I've been leaving for work before 7 P.M. and not returning until close to 7 P.M. This will persist until November.
Alas! but I promise to be more vigilant in my complaints, rants, and casual observations. Here's a short one for now.
A lot of people (myself included) think that George W. Bush employs tyrannical methods of governance. However, not to excuse him but to get a clear picture of things, his record proves far better than Abraham Lincoln's.
What did Lincoln do?
Among other things, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus--even though this power is reserved for Congress (Article I of the Constitution)--and tried civilians (e.g. C. Vallendingham) in military courts for such atrocities as speaking against the Lincoln administration's tyrannical policies.
He closed down newspapers who depicted him and his administration unfavorable, going so far as to arrest editors, journalists, and even vendors.
When the Roger B. Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court demanded a writ of habeas corpus for one of Lincoln's unconstitutional prisoners, Lincoln tried to arrest Taney!
After the Navy conquered New Orleans, he placed the political general Benjamin F. Butler in command of the military district. Following reports of Butler's cruelty (he executed a man who took down a U.S. flag) and corruption (you will grow weary following the money trail), Lincoln promptly did nothing.
Let's talk about underestimating your enemy's resolve. Following South Carolina's capture of Ft. Sumter (it was squarely in the state's territory), Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the "insurrection."
Abraham Lincoln called for a reconstruction plan based upon "malice toward none." That's an easy thing to say once you have impoverished and disenfranchised all enemies who weren't slaughtered by his war machine.
Here's a little essay that I wrote a couple of years ago.
After what many deemed a “long train of abuses” by the federal government, the states of the Confederacy formed for one purpose: to establish an independent.[1] The Civil War was thus a secessionist movement, not unlike the American Revolution.[2] On the one side, Confederates fought for recognition as an independent country; and on the other side, Unionists fought to secure federal supremacy and to abolish entirely the notion of constitutional secession. The United States was to be either a loosely bound collection of sovereign states (as under the Articles of Confederation), or it was to be a single entity with a single zeitgeist, along the same pattern as the established nation-states of Europe (e.g. Great Britain) and those developing concurrently (e.g. Germany).
Secession was the main issue of the Civil War. Had there been no secession, there would have been no war. Still, individuals fought for a number of different reasons. Many on both sides simply joined because they thought that it would be an adventure, while others did not enlist at all but were conscripted. Secession (for or against) was the legal justification for both sides. The next question is why did Southerners want to secede, and why did Lincoln refuse a peaceful secession? The reasons are plenty. The war more was about economics, politics, and culture; and less about morality and idealism. These various causes coalesced into Southern secession and Northern aggression.
The Southern states seceded because they were a declining minority, and they knew it. They had for decades been well behind Northern states in the House of Representatives, and they had recently lost parity in the Senate. With the election of Abraham Lincoln as president (though Lincoln won not a single electoral vote from a southern state), only the Supreme Court remained friendly to Southern interests. However, since members of the Supreme Court were appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, Southerners knew that it was only a matter of time until they lost support from the judiciary branch as well. There was thus no separation of powers, no checks and balances, no federalism, no Constitution for Southerners; they were to be dominated politically by the North: a section that had for the past several decades been at odds with Southerners economically and politically.
That Southerners fought for the right of secession is not sufficient to explain the war; for the questions of why did Southerners wish to secede and why did Northerners wish to refuse secession remain. Of course Southerners wanted to secede because they wanted to be independent, but it wasn’t just that they fancied independence. Had they been confident that they would have been able to maintain their local customs and institutions and not have to live under a federal government lorded over by Northern interests, they would have stayed in the Union. However, they were not confident in this. In fact, they feared (and realistically so) that the political domination of the federal government by the North would mean that Southern interests would be ignored or outright bullied and assaulted; and the rise of the imperialist Republican Party meant that this usurpation was already in progress.[3]
Many historians have identified slavery as the chief cause of the war. The clearest evidence of slavery’s role in the war was its long-time status as the sectional dispute. The Republican Party was essentially born of anti-Nebraska (free-soil) factions. The Republican Party was a vast hodgepodge catering to various special-interests throughout the North, but its most basic tenet was that slavery must not expand into new territories. Knowing that such a policy was unconstitutional (see Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857), Southerners cringed at the notion of Republican control of the White House. Of all the slave states, only four remained in the Union after that fateful Spring of 1861. Of the four "loyal" slave states, only Delaware was not rife with Confederate sympathy—for only a nominal slave-based society existed in that state. When Lincoln's armies were losing on the field, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The ratification, in 1865, of the Thirteenth Amendment ultimately ended the debate.[4]
So slavery was certainly an essential division and helped to facilitate hostilities, but what about slavery was so divisive? First, the Civil War was not a moral crusade waged by abolitionists in the North to redeem the nation of its sin. Slavery was an economic and political issue, and because of its obvious immorality has always been the most visible political, socio-economic difference between the antebellum North and South. Behind the issue of slavery are a number of specific economic issues ranging from the contest between an industrializing, free-labor based North and an agriculturally based South with more than four million slaves employed in the various tasks of cash-crop agriculture; however, most Southerners who fought and died in the war were not slave owners, and most Northerners who fought and died in the war were not abolitionists.[5] Yes, there were radical abolitionists in the North and radical pro-slavery men in the South, but overwhelmingly few men in either section possessed moral inclinations for or against slavery that were so strong as to inspire them to die for their causes. Furthermore, while there were many Southerners who had invested a great deal of capital in slaves (and who thus possessed a vital economic interest in its preservation and expansion), most Southerners were yeomen who owned few if any slaves. Minor slave owners would have been severely inconvenienced by abolition (which was not even Lincoln's or the majority of Northerners’ goal), but they would not have been fiscally destroyed by it. For the many yeomen who owned no slaves at all, the economic threat posed by the anti-slavery North was miniscule.[6] Slavery as an economic issue merely is simply not an adequate conclusion. Most Southerners opposed anti-slavery sentiments and policy, but not on economic grounds; and most Northerners disliked the idea of slavery, but not because they were civil rights crusaders.
The problem with identifying economic divisions as the cause of the Civil War is that the economic divisions were political in nature. Economics means the study or organization of production, distribution, and consumption. Yes, a slave society is economically different from a free-labor society, yet the problem with slavery was not an economic one.[7] Southerners were not worried that slavery would become economically unfeasible by itself; they feared that Republicans would use the coercive power of government to eliminate slavery in the territories first, and slavery in the slave states second. Free territories become free states, and free states have Northern interests and elect Northern-minded representatives and senators. This means that slavery and anti-slavery were decisively political issues.
The persistent noise made by radicals such as William Lloyd Garrison and the bold action of John Brown at Harpers Ferry (though neither man was particularly popular, even in the North) made the threat of Northern aggression against slavery seem all the more immediate. Although moralists in the North were a well-organized force, they were in no way representative of the bulk of Northern society. While many a Southerner would have enjoyed lynching William Lloyd Garrison, the most immediate threat to Garrison’s life came from a mob in Boston. Generally, abolitionists were not politically powerful (Seward’s abolitionism was a chief reason why Republicans nominated Lincoln, the free-soiler, and not him); however abolitionists’ incessant preaching provoked fear and indignation amongst Southerners.
Many Northerners were indifferent to slavery when it came to moral issues, for Northerners were every bit as racist as Southerners. In fact, the American Colonization Society was established not to free slaves but to ship freedmen back to Africa or to some undetermined Central-American colony.[8] Many Northerners did not want to abolish slavery because they were afraid that freedmen would move north, take their jobs, and mingle with their wives and daughters.[9] On the other hand, most Northerners resented the dual advantage of slaveholders: (1) The ability to farm at low-cost and (2) due to the 3/5 Compromise of the Constitution, slaves were counted for Southern representation in the House of Representatives. The Republican Party sought support from many Northerners by promising them essentially free “homesteads” in the western territories. Those who received homesteads were likely to be poor or modest Americans who could not afford land otherwise. Since these people were economically modest (at best), they would not be able to afford slaves, so free-soil went along with homesteading (free-free-soil). Northerners—the only supporters of the Republican Party—who sought to seek opportunity out west did not want to compete with Southerners’ slave labor, and they did not want to live near African-Americans. Most Northerners who really thought about it, wanted the territories to be white. That means no slavery. That means free-soil, and that means that Southern interests were at odds with Northern interests.
The “economic” issue of slavery was thus largely a political and social one, and what Southerners heard from their Northern brethren was hardly the sound of fraternal goodwill. Although few in overall numbers, the abolitionists were insatiable in their moralizing that Southerners—via the institution of slavery—were evil, corrupt, backwards, and essentially violent people (Preston Brooks did nothing to help this); and although still a minority movement, abolitionist sympathy was visibly growing in many parts of the North, especially since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This forced Southerners always on the moral defensive. Abolitionist groups could nearly logjam Congressional sessions with anti-slavery petitions, and when Southerners protested they were derided for opposing free speech. Anti-slavery politicians (whether for economic or racist reasons) were seeking to bar slavery from expanding into territories. John Brown slaughtered pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. New Englanders were flaunting their disregard for the Fugitive-Slave Act—a central part to the compromise that had allowed for California’s admission as a free state—with personal liberty laws. Writing for The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison damned Southerners to Hell. John Brown killed men and seize the federal armory in Harpers Ferry and attempted to distribute weapons to slaves who would then massacre white Virginians, only for Henry David Thoreau to eulogize him as the only true man and epitome of a hero in America. To top it off, Abraham Lincoln, who was so unpopular in the South that he failed even to gather enough support to be on the ballot in some states, seized the Presidency without gaining a single electoral vote south of the Mason-Dixon line. And what did Abraham Lincoln support? He was a staunch Republican: free-soil, protective tariffs, internal improvements, and central banking. He was the first president whose entire platform was essentially hostile to Southern interests.
Slavery aside, the institution of a high (some might say prohibitive) protective tariff was another polarizing issue. Protective tariffs deal with economics, for they seek to alter the distribution and consumption of certain goods; however, like slavery, tariffs are really political policies. It’s one thing to say “Buy American,” and its another thing to use the coercive powers of the state to inflate artificially the price of imports. Furthermore, protective tariffs clearly favored Northerners at the expense of Southerners. Southerners grieved, for while the Constitution empowers Congress to enact tariffs as a means of generating revenue for the federal government, it does not grant Congress the right to use its legislative powers to influence the economic choices of free citizens and funnel money from one section to another.
To Southerners, who manufactured little, protective tariffs were a Northern scheme, promoted by special interests, to rob Southerners of their money. Many Northerners claimed that protective tariffs fostered industry in America, which was good for the country as a whole. As they continued to mature, the American textile industry would thus consume more Southern cotton, but this argument did not sway Southerners. First, whether the British or New Englanders purchased cotton did not really matter. It was still being purchased. Second, a protective tariff rang eerily similar to the mercantilist policies (Navigation Acts, Hat Act, Iron Act, Sugar Act, Townshend Acts, Tea Act, etc.) of the British, who had argued that what was good for the motherland was good for the colonies. Just as the citizens of Massachusetts had denied the right of Parliament to tax them in order to rescue the British East India Company, the citizens of Charleston et cetera refused the right for Washington, D.C., to tax them in order to benefit textile mills in Massachusetts. Southerners were farmers, the most influential of which were cotton planters. Due to the South's unique geographical disposition, cotton plantations were in no need of “protection.” New Englanders could not produce cotton in New England, nor could the British or French grow cotton in Wales or Burgundy. Since no money was taken from Northern interests to help Southern interests (no such money was needed), Southerners, by opposing protective tariffs, simply invoked the golden rule.
Federal funding of internal improvements was a political-economic issue similar in nature to tariffs. For decades, Whigs led by Henry Clay (and later Republicans led by the likes of Lincoln—who had started out as a Whig die-hard) had tried to secure support from powerful, special interests in the North by lobbying for federal subsidies of certain projects, namely canals and railroads. For which section of the country did most of these projects apply? Not surprisingly, the bulk of internal improvement designs were for the North. This would mean that federal tax dollars, much of which was taken from Southerners, would be spent “improving” the North. For the same reasons that Southerners opposed tariffs, they opposed these internal improvements. It’s not that Southerners disliked canals and railroads, but they resented the notion that money from Mississippi, Georgia, et alia should be used to build canals in Illinois (a favorite plan of Abraham Lincoln’s).[10] As largely independent yeomen, Southerners were not generally helped by tariffs or internal improvements, so they resented having their coffers looted anytime a Northern special interest cried foul over international competition or developed a grandiose scheme to dig a canal across Michigan.[11] If Michiganders, New Yorkers, or the citizens of any northern state wanted a canal, railroad, or such, then let Michigan, New York, or whomever foot the bill.
Like tariffs and internal improvements, a central bank was clearly a Northern favorite and stood well against the interests of most Southerners. This debate had deep roots in American sectionalism. The first national bank was the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, a centralizer who saw the bank as an opportunity to plant the national government firmly in the economic life of the United States.[12] Thomas Jefferson had opposed the national bank for exactly the reason that Hamilton had supported it. After Hamilton’s Federalist Party declined into nothingness, Henry Clay’s Whig Party picked up its pieces, a chief one of which was the national bank. When the Whig Party died, Republicans carried on the tradition.
Republicans wanted to influence the value of currency and manage credit via a central bank. Southerners recoiled in distaste. A national bank was yet another weasel-concept, designed by Northerners to enrich themselves at Southerners’ expense. Southerners still held Andrew Jackson’s fear that such control over the nation’s money supply would only foster corruption in the government and disaster in the market. A national bank would hold a tyrannical power over credit, doling money out to its favorites (Northern industrialists and speculators). A national bank also would wreck the economy by weakening the currency through paper money schemes. This is why Jackson and fellow Southerners had long promoted states as the best arbiter in banking and specie—not paper notes—as the only secure form of currency. When state banks gave reckless amounts of credit to speculators and printed their own notes to use as currency, Jackson ordered that all federal land transactions be made in specie. This was as far as Jackson believed the national government could go into banking, for the Constitution provided no basis for which to establish a national bank. Paper money was a bad idea too, for it is inflationary and hard to resist printing more and more. Paper money schemers are special-interest inclined, supported by those who wish to have instant money but do not have enough on hand or sufficient capital to acquire it. The fact the Confederacy would go on to commit most egregious paper money schemes shows not their rejection of sound monetary policy but their fiscally desperate condition.
Too often historians overlook tradition as a fundamental cause of secession. After all, the American Revolution was, at its heart, a secessionist movement.[13] The American colonies seceded from Great Britain because they were tired of being exploited by the English in Parliament; so too did Southern states secede when they were sick of being looted by Northern special interests. Of course for American colonists the issue was one of not having representation (a political issue), which Southerners undeniably had. However, if the Americans had had representation in Parliament, they would have been a minority so small that it would have been impotent in promoting the colonies’ interests. Such was exactly the case of the Southerners. Government is supposed to be based upon the consent of the governed, but consent suggests majority support. In light of its minority status in the House and the Senate, Southerners could refuse consent to any number of things but still been unable to stop them. Although Hamilton #9 and Madison #10 of The Federalist Papers argued eloquently that no faction in a country as large as the United States could ever grow strong enough to oppress minority rights, neither man could have realized how sectional the United States would become. The Republican Party was completely sectional, and it had just seized control of the White House. Appreciating the tradition of secession that ran deep in American heritage and recognizing the error of Federalist #9 and #10, Southerners could rationally latch on to secession as their last, great hope.[14]
As an agriculturally based society, Southerners were prone to a very distinct political philosophy. Farmers—even subsistence farmers—tend to be of a very independent-minded ilk; and while most Northerners still farmed the land, the North was more and more being characterized by its bustling metropolises and commercial-industrial economy. To a Southern farmer, the government was an idea, not an actual force, with the mission to protect life, liberty, and property; and owing its existence to popular consent. Understandably, a man's rights in a rural setting are minimal; so Southerners had very little need for any government at all, let alone a Northern controlled federal government. The only government active in the states should be the states’ own governments, and state governments’ activity should be relegated only to measures that protected the lives, liberty, and property of their citizens. Southerners believed in strong state governments, but strong is not used to modify “state governments”; rather, it is used to contrast states with federal power. A Mississippi Delta planter expected noninterference in his affairs, but, if there must be interference from a government, it ought to come from Jackson, not D.C.
The American colonial experience had demonstrated how oppressive an “active” government could be. As traditional republicans (irony not intended), Southerners wanted a latent, not an active government. Southerners were opposed the ambitions of both forms of political activists: special-interest groups (e.g. canal diggers and railroaders who sought subsidies for “internal improvements”) and the idea of an “active” government empowered to use its force to direct socio-economic policy (e.g. protective tariffs and free-soil). Northerners, especially New Englanders with their underlying streak of Puritanism, tended to see the government as an instrument of social change and economic influence. Besides, Northerners were in the majority, and a majority unchecked will always use its power to exploit minorities.[15]
Seen in this light, the economic conflicts between Northerners and Southerners were so thoroughly mingled with political issues that they were essentially political in nature. The question of slavery in the territories was really a question about individual property rights, states’ rights, and federal incursion into these matters. If, as the Dred Scott decision stated, slaves were property and, like other forms of chattel (e.g. mules) could be brought from one place to another with no change in their status, then the federal government possessed no right whatsoever to meddle with it in the territories. Southerners thus believed that the territories should be open to all Americans and that the federal government could not justly discriminate against legal property. On the contrary, the function of the executive branch is to protect a man’s property. If tariffs and internal improvements do not “promote the general welfare,” but benefit only the welfare of a special interest, then protective tariffs and internal improvements are unconstitutional.[16] Furthermore, internal improvements are state issues, not national issues. Federal funding of them is thus an usurpation of state prerogatives.
Most white Southerners owned their own land, so they resented the Republicans’ desire to elicit support by offering (virtually free of charge) large tracts of land—land in territories in which Republicans hoped to refuse Southern interests with their catchy slogan: “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”[17] Southerners had the right to ask, “Whose government is this?”
In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln supports “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” but Southerners knew which people he meant, and it was not they. When they seceded, they thought that they were establishing a government of their people, by their people, and for their people. Unfortunately for them, Lincoln, the Republicans, and most other Northerners refused to recognize the right to secession. Fearing that secession would lead to a decline in stature for the United States (it certainly would have weakened the power of the federal government if the states possessed such a massive check to its ambitions) and wanting to lead the only empire of the Western Hemisphere (and avoid losing consumers of its goods to the British), Northerners waged war.[18]
In every political-economic issue, Southerners, for the most part, sided against the federal government; while Northerners, for the most part, tended to support the expanding powers of the federal government (which they controlled). It was the old argument between Alexander Hamilton, the New Yorker, and Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian.[19] And just as Hamilton took the field at Weehawken to maintain his exalted station, Northerners and Southerners alike took to other fields: Manassas, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, etc.
So the economic issues behind the war were really political issues. Then again, these economic issues tangled in political issues were also rife with cultural entanglements. Of course there were a myriad of cultural similarities between Northerners and Southerners: language, religion, and a common history; but these alone did not suffice to suppress sectional divisions. In a way, sectionalism is about culture. The word culture is rooted in the word cult, and a cult is a group of people loosely or strictly connected by similar beliefs. All religions are cults. The scientific community is a cult—or many different cults depending upon the issue (e.g. quantum mechanics versus Einstein’s theory of relativity). Political parties are cults, as are Marxist and Austrian economists.[20] In short, different “cultures” can exists amongst and within very similar groups of people, and the differences between them can often be surprisingly minor (e.g. moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans)—but these differences seem minor only to those outside of the disputing cultures’ spheres of influence.[21]
Culturally, the South had not changed much since the Revolution. When the United States achieved its independence, both the North and the South were overwhelmingly rural. Even the North’s “big cities” (e.g. Philadelphia, New York, Boston) were relatively small. By the time of the Civil War, the South was still overwhelmingly rural, but the North was changing into an urban-industrial giant. When the United States achieved independence, every one of the 13 new states was a slave state. By the time of the Civil War, slavery remained only in the South. The 19th Century saw the North’s population skyrocket through combinations of natural reproduction and massive immigration, the population of the South—while it increased—fell well behind the North and was increased by no significant waves of immigration.. Everything, it seemed, was changing in the North. Nothing much since the invention of the cotton gin had changed in the South, and the cotton gin had really only entrenched agriculture in the South. In many respects, Southerners were simply recalling their heritage. As changes in British policy and imperial arrogance had alienated American colonists from the motherland, changes in the North and Northern political and socio-economic designs for the United States had alienated Southerners.
So at first it seems like a contest over the economic policies of the federal government; then it seems that the contest is really over the political power of the federal government to support economic policies; only for it to become clear that the economic and political quarrels are both rooted in a cultural conflict. However, to say that the war was over this or that is to exclude far too much. Economics played a role in the conflict. Northern economic interests certainly played a role in their hostility to Southerners, while Southern economic interests led them to resent Northerners. What made the economic issues worse was that Northerners sought to use federal power in achieving their goals, and Southerners, who were in the minority, could not stop Northerners from doing so. Behind all of this was a generally static culture in the South resisting a generally dynamic culture in the North.
The bottom line is that Southerners did not believe that their culture was safe in the Union, so they left the Union. The conflict comes down to a changing, ambitious North and a reactionary, anxious South. To Southerners, the Republicans planned to turn the government into a fearsome leviathan, and secession was their only method of resistance. Since Republicans were essentially “empire builders” whose imperialistic and sectional plans would deteriorate upon secession, they made war upon the South. Northern democrats joined in because patriotic sirens and Southern hostility hypnotized agitated them. Southerners who stood to gain no tangible political, economic, or social advantage in the war were also nonetheless lured by patriotism to the South and a general hatred for the North. Apolitical men on both sides—and there were many men who fought for no real objective at all—took up arms because they wanted to participate in what was surely the great event of the century or because they were conscripted into service. There is no practical way to generalize the causes of the war.
One great question remains. Were the fears that led Southerners to secede reasonable? One need look no farther than Reconstruction to see that, once sufficiently empowered, the North would dominate the South and its economic, social, and political institutions. Many historians talk about Reconstruction as something of a revolution, but they tend to miss something important.[22] Southerners did not experience Reconstruction as a revolution within the South of Southerners who sought to change their culture, and what the North did was not so much revolution as exploitation.
What did Reconstruction mean to Southerners? It meant a loss of political rights, an invasion of Northern carpetbaggers seeking to exploit the Southern economy (which had been wrecked by Northern armies), and the abolition of slavery. To regain “official” statehood, Southerners had to consent to virtual extortion by ratifying Northern constitutional amendments. Known Confederate sympathizers and abettors were prohibited from voting, while freedmen were given the right to vote because propertyless, illiterate freedmen would elect Republicans (their liberators) who meted out nothing but empty promises (how many freedmen were given 40 acres and a mule?). The few Southern whites who did vote Republican were branded as scalawags, ostracized, and often terrorized by their angry, betrayed peers.
For Southerners, Reconstruction meant having to live in a country with a protective tariff, federally funded internal improvements, and a federalized bank system. All their nightmares had become true, and all that they had fought to ward off was forced upon them. Reconstruction shows clearly that Lincoln and his party fought to cement a federal presence in the South, to abolish all that it detested (for whatever reason), and augment all that it desired. And what of the moral and idealistic aspects of the Northern war effort? Reconstruction saw the end of slavery (the Thirteenth Amendment), but the end of slavery simply meant a new form of suffering for freedmen. Now they were free to starve and die. The great moralists who had talked so much of elevating the black man’s station did pitifully little to help the freedman come “up from slavery.”[23] The Freedmen’s Bureau and other "charity" organizations often served for little more as fronts to corrupt, exploitive designs.[24]
Reconstruction failed to bring about an economic revolution in the South. The South remained cotton land. The only difference was that tenant farms replaced plantations; slaves became sharecroppers. Industry did not take root in the South. Free labor was perverted into peonage, and blacks remained at the bottom of the socio-economic strata. Since they were no longer a master's property, individual blacks lost all "value" to whites except inasmuch as they could be exploited.
Reconstruction also failed to secure democracy in the South, for it temporarily eliminated most of the white franchise. The North did enact the Fifteenth Amendment to secure the right to vote for blacks—to a certain extent. Where they were practically guaranteed to vote Republican (the South), blacks were enfranchised; where the Republicans did not need a new voting bloc (the North), blacks were not enfranchised. The only black men who were given the right to vote were the men who owed their freedom to the Republican Party and remembered clearly the Democratic Party’s position on slavery. So, while Southern states were being forced to allow blacks to vote, no federal power whatsoever was exerted in “loyal” states to do so. The reason can only be that the freedmen in the South represented a massive opportunity for the Republican Party to expand its political power into Southern states. So long as blacks in the South were voting, Republicans were being elected in the South. In spite of this ulterior motive, many are willing to excuse the Republicans because it was at least a step in the right direction. However, for every step forward, Republicans took two steps back. Reconstruction was an empty victory for black civil rights. They were freed from bondage and granted suffrage, but before long most were trapped in peonage, tenancy, or marginal sharecropping. As for enfranchisement, the Ku Klux Klan soon effectively kept blacks from the voting booths. There is no lack of correlation between the “redemption” of the Southern states and the loss of black political rights in the South. As Democrats regained power in the South, new state laws circumvented the Fifteenth Amendment making disenfranchisement of freedmen a legal fact.[25] By the 1890’s only the bravest (and perhaps most reckless) blacks were voting in states such as Mississippi and Alabama.
Just because the Civil War resulted in a Reconstruction Era that saw the enactment of civil rights based Constitutional Amendments, suffrage for freedmen, and Civil Rights Acts does not mean that the Civil War was about morals or idealism. Republicans waged the war relentlessly, cutting a path of destruction everywhere the army went; and they incurred extreme losses themselves in doing so. Why were they not equally as relentless in "reconstructing" the South? Because they waged a war of conquest, not of revolution. Lincoln was honest when, in the “Gettysburg Address,” he stated his mission to ensure that Union soldiers had not died in vain. His goal was to preserve the Union, to end the idea of secession forever, and in doing so enhance the power of the federal government and achieve his political-economic agenda. Slavery died in the process, which solved the question of slavery in the territories; but beyond emancipation, the federal government did little for freedmen. If the North had truly been dedicated to a new South, then it would have done much more to ensure actual change in the South. Instead, the North let the South back into the Union, and except for the absence of slavery, considerably harder economic times for whites, and the lack of any secessionist movement of any substance, the South was pretty much as it always had been.
[1] “Long train of Abuses,” is taken from Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence.
[2] The Declaration of Independence is nothing more than a declaration of secession from the British Empire.
[3] I use the word “imperialist” loosely to delineate the Republicans’ innate “Northerness” and desire to use the federal government as the ultimate instrument of expanding (forcing) their ideology throughout the continental United States. “Imperialist” has a very strong, negative connotation; and my decision to use it is based not out of a personal hostility to the Republican Party (then) but more to modify accurately “Republican Party” in Southern terms. It’s not so important whether or not Republicans were actually imperialistic, but that Southerners believed that Republicans were imperialists.
[4] The Three-Fifth’s Compromise, the Missouri Compromise, the gag rule, Texas’s delayed admission to the Union, opposition to the Mexican War, the Mexican Cession, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s Raid, etc.
[5] The best study written thus far to explain why soldiers on either side fought and died in the Civil War is James M. McPherson's For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[6] Non-slave owners might have faced an increased competition in the market and for land from freedmen, but that topic is debatable. When slavery finally did end in the South, the economic competition of freedmen was not a serious threat to anyone, for freedmen generally lacked the capital and the credit necessary to acquire land, farm it, and sell their harvests.
[7] For a good analysis of free labor's hostility to a slave labor see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
[8] See Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2002).
[9] Non-slave owning Southerners also opposed abolition because they feared living amongst freedmen.
[10] Again, see DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln.
[11] At the heyday of “canal fever,” ambitious Michiganders actually planned and began construction on a canal that was to cut across the lower peninsula of Michigan from Lake St. Clair to Lake Michigan. The plan failed when its master planners forgot to consider the cost of such a venture.
[12] Robert E. Shalhope, The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1760-1800 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 147
[13] Again, see DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln.
[14] The Federalist Papers is within the public domain and can be accessed through numerous on-line resources. Or see Alexander Hamilton et al, The Federalist Papers (New York: Signet Classic, 2003), 66-78. Also, an astute reader recognizes that I have used Lincoln’s words (last, great hope) for anti-Lincolnites. I omitted quotation marks because of the reverse context in which the words are used.
[15] “Minorities” denotes those not in the majority. It should not, in this case—or possibly any case—be understood as an innately racial term.
[16] See the "Preamble" of The Constitution of the United States of America.
[17] Emphasis added. See http://searches1.rootsweb.com/usgenweb/archives/wi/dodge/newspapers/hardshel.txt.
[18] Once again, see DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln.
[19] Although Hamilton was not a New Yorker by birth (he was born on the British Caribbean Isle of Nevis), it was his theory of an active and powerful central government that would characterize “Northern” political philosophy. Hamilton’s ideals would be most forcefully expressed through Henry Clay and the Whig party, which in turn molded the political philosophy of Abraham Lincoln—whose election in 1860 as president sparked secession.
[20] The term Austrian economist does not refer to Austrians per se; rather, it refers to the national identity of it founders: Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Austrian economists are free-market economically and laissez-faire politically. But I digress.
[21] For example, this author wonders why so much is made of the contest between John Kerry and George W. Bush; but only because he is a Libertarian who believes that both men are essentially bad for the country.
[22] See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Perennial, 1988).
[23] Booker T. Washington’s autobiography is entitled Up From Slavery.
[24] For a fine analysis of such corruption see Carl R. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman's Savings Bank (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
[25] The Fifteenth Amendment simply prevents states from barring the franchise to men because of their race. State laws requiring literacy and the ability to comprehend selected sections of the Constitution were used to prevent the largely uneducated black population from the polls. Those blacks who could make these hurdles were then “discouraged” by “other means.”
