DEFENDER OF THE UNION
ABRAHAM LINCOLN WON election as president of the United States by carrying every Northern state except New Jersey. No candidate—not even Thomas Jefferson in his divisive 1800 race against John Adams—had ever before taken the presidency with such an exclusively regional vote. Lincoln failed to carry a single Southern state—and his name did not even appear on the ballot in ten of them. But even in those Dixie states where voters could vote Republican if they so chose, Lincoln fared disastrously. In Virginia the Lincoln ticket received just 1,929 votes out of 167,223 statewide—barely 1 percent. The result was even more pronounced in his native Kentucky, where only 1,364 out of 146,216 voters, less than 1 percent, cast their ballots for the Republican candidate. Lincoln could find some solace in the fact that both of these Upper South states, along with Missouri, at least went for the moderate John Bell rather than the conservative Southern choice, Democrat John C. Breckinridge. As the ominously divided vote confirmed, and just as Southern foes had warned, Lincoln’s victory was entirely sectional. The total result gave Lincoln a decisive 54 percent in the North and West, but only 2 percent in the South—the most asymmetrical plurality in American election history. The Northern Democratic candidate, Stephen Douglas, finished in second place in the popular vote, but won almost no electoral votes.
Lincoln’s election triggered the secession crisis. One by one, the seven states of the Lower South began to move toward separation from the Union. In Washington prominent senators proposed new compromise legislation designed to persuade the Southern states to stay in the Union by assuring them that the institution of slavery would remain untouched by the new administration—and all future administrations.
The Lincoln Quick-Step—an 1860 campaign sheet-music cover by Thomas Sinclair of Philadelphia—highlighted the Lincolnian virtue of hard work. Note the scenes (top and bottom) of a young Lincoln splitting rails and piloting a flatboat and (left and right) the tools of those humble trades.
FROM THE LINCOLN FINANCIAL FOUNDATION COLLECTION, COURTESY OF THE ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY AND INDIANA STATE MUSEUM AND HISTORIC SITES
Lacking anything but symbolic power, and with sixteen long weeks remaining before his inauguration, Lincoln believed he could do nothing official to avert the crisis as long as the lame-duck James Buchanan administration remained in office. The new president-elect calculated that any public comment on his part during this period might prove fatally dangerous. He was worried that inflammatory statements might even jeopardize the Electoral College balloting that would make the November 6 presidential election results official in February.
Lincoln and Douglas in a Presidential Footrace—an 1860 campaign cartoon by J. Sage & Son of Buffalo—shows the long-limbed Republican candidate proudly toting a rail splitter’s maul as he outdistances his short-legged rival toward the White House. Douglas is saddled with a bag marked “MC,” a reminder of the Missouri Compromise that his controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed, opening the American Northwest to slavery. Outraged by that 1854 legislation, Lincoln had come roaring back into politics.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
For generations after 1800, Americans had regarded these sessions as mere formalities, a kind of postelection coronation devoid of suspense, with each of the 303 “delegates” firmly pledged in advance to support the ticket on which he had run. But nothing about this interregnum was going according to tradition. Never before had a president-elect been subjected to so much pressure to pronounce himself on doctrinal issues before his inauguration. Never before had an entire section of the country threatened to abandon the United States altogether in response to an election.
Not even the electoral vote could be regarded as pro forma. What if Southern messengers withdrew their votes and threw the required quorum into jeopardy? What if the “fire-eaters” disrupted the meeting of electors—or, worse, prevented the votes from being counted or the vote from taking place at all?
For better or worse, Lincoln concluded that whatever he might say would unavoidably alarm at least part of the country in such a way that he might not be able to govern when he took office. Soothing words of reassurance on the constitutional rights of slaveholders might inflame Northern Republicans who had just voted for him with the expectation that he would limit the spread of slavery. Defiant pronouncements on the sanctity of the Union would probably arouse Southern Democrats who had not voted for him and for whom anything less than substantial conciliation amounted to coercion. To Lincoln, saying nothing was preferable to saying too much.
Lincoln likely believed, too, that expending political capital too early in the national arena might render him less effective when he took over the government in March. Historians who have suggested that he misjudged the growing crisis by exaggerating Union sentiment in the South have both overestimated his legal and political ability to allay the growing panic and underestimated Lincoln’s logic-driven conviction that the best time to confront the secession crisis directly was after his inauguration.
But that is not to suggest that Lincoln was unaware of the severity of the secession crisis. Indeed, as his private statements during the so-called secession winter make clear, it was very much on his mind, if not his chief concern. “I feel constrained, for the present, at least, to make no declaration for the public,” he said on November 10, 1860, in defense of his silence. Convinced that any such “declaration” might undo the perilous balance under which he had just been voted into office, he refused to modify the policy of restraint that had won him the election in the first place. Still fearful that he might embolden his foes by appearing weak or worried, and recognizing that the all-important Electoral College would not cast its votes for president for another three months and must not be impeded or threatened, Lincoln further justified his position this way: “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print, and open for the inspection of all. To press a repetition of this upon those who have listened, is useless; to press it upon those who have refused to listen, and still refuse, would be wanting in self-respect.” Lincoln’s views had been fully expressed in the recently published Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Cooper Union address, and the Republican Party platform. Popular sovereignty was dead. Under no circumstances would his new government allow slavery to spread into the West.
There was little danger Lincoln could forget, even for a moment, the pressures that continued mounting for an official preinaugural statement. “Every newspaper he opened was filled with clear indications of an impending national catastrophe,” journalist Henry Villard observed from Springfield, Illinois. “Every mail brought him written, and every hour verbal, entreaties to abandon his paralyzed silence, repress untimely feelings of delicacy, and pour the oil of conciliatory conservative assurances upon the turbulent waves of Southern excitement.”
But still Lincoln would not speak, believing that while he yet enjoyed no power to govern, he did possess significant potential for sparking further discontent through anything he might now declare. Lincoln believed he had as much to fear from dissatisfaction among his Northern allies as from secession-minded Southern fire-eaters. As if to punctuate that danger, black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, speaking in Boston on December 3, declared with impolitic frankness: “I want the slaveholders to be made uncomfortable. . . . I rejoice in every uprising in the South.” How could Lincoln reply to such a provocative statement without either offending abolitionists with his condemnation or frightening pro-Union Southerners with a positive comment?
In fact, Lincoln did not remain entirely silent during those tense weeks, however. Convinced as he was of the validity of this position, Lincoln knew disaster would follow if wavering border Southern states came to regard him as pro–equal rights. In one private letter to Henry J. Raymond, the influential pro-Republican editor of the New York Times, he did separate himself from the “radical” abolitionist view in support of racial equality. Speaking in the third person, he wrote, “Mr. Lincoln is not pledged to the ultimate extinctinction [sic] of slavery.” He went on to say that he “does not hold the black man to be the equal of the white, unqualifiedly . . . and never did stigmatize their white people as immoral & unchristian.” Lincoln fully expected the New York Times to present his views to the public without attribution.
Judged by modern attitudes on race, of course, this was not Lincoln’s finest moment. But it was true to his long-expressed belief that the Constitution did not permit direct action to abolish slavery where it existed in the Southern and border states and with certainty did not provide the president or the Congress with the federal power to mandate civil or legal equality for African Americans.
Lincoln’s public silence was tested yet again when he received the news that Congress, which convened in December, might appropriate to itself a legislative compromise to avert secession. This unsettled Lincoln. The president-in-waiting wanted nothing less than for a lame-duck House and Senate to enact policy that would bind the new administration, especially if it permitted slavery to expand westward in violation of the 1860 Republican platform and if that policy arrogated powers Lincoln believed he was elected to exercise, and certainly not if it left future decisions on slavery to local constituencies, in total disregard of his determined opposition to popular sovereignty.
Keeping the western territories open to limitless opportunity for free white labor—and free of slaves—had been Lincoln’s holy grail since 1854, the year Douglas had engineered passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In Lincoln’s mind, his position on the Free Soil issue had gotten him elected in November and bound him to that policy for the future. Now, to his dismay, before he began his presidency, he sensed congressional Republicans might entertain softening the party’s opposition to slavery extension in return for guarantees against secession.
Lincoln could easily have decided to accept a congressional compromise that might keep the country intact, to support a revival of the old Missouri Compromise line that would allow slavery to migrate into the Southwest. Or he could draw his own line in the sand and oppose compromise entirely.
For Lincoln, drawing a line in the sand was the only choice he was willing to make. But even so, he remained unwilling to do so publicly. Privately, Lincoln decided to engage in unprecedented activity to prevent, even sabotage, any compromise solutions that would allow for the expansion of slavery. His letter to Henry Raymond was only the first of many such efforts. Making his feelings known only in private letters to loyal senators and congressmen, the president-elect insisted that Republicans hold fast to party principles and do nothing that might open the popular-sovereignty debate afresh. He especially did not want to give Southerners the hope that they might use their legislative power to extend slavery to territory west of the Mississippi or even by acquiring new territory in Cuba or elsewhere in the Caribbean.
When William H. Seward, Lincoln’s first choice to lead his cabinet as secretary of state, began to make noises from Washington about bending to the compromisers, Lincoln fired off a confidential letter that made his unwavering position clearer than ever (even if it still remained only privately expressed). Lincoln was preoccupied with the early stages of composing his Inaugural Address, but he knew an existential threat when he faced one. He realized at once how crucial it was to assume leadership of the national party even in absentia, even without formal office, and even with private, not public, communication. So he wrote to Seward to clear up once and for all the issue of whether he was prepared to accept the expansion of slavery in return for peace and union. He was, he wrote, “inflexible,” explaining, “I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation. And any trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as any other. I take it that to effect some such result as this, and to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire is the object of all these proposed compromises. I am against it.”
Thus, Lincoln began injecting himself quietly but forcefully into the debate on Capitol Hill to ensure that there would be no additional compromise on the issue of extending slavery to the western territories. As self-conscious as he had been about assuming control of the secession crisis, Lincoln had in fact done just that. No previous president-elect ever made such a show of power and influence before his swearing in. The politically astute Lincoln still delivered no public speeches and issued no state papers on the compromise issue; to do so, he believed, would only exacerbate matters by angering both antislavery men and border-state conservatives. Instead, he made his views clear in many more remarkably tough private letters to key allies on Capitol Hill, which he probably knew would be widely shared with other Republicans.
In a letter to his friend Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Lincoln left little doubt where he stood. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” came the pointed instructions. “If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is Pop[ular]. Sov[reignty]. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” The very next day, Lincoln employed the same emphatic phrase in a similar message to Illinois congressman William Kellogg, who had joined the new House committee seeking “the remedy for the present difficulties.” Reiterated Lincoln: “The tug has to come & better now than later.”
The president made the same line-in-the-sand point to Republican congressman Elihu Washburne, insisting that he would not bend on the crucial issue of slavery expansion. What was more, as the head of the Republican Party, he expected support from others. His self-assurance on manifest display, Lincoln reiterated on December 13: “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves, and our cause, by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort, on ‘slavery extention.’ There is no possible compromise upon it, but which puts us under again, and leaves all our work to do over again.” For good measure, the president-elect reminded New York State Republican boss Thurlow Weed: “My opinion is that no state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union, without the consent of the others; and that it is the duty of the President, and other government functionaries to run the machine as it is.” No doubt he expected that Weed and his ally Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times, would make this view known and that Raymond would endorse it in his newspaper. Publication of such an editorial in the New York Times would be perceived as the official view of the upcoming administration.
In the middle of December, that “machine” finally stopped functioning. The long-feared South Carolina secession convention opened in Charleston on December 17. Three days later, in an atmosphere of defiant celebration, delegates to the convention chose the course of secession, formally adopting an ordinance to take South Carolina out of the Union and “resume a separate, equal rank among nations.” Over the next nineteen days, while Lincoln watched from Springfield and Congress debated compromises that no longer seemed to matter, six more Southern states held referenda and elected delegates to secession conventions of their own: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The momentum unleashed in South Carolina became impossible to contain. Secession fever had grown incurable.
Although congressional maneuvering continued through the month in Washington, by late December meaningful compromise solutions appeared doomed. Lincoln had achieved his objectives. “Compromise has gone up the spout,” one newspaper reported on December 28, the day before a crucial vote. “The compromisers go about the street like mourners.” Any new constitutional amendment required approval of two-thirds of the House and Senate, and it seemed highly unlikely that enough Northern Republicans would support a compromise package to send it on to the states.
In the end, Congress failed fully to heed Lincoln’s admonitions. Despite the warnings and clear signs that secession could not be averted, legislative leaders kept busy exploring compromises. Seeking refuge in a last-minute proposal advanced by an ad hoc “Peace Convention” that brought to Washington a collection of fossil politicians from many (but not all) the states, the House and Senate offered a token to the Southern states in the form of a proposed new amendment to the Constitution. It merely banned future congressional action to end slavery where it existed. Lincoln would later dutifully send it to the states, so the amendment proposal represented something of a political victory for the president-elect, one he could point to later as proof of his efforts to tolerate reasonable conciliation as long as it did not include the expansion of slavery. Although the amendment had no chance of ratification, it represented a sincere effort to forestall the crisis by codifying Lincoln’s oft-repeated vow not to interfere with slavery where it already existed.
While the debates continued into January, Lincoln took up his pen to write a deeply felt private manifesto of principle that he shared with absolutely no one. It confirms Lincoln’s steadfast determination to preserve the permanence of the Union as the basis for extending the promise of economic opportunity. He had thought much about this question during the secession crisis, pondering concepts that went well beyond the planks of the Republican platform he so often cited. The result was an appeal not just to reason but also to emotion, a heartfelt justification for resisting any compromise that reneged on the original promise of the American Dream.
Lincoln began his statement by referring to the nation’s outstanding economic growth since its founding: “Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of ‘Liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.” Lincoln was determined to sustain the survival of a government that “clears the path for all” to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Northern economic system.
Lincoln’s private musings, political statements, and political maneuvering make it clear that the incoming chief magistrate remained morally and politically committed to the democratic middle-class society of the Northern states. He was viscerally opposed to the aristocratic alternative in the Southern states and thus rejected the rationale for the political compromises advanced between the sections during the decade preceding the Civil War. Lincoln was determined that the new states to be admitted to the Union would have a political, social, and economic structure consistent with that of the Northern states rather than the Southern states. It was this determination that formed the basis for his willingness to engage in the Civil War. It was this determination that poet Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorated when he said in his eulogy to Abraham Lincoln in 1865: “This middle-class country had got a middle-class President, at last.”
This determination would also serve Lincoln well as he faced an unprecedented challenge on the eve of his inauguration. Lincoln had spent the months between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861 ensuring that his supporters would block congressional efforts at compromise. Throughout the secession winter, Lincoln had remained steadfast in his commitment to prevent any extension of slavery. The states of the Lower South were equally uncompromising. When Lincoln boarded the train that would take him out of Springfield toward Washington on February 11, 1861, one crisis had passed, while another loomed even larger. Virtually the entire Deep South—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union. While Lincoln’s election had itself been the trigger, his silence added to the determination of Southern leaders to protect their way of life at all costs. Even before Lincoln departed for his inauguration, they had formed a separate government and chosen its president: former US senator from Mississippi Jefferson Davis.
As he headed east, Lincoln began to accept the idea that armed conflict might be required to protect political democracy, economic opportunity, and what he perceived as the national destiny. Southern secession based on what Lincoln believed to be an unjust defense of human slavery and the right to continue it forever was threatening the existing national order, majority rule, and the sanctity of the law.
Still only president-elect, with no formal power to enforce national authority but on the move at last, Lincoln now began responding to the secession crisis in the way he knew best: through oratory. Compelled for the first time since 1860 to speak in public as his journey took him eastward, and then southward toward Washington, with more than a hundred scheduled stops along the way, secession was uppermost on his mind, but he pointedly refrained from acknowledging it directly. Instead, he insisted on “adherence to the Union and the Constitution.” Lincoln used the occasions not to pronounce new policy (this must be withheld, by custom, until his Inaugural Address), but to employ humor, assurance, and a purposefully benign confidence in the future.
Lincoln knew the challenge of the “seceding” states was insurmountable as long as he refused conciliation that accepted the expansion of slavery. In a new kind of speech for him—short and almost elegiac, the harbinger of his future rhetorical style—he told his Springfield neighbors before boarding the train that he had “a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington,” an astounding claim in an age in which no living politician dared compare himself to the pater patriae. Going a step further, Lincoln now called not only on the loyal citizens of the country but on God to sustain him. “Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good,” he said at his parting, “let us confidently hope all will yet be well.”
Lincoln never approached this level of sublimity during his subsequent preinaugural comments, nor did he ever use his many speaking opportunities to hammer away at specific policy demands. But in several speeches, he made manifest his ongoing, unbreakable commitment to the rule of law and majority rule as the essential features of American democracy.
Perhaps the most impressive of Lincoln’s preinaugural speeches came when he appeared before the New Jersey state legislature on February 21. Here he harked back nostalgically to the American past, once again identifying himself with the enlightened “fathers” who had struggled to unite the disparate colonies into a cohesive country four score years earlier:
[A]way back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, “Weems’ Life of Washington.” I remember all the accounts there given of the battle fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New-Jersey. The crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.
Against this backdrop, Lincoln had taken his pen to do what he did better than any politician of his day: express himself convincingly in a public speech. There is no doubt that Lincoln drafted his Inaugural Address—all of it—alone. Lincoln planned to use this message to reintroduce himself by reminding the public that he remained “bound by duty, as well as by inclination,” to the principles of the Republican platform, put forth at the convention in Chicago; by opposition to the spread of slavery; and by a commitment to a government that would “clear the path for all.”
Lincoln had intended to begin his Inaugural Address with an oblique but unmistakable reiteration of the Republican Party plank that specifically forbade the extension of slavery: “Having been so elected upon the Chicago Platform, and while I would repeat nothing in it, of aspersion or epithet or question of motive against any man or party, I hold myself bound by duty, as well as impelled by inclination to follow, within the executive sphere, the principles therein declared. By no other course could I meet the reasonable expectations of the country.”
But after consulting in Washington with the compromise-minded Seward, he deleted this paragraph entirely. Instead, Lincoln went further than he had ever gone to attempt to placate his slaveholding critics. As president he would continue to enforce the much-hated Fugitive Slave Act (an announcement abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass greeted with alarm and disgust). He remained committed against interfering with slavery where it existed. He would not even force Republican federal appointees on overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies. But he would not tolerate the dissolution of the Union.
And he would not sugar-coat—one of his favorite phrases—his unyielding opposition to the spread of slavery, even if he found a less threatening way of expressing it. Redeploying a sentiment he had recently shared in a letter to his old Whig congressional colleague from Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens—now the vice president of the new Confederate States of America—Lincoln insisted: “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. . . . Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better, or equal hope, in the world?”
Lincoln opted for a tried-and-true lawyer’s brief against secession. Regardless of the “disruption” of secession, Lincoln insisted, both universal law and the Constitution must be regarded as “perpetual.” It was unthinkable that some of the states could destroy a Union that all of the states had created. And since “no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union,” Lincoln argued, “I therefore consider that the Union is unbroken; and, to the extent of my ability, I shall take care that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.” Plainly spoken, this meant that as president, he would use all the power at his disposal to ensure that federal military presence in the South would be maintained, import duties would be collected, the mail would be delivered, and where necessary, federal property would be not only held but reclaimed.
Lincoln presented a direct defense of his unwillingness to compromise on slavery expansion—“to shift the ground upon which I had been elected”—arguing that such a “surrender would not be merely the ruin of a man, or a party; but, as a precedent, would be the ruin of government itself.”
On March 4, 1861, Lincoln delivered his Inaugural Address before a vast crowd from the portico of the Capitol. “Fellow citizens of the United States!” he began. He gave pronounced emphasis to the word united to an eruption of “loud cheers.” Lincoln was unyielding. “Physically speaking,” he declared in a loud voice that was said to reach the outer fringes of the vast crowd, “we cannot separate.” The Union was older than the Constitution: it was “perpetual” and could not be dissolved. In any case, “the laws of the Union” would be “faithfully executed in all the states.” And he left little doubt that slaves would never inhabit America’s new territories.
Lincoln intended a stern warning against disunion, asserting that war would be the South’s fault, not his. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. . . . You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it. You can forbear the assault upon it; I can not shrink from the defense of it. With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’”
At the urging of Seward and others invited to vet the speech in advance, Lincoln had agreed to give the appearance of moderation. At Seward’s suggestion, Lincoln modified the wording of the challenge—but only slightly. He took out the provocative antiphony “unless you first assail it” after “The government will not assail you,” but he retained the most provocative phrase: “You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” While retaining the charge that Southern intransigence could be blamed for the onset of war, he added a new concluding paragraph that ended with a beautifully crafted plea he likely knew would be expressed in vain: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
And then a visibly trembling Chief Justice Roger Taney—the man who had done more than anyone living to demean the worth of the black man through the Dred Scott decision—administered to Lincoln the oath of office. As the new president swore on the Bible to uphold the Constitution, the roar of a canon salute erupted from the nearby plaza. The volley, far more than Lincoln’s final, eloquent attempt to soothe the enemies of freedom, proved a portent of things to come.
Lincoln was hardly surprised when South Carolina fired on the Federal troops in Fort Sumter six weeks later. He all but invited the aggression by openly communicating his determination to resupply, though not to rearm, the garrison. What is not fully recognized is the power of Lincoln’s immediate reaction to the firing, in deeds as well as words. The new, untested commander in chief responded within hours, suspending habeas corpus privileges in Maryland so troops could pass through the slaveholding state en route to the defense of Washington, ordering a naval blockade of Southern ports, and calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to “maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union.” Southern reaction followed quickly: four more states seceded from the Union: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
Lincoln made no effort to win immediate congressional approval—much less appropriations—to pay for his initiatives. The public reason seemed simple enough: Congress was out of session and out of town. Enemies of the administration predictably bristled at its exercise of executive power in the wake of Fort Sumter. The New Orleans Daily Picayune denounced Lincoln as a “military dictator . . . grasping at the power of a despot.” And the hostile New York Evening Day-Book likened his threat to “save the Union” with “the bayonet” as no less inhumane than French emperor Louis Napoleon’s repressive actions against his own people.
The new president might have avoided charges of despotism simply by calling Congress back to Washington immediately. Railroad and steamboat technology had made the capital far more accessible than it had been in the days when congressional sessions were preceded by weeks of travel. Instead, Lincoln gambled that once he had ordered resources into the fray, none would be recalled, not even by a Congress populated by dubious Northern and border-state Democrats.
Lincoln largely avoided a negative reaction from Congress and the harsh judgment of history by again deploying the most effective weapon in his personal arsenal: words. For at least two weeks in June, during which time he saw few visitors so he could focus on writing his formal appeal for support from Congress, he crafted a lengthy, deceptively simple, yet ingenious message for the Special Session. His final text combined lawyerly logic, populist language, and evangelical zeal to accomplish his daunting but essential goals.
Lincoln argued that secession was plainly illegal and unacceptable and, moreover, a sophistry: treason masquerading as states’ rights. Americans had chosen their president, and even those who had voted for others had the obligation to unite around the new government. In turn, the government would fight to “maintain its own existence.”
Using the stirring language that we associate with his best speeches, Lincoln presented a compelling case for suppressing the rebellion. In one particularly sublime passage, he foresaw the approaching war as presenting “to the whole family of man, the question, whether . . . a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” The war would be a fight to sustain the one country in the world that was the model of democracy for the future. In one of the strongest statements of American exceptionalism ever made, Lincoln said: “This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
Lincoln’s political and economic philosophy guided his response to the Southern secession movement. He refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of secession because to do so would accept the principle that the unique American middle-class nation, “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” could be destroyed by a willful aristocratic minority of slaveholders.
Here we find the basis for Lincoln’s refusal to accept any further extension of the Southern economic system by limiting it to the existing Southern states. Now he was willing to commit American lives to limit its expansion, to put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Lincoln was not an abolitionist advocating the immediate end to the institution. What he was determined to maintain and spread was the Northern political, social, and economic system that ensured that all men “should have an equal chance,” and that meant arresting the spread of slavery in the hope of placing it in the course of ultimate extinction.
Lincoln believed that the founders of American society had defined its essence in the famous words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Lincoln was at one and the same time an economic realist, a pragmatic politician, and a moral philosopher committed to the rule of law. As early as the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln had a clearly defined position on slavery that he defended on all three levels. As to the morality of slavery, he held that the institution was evil and that a nation dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” could not permanently continue “half slave and half free.” As to economic realism, he understood that a nation dedicated to building a middle-class society could not permanently harbor a substantial slave-based economy. As to pragmatic politics, he said that while the Constitution barred the president and Congress from taking immediate action to abolish slavery in the existing Southern states, there was no barrier to banning the extension of slavery to the western territories.
With the clarity of distance, England’s great philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1862 in Contest in America, “The day when slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its doom. The slave-owners know this, and it is the cause of their fury.” What animated Mill and the majority of nonaristocrats in Britain was Lincoln’s concept that preserving the Union was essential to prove that a nation based on democracy, equality, and opportunity could protect itself from dissolution.
Lincoln believed his approach was not only moral, legal, and practical but also consistent with his personal commitment to sustain and implement the principles of American exceptionalism enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. He was determined that the one nation in the world founded on the principle that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would endure in perpetuity. He was willing to take any and all actions to preserve the Union—to ensure that the American experiment in an enduring middle-class economy and society would not fail. The America of the future, he believed, should be based on equality and opportunity, just as it already existed for citizens of the Northern states. In essence, this is why Lincoln was willing to fight a war to “save the Union”—to establish once and for all that America would continue to be a model of middle-class democracy.
Abraham Lincoln was willing to raise his sword in 1861 because he believed that it was worth fighting a “civil war” to establish once and for all that the United States of America would continue to serve as the model of democracy for the future—that this just and generous nation of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. For Lincoln, this was a commitment to sustain the American Dream of economic opportunity for future generations.