people all the time,
but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Lincoln quotesFor example, some people will always believe that Abraham Lincoln first uttered this famous aphorism, even though there is no record of him ever having written or said those words.

A French Protestant named Jacques Abbadie authored an early incarnation of the adage in 1684.

In 1754, the French editors Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert helped cement its popularity.

The phrase doesn't show up in American letters until some Prohibitionist politicians started using it in 1885. Twenty years after Lincoln died.

Until recently, I simply took at face value the common claim that these were Lincoln's words. It's not a very important issue, so what would push me to question it?

My decision to title this article.

A little healthy skepticism is all it took. After all, lots of famous quotes are misattributed to famous people, ergo the Yogi Berra line: “I really didn't say everything I said.” Which he really did say.

So before titling and publishing this essay, I looked up the maxim at a reputable site with citations, just to be sure. And presto: suddenly I am, at least in this regard, all of the people some of the time, and not some of the people all of the time.

You really don't want to be some of those people who get fooled all the time. Which brings us to Donald Trump.

He's very good at fooling people. At the moment, he's successfully fooling millions of Republican voters into thinking he'd be a good president generally, and more specifically, that if elected he could actually do many of the outlandish things he's claiming, like getting Mexico to pay for a wall.

Thus, the question lurks forebodingly: Are we living through “some of the time?”

Is this the moment when Donald Trump fools all of the people, or at least enough of the ones who call themselves Republicans, that he lands the GOP's presidential nomination?

Read more »

Monday, May 7, 2012

The Birth, Decline, and Re-Emergence of the Solid South: A Short History

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Slave saleSince the Civil War, the American South has mostly been a one-party region. However, by the turn of the 21st century, its political affiliation had actually swung from the Democrats to the Republicans. Here’s how it happened.

It is not an oversimplification to say that slavery was the single most important issue leading to the Civil War. For not only was slavery the most important on its own merits, but none of the other relevant issues, such as expansion into the western territories or states’ rights, would have mattered much at all if not for their indelible connection to slavery.

Initially, Northerners rallied around the issue of Free Soil: opposition to slavery on economic grounds. Small farmers and new industrial workers did not want to compete with large slave plantations and unpaid slave labor. This was the philosophy that bound together the new Republican Party.

No friends of African Americans, most Free Soilers were openly racist, as were the vast majority of white Americans at the time. Abolitionists, who were fired by religion and opposed human bondage on moral grounds, were actually a small minority of the population However, as the bloody war raged on, Northerners began to seek moral assurance in their cause. For more and more people, the mere political goal of saving the union did not seem to justify the unholy slaughter of men by the tens of thousand. Though preserving the union was always Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal, he astutely played to this concern by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and establishing abolition as the war’s moral compass. It worked. The North persisted, won the war, abolished slavery, and forced the South to return.

Read more »