Circa1865

Republican opposition to compromise efforts brought forth by Democrats thwarted attempts to truly “save the Union.” Ohio Democrats Samuel S. Cox and John A. Crittenden formed a committee in late December 1860 to craft compromises more palatable to Lincoln and his Republican cohorts. By February 4, 1861, Republican party intransigence triumphed over peace as the Crittenden Compromise emitted a dying gasp. It was then clear which party was “disloyal” to the Union and Constitution, and who was to blame for bringing on a war destined to kill a million Americans.

Lincoln Versus “20 Millions of Secesh”

“If what the abolition disunionists say be true [that] no power on earth can prevent its success, and let us see why. They declare that all who vote the Democratic ticket are disloyal to our Government – “sympathizers” with the rebellion, etc. If this be true, let us see how strong the rebels are. The vote of 1860 developed about seven inhabitants to every voter in the land.

Now, there are in the loyal States the following numbers that vote the Democratic ticket, which will not probably vary 5,000 either way – near enough to meet the argument: 1,685,000.

Here, then, right in the loyal States, are one million, six hundred and eighty-five thousand votes that “sympathize with the rebellion,” according to Abolition say-so. Multiply this by seven, and you have 11,795,000 persons here at the North who are in “open sympathy with the rebels.”

Add this vast number to the 10,000,000 in the rebel States, and its gives 21,795,000 “traitors,” which, subtracted from the 30,000,000 of the entire white population of the whole Union, and it leaves only 8,205,000 “loyal” people to contend against over twenty millions of “secesh.”

This argument is not ours. It is only the presentation of the Abolition “argument,” and the bare statement shows the malicious absurdity of the Abolition asservation. Let the Administration once throw out the “copperhead” element, and it will find itself in a woefully decimated dilemma.”

(Miscellaneous Facts and Figures, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XXXVII, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 305-306)

No Union Saved

“The notion that Lincoln “saved the Union” is as naïve as the notion that he “freed the slaves.” The Union he saved was not the one he set out to save. The Civil War destroyed the “balance or powers” between the States and the federal government which he had promised to protect in his 1861 inaugural address.

This was not Lincoln’s intention, but it is the reason many of his champions praise him. James McPherson celebrates Lincoln’s “second American Revolution”; Gary Wills exults that Lincoln “changed America” with the Gettysburg Address, which he admits was a “swindle” (albeit a benign one).

In other words, Lincoln’s war destroyed the original constitutional relation between the States and the federal government. His own defenders say so – in spite of his explicit, clear and consistent professed intent to “preserve” that relation.

The Civil War wasn’t just a victory of North over South; it was a victory for centralized government over the States and federalism. It destroyed the ability of the States to protect themselves against the destruction of their reserved powers.

Must we all be happy about this? Lincoln himself – the real Lincoln, that is, – would have deprecated the unintended results of the war. Though he sometimes resorted to dictatorial methods, he never meant to create a totalitarian state.

It’s tragic that slavery was intertwined with a good cause, and scandalous that those who defend that cause today should be smeared as partisans of slavery. But the verdict of history must not be left to the simple-minded and the demagogic.”

(Slavery, No; Secession, Yes, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s Real News of the Month, March 2001, Volume 8, Number 3, excerpts pg. 9)

Though Lincoln initially acted unilaterally to launch his war against Americans in the South, he did seek absolution when Congress convened in July 1861 – though the threat of arrest and imprisonment became common for those who opposed his will. In his treatment of what he or his minions believed to be “disloyal” practices, Lincoln carried his authority far beyond the normal restraints of civil justice, and in violation of fundamental concepts of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.

Republican Tyranny in Indiana

“Before Abraham Lincoln ordered a national draft, which would cause insurrections throughout the North, the President put into law the involuntary call-up of each State’s militia. Indiana inducted 3,090 men into the national army this way, but this caused a major backlash of violent resistance. More significantly, the Democrats won substantial victories in both houses of the Indiana Assembly in the fall of 1862.

With the loss of Republican power, [Governor] Oliver P. Morton became more emotionally unbalanced. He saw treason everywhere, and expected a revolution at any moment. At the beginning of 1863, Indiana’s Democrats voted for peace negotiations with the Confederacy. Simultaneously, many Republican army officers, appointed by Morton, resigned their commissions over Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the governor’s support of this radical document, which would destroy State sovereignty. Army recruitment stagnated and desertions increased.

[Morton] blamed “organized conspirators” — meaning Democrats. Under his orders, Indiana soldiers threatened Senator Thomas Hendricks and Daniel Voorhees, both leading Democrats. Then these troops destroyed Democratic newspapers in Rockport and Terre Haute.

On January 8, 1863, amidst military failures and malignant partisanship, the Indiana legislature began its bi-annual session. Morton telegraphed Secretary of War [Edwin] Stanton that the legislature intended to recognize the Confederacy, implying that the federal army’s interference was required to arrest the “traitors” in the Assembly, as had been done in Maryland [in April 1861].

The Republican members determined to withdraw from the House . . . thus the legislature came to an end . . . [and] Morton would administer the State all alone. His first problem was to secure the money to rule as a tyrant for the next two years [and] with the President’s approval collected $90,000 “for ammunition for the State arsenal.” The Republican Indiana State Journal triumphantly announced that this money would really be used to carry on the functions of government.

Governor Morton quickly exhausted these funds. Once again he met with . . . Lincoln . . . An appropriation of 2.3 million dollars had need made by Congress in July 1862, to be expended by the President “to loyal citizens in States threatened with rebellion,” and in organizing such citizens for their own protection against domestic insurrection.

When Stanton placed [Lincoln’s] order in Morton’s hands, both men appreciated the great risk they were incurring. “If the cause fails, we shall both be covered in prosecutions,” Morton said. Stanton replied, “if the cause fails, I do not wish to live.”

(Northern Opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s War, D. Jonathan White, editor, Abbeville Institute Press, 2014, excerpts pp. 217-221)

Lincoln the Tragic Hero

“[Lincoln’s] favorite play was Macbeth. He had read it often, he wrote to the actor James Hackett, “perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader . . . I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.” He had seen Booth in that role too.

Lincoln’s fascination with this play is itself interesting. He knew that much of the country saw him as a Macbeth – a tyrant, a usurper, a murderer, and his conscience may have promoted him to ask whether he could reasonably be seen in that light. He had expected a quick end to the “rebellion,” but the war had dragged on for years, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.

Many Northerners clamored for a peace settlement. If the war was not justified, Lincoln had much to answer for, infinitely more than he could have imagined at the beginning.

Apart from the scale of violence against the South, including its civilian population and their property, Lincoln aroused angry opposition in the North. “Saving the Union” had required him to transgress against the Constitution and civil liberties; he acted as a dictator, assuming both legislative and executive powers.

An Illinois newspaper accused him of “seeking to inaugurate a reign of terror in the loyal States by military arrests . . . of citizens without a trial, to browbeat all opposition by villainous and false charges of disloyalty against whole classes of patriotic citizens, to destroy all constitutional guarantees of free speech, a free press, and the writ of habeas corpus.”

His biographer David Donald notes: “Editors feared that they might be locked up in Fort Lafayette or in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington if they voiced their criticisms too freely, and even writers of private letters began to guard their language.”

As the ghastly war continued inconclusively, Lincoln must have pondered Macbeth’s words:

“I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far, that should I wade no more

Returning were as tedious as go o’er”

In scale of character, in eloquence, and in impact on his country, Lincoln had the dimensions of a Shakespearean tragic hero. Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that tragic action must have “magnitude”; and Lincoln’s action certainly had that quality. He also displayed the tragic flaw of rash judgment; despite his deliberation, he had ignored the advice of his cabinet by launching war over Fort Sumter, failing to foresee the madly disproportionate violence that would ensue from a legalistic dispute over secession.

The tragic hero is neither saint, villain, nor passive victim: he is the cause of his own and his society’s ruin, in spite of his own intention. As Aristotle says, the ruin of a purely innocent man is not tragic, it is injustice. That of a purely evil man is not tragedy, but justice.

Lincoln was driven to meditate on the events he had set in motion. By the fall of 1862 he was reflecting: “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” In 1864 he wrote: “I claim not to have controlled events, but plainly confess that events have controlled me.”

Was he trying to disclaim responsibility? He always insisted that the South “began” the war, which, even if true, would not necessarily mean that the South bore the guilt for what the war became. Perhaps sensing this, he referred the problem to Providence, which had allowed the war to continue and spread.”

(America’s Tragic Hero, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s Real News of the Month, March 2001, Volume 8, Number 3, excerpts pp. 4-5)

Lincoln soon realized that his war to save the union was an impossible dream and that the only way to victory was invasion and capturing slaves to deny the agricultural South of its needed labor force. Additionally, he allowed State governors to recruit homeless blacks in areas overrun by Northern troops and credit them to State quotas – thus relieving white Northerners of having to fight in an unpopular abolition war. William Milo Stone (1827-1893) below was a native of New York who moved to Iowa and served as captain in a State regiment. He was captured at Shiloh and paroled by President Jefferson Davis to help facilitate a prisoner exchange.

Another Myth of Saving the Union

“Col. [William M.] Stone, the Governor of Iowa, in canvassing that State in the summer of 1863, in his speech in Keokuk on the 3rd of August, said:

“Fellow citizens – I was not formerly an abolitionist, nor did I formerly suppose I would ever become one, but I am now [and] have been for the last nine months, an unadulterated abolitionist. Fellow citizens – the opposition charge that this is an abolition war. Well, I admit that this is an abolition war. It was not such at the start, but the administration has discovered that they could not subdue the South else than making it an abolition war, and they have done so . . . and it will be continued as an abolition war as long as there is one slave at the South to be made free. Never, never can there be peace made, nor is peace desirable, until the last link of slavery is abolished . . .”

Morrow B. Lowry, an abolition State Senator in Pennsylvania, at a [Union] League meeting in Philadelphia in 1863 said:

“This war is for the African and his race . . . When this war was no bigger than my hand, I said that if any Negro would bring me his disloyal master’s head, I would give him one hundred and sixty acres of his master’s plantation (Laughter and applause).

[A] Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune said through that sheet . . . “For years the disunionists of the North have manifested the boldness of Cromwell, the assiduity of beavers, the cunning of foxes, [and] the malignancy of Iscariots. Their money has been poured out free as water, in publishing and circulating Abolition tracts, speeches, inflammatory and incendiary appeals – not to national honor and pride, but to the passions and hot bed sentimentalities that fester in the breasts of malcontents.

In 1852, a series of pamphlets were issued for Massachusetts, entitled, “The United States Constitution and its Pro-Slavery Compromises.” From the “Third edition, enlarged,” of this treasonable publication we take the following:

“If, then, the people and the courts of a country are to be allowed to determine what their own laws mean, it follows that at this time, and for the last half-century, the Constitution of the United States has been, and still is a pro-slavery instrument, and that anyone who swears to support it, swears to do pro-slavery acts, [thus] violates his duty both as a man and as an Abolitionist.”

(Progress of the Northern Conspiracy (Continued)., The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XII, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 59-60)

The war of 1861-1865 created a new union of the North and a forced South, with the mercantile former dictating terms, policies and allegiance to the latter as an economic colony. The Republican party oligarchy then ushered in the Gilded Age of political bosses, bought politicians and a vote-rigging press. The Founders’ Union of equal and sovereign States was but a distant memory.

The South Forced to Obey the New Union

“Remember money breeds money, which in turn brings more,” said Benjamin Franklin. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” wrote Thomas Jefferson.

If these two attitudes may be considered the respective mainstream philosophies of the North and the South, then it becomes obvious there can be no way to blend the two into a single national spirit ant more than Cain could live by Abel’s side. “We the people,” as famous a phrase as it may be, is a dupery.

Understanding it as such seems to me the key to the history of the United States both before and after 1865.

When the American colonists started debating their merging into a single political unit, the obviously central issue was that of States’ rights – i.e., what sovereignty would be left to the States once a federal power, endowed with a sovereignty of its own, had been established.

Since none of their representatives appears to have called for the States to forfeit their sovereignty entirely, it seems obvious that the new union, it tighter than the one obtaining under the Articles of Confederation, was nevertheless to be that of a federation in which the federal power was rigorously construed, strictly limited, and States’ rights sternly asserted. Such a view was never unanimous.

The Federalists, men of the North already, opposed it immediately, (hence the Tenth Amendment) and never relented until they overcame at the price of open war. In between they had constantly waged one by other means, kindling the fires of conflict with self-interested issues (internal improvements, tariffs, a central bank), the last of which was the rather contrived issue of slavery. (The South ended up fighting as one man while the only a fourth of Southern households actually owned slaves . . . As for the Yankees, once victorious they abandoned the freed slaves to a rather dubious fate.)

So the fateful war was fought, and union proclaimed to have been restored.

A scurrilous claim: It is symbolic that the South could be reinstated as a member of the Union only after a team of Northern generals had razed it. The new union, instead of resulting from the regulated intercourse of political bodies, was forced down the throats of half of them, and the unity prevailing between Americans became that which obtains between colonizers and colonized.

Lincoln showed himself to be a faithful disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s method for regenerating France: “to prevent the union from being an empty word, it must be disposed that whoever is rebellious to the people’s will must be forced to obey it, which only means forcing him to be free. From such deviousness was born a new type of nation, indeed.”

(1865: The True American Revolution, Claude Polin, Chronicles, April 2015, excerpts pg. 14; www.chroniclesmagazine.org)

Lincoln’s War Against the People

“Did not Jefferson Davis have a better grasp of the Revolution when he said that Southerners were simply imitating their forebears, and that the Confederacy “illustrates the American idea that government rests upon the consent of the governed?

The desire for [centralized government] “consolidation on the part of some Americans, perhaps not a majority, had reached a point that the observations made by [Alexis de] Tocqueville and [James Fennimore] Cooper were no longer relevant. Lincoln could launch war against a very substantial part of the people. To this end he was willing to kill 300,000 Southern soldiers and civilians and even more of his native and immigrant proletariat.

The crackpot realist General Sherman said it well: We are in the enemy’s country, and I act accordingly . . . The war will soon assume a turn to extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.” Clearly, the government, the machinery controlled by the politicians in Washington, who had been chosen by two-fifths of the people, now had supremacy over the life and institutions of Americans.”

(Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions, Clyde N. Wilson, Chronicles, April 2015, excerpts pg. 18) www.chroniclesmagazine.org

After an abolitionist mob disrupted an 1854 Chicago speech by Stephen A. Douglas, the New York Herald wrote: “Here we find the members of [the Republican] party which has inscribed on its banners the motto “free speech – free labor – free men,” uniting to put down the exercise of a right guaranteed by the Constitution, and adopted as one of their own cardinal points of faith.” The Illinois State Register had already noted that the mob disruptions at Douglas speaking events as “characteristic of abolitionism,” and “It is but natural that men who deny who deny the people of the Territories privileges which they claim for themselves, should deny, by mob action, the privilege of free speech to those who differ with them in matters of public policy.” As Douglas prophesied below, the Republicans did get rid of the Southern States and held a near permanent majority until Woodrow Wilson, with only Grover Cleveland interrupting their political dominance.

Evidence of the Northern Conspiracy

“Stephen A. Douglas understood the secret designs of the leading Republicans, as well as any other living man, and he thus gave utterance to his honest convictions, in the United States Senate, December 25, 1860: “The fact can no longer be disguised that many of the Republican Senators desire war and disunion, under pretext of saving the Union.

They wish to get rid of the Southern States, in order to have a majority in the Senate to confirm the appointments, and many of them think they can hold a permanent Republican majority in the Northern States, but not in the whole Union; for partisan reasons they are anxious to dissolve the Union, if it can be done without holding them responsible before the people.”

(Progress and Evidence of the Northern Conspiracy, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XI, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, pg. 53)

With the deaths of Calhoun, Clay and Webster, it is said that the spirit of the Union died as well. For the rising class of Northern abolitionists, the legalities did not matter. Those like Theodore Parker linked antislavery actions with the “law of God,” and declared the Constitution not morally binding. Outside the small numbers of fanatical abolitionists were the many, North and South, who thought of African slavery – in truth a relic of the British colonial labor system – as an institution that would collapse with changes in time. The disunionist abolitionists, together with the new and purely sectional Republican party, lost no time in fomenting war with the American South and ending the Founders’ republic.

High in the Confidence and Employ of the Party in Power

“Let us enquire about the whereabouts and status of some of the leading Abolitionists.” Where is Senator [Benjamin] Wade, who declared there was no Union in the United States Senate? As one of the President’s constitutional advisers.

Where is Senator [John P.] Hale, who in 1850 introduced resolutions for a dissolution of the Union in the United States Senate? As one of the President’s constitutional advisers.

Where is Senator Charles Sumner who said at Worcester, the 7th of September 1854, that it was the duty of the people to resist a law even after it was decided constitutional by the highest Federal Court? [He] is in the United States Senate, re-elected as one of the President’s constitutional advisers.

Where is Mr. [William] Seward, the author if the “Irrepressible Conflict,” and who voted to receive a petition for Dissolution of the Union, in 1848? In Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet.

Where to-day do you find the man who declared that any people had the right to revolutionize their Government and establish another – who pronounced the Mexican war a wicked war, and declared that this Union could “not exist half free and half slave,” and bestows the blessings of his power on those who have for over a quarter of a century denounced the Government of our fathers? Acting as President of the United States.

Where to-day is Thaddeus Stevens, who scouted the idea that he obeyed his oath to support the Constitution, in voting to dismember Virginia? Chairman of the most important committee in the American House of Representatives.

Where to-day is [Nathaniel] P. Banks, whose easy loyalty would “let the Union slide?” A Major-General in the loyal army.

Where have you found Anson Burlingame, the Abolitionist who declared for a new Constitution, a new Bible – a new God – in short, a new deal all around? Appointed by Mr. Lincoln to drink tea and eat ornamental mince pies in the Celestial Empire.

Where do you find Joshua R. Giddings, who in 1848 introduced a petition for the dissolution of the Union? As Mr. Lincoln’s Consul to the Canadas.

Where do you find Hannibal Hamlin, the Vice President of the United States? Leaving the presiding officer’s chair to welcome Wendell Phillips upon the floor of the Senate, a courtesy rarely accorded to any civilian.

Where to-day do you find Horace Greeley, the man who stigmatized the American flag as a “flaunting lie” and cried “tear it down?” As the editor of THE leading Republican paper in America.

Where is now Wm. Lloyd Garrison, who pronounced the Constitution “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell?” You will find him feted by Republicans, and addressing the “loyal Union” meetings.

Thus we might go on ad infinitum, and show that each and every one we have quoted “disloyal,” “disunion,” and “treasonable” sentiments, are now high in the confidence and employ of the party in power.”

(The Power and Influence of Abolitionists, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XIX, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 106-107)

The long-standing myth of Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg in November 1863 is first questioned by his status as a secondary speaker to the eminent Edward Everett, and that the event promoters did not desire Lincoln to upstage him. Additionally, those seated behind Lincoln at stated afterward that the published speech were not Lincoln’s words, and that he was a “wet blanket,” and newspaper accounts criticized his ill-chosen words. Those who heard Lincoln’s speech said later published accounts were “revised” by someone.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Taking Propaganda as Self-Evident Truth

“Is it time to pull US troops out of Iraq? Back in 1862 you could have been arrested for saying US troops should be pulled out of the Confederacy, because Abraham Lincoln insisted that they were fighting for “a new birth of freedom.”

Lincoln is the subject of yet another new book – worshipful, naturally – called “The Gettysburg Gospel,” by Gabor Boritt (Simon & Schuster).

This is the second recent book about the Gettysburg Address, the previous one being Gary Will’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lincoln at Gettysburg.” Both books treat Lincoln as a national savior, overlooking his fallacious appeal to the Declaration of Independence.

According to Lincoln, the Declaration “brought forth a new nation.” That is plainly not true. The Declaration says nothing about a “nation”; it speaks only of 13 “Free and Independent States.” It is, in fact, a declaration of secession! The 13 States are serving notice that they are pulling out of the British Empire.

Lincoln even contradicts himself. In his first inaugural, denying the right of any State to leave the Union, he had said that “the Union is older than the States.” That is like saying that a marriage is older than the spouses. Apart from being nonsense, it implies that the “new nation” didn’t begin with the Declaration after all.

But Lincoln worshipers, bewitched by his eloquence, rarely notice these things. They overlook not only his lapses in logic but also his gross violations of the Constitution: usurpations of power, suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrary arrests of dissenters and even elected officials, crackdown on the free press, the Emancipation Proclamation (Lincoln himself doubted his authority to issue it but finally yielded to Republican pressure), and so on.

Some of the worshippers, such as Wills and Harry V. Jaffa, strain to defend these measures, but Boritt seems not to even notice them. He sounds like Tony Snow explaining Bush’s Iraq policies: the king can do no wrong. Lincoln always praised Thomas Jefferson, but under his administration Jefferson, the ur-secessionist, would have found himself in the clink.

Unless the North conquered the South, Lincoln said at Gettysburg, self-government itself would “perish from the earth.” Balderdash, of course. Yet most Americans still take Lincoln’s war propaganda as self-evident truth. He ranks among history’s most durably successful humbugs.”

(How Lincoln Gave Us Kwanzaa, Joe Sobran, Sobran’s Real News of the Month, January 2007, Volume 14, Number 1, excerpts pg. 9)