Was Lincoln wrong?

That is to say, was Lincoln incorrect to believe that a right to rebellion did not exist within a representative government, and that any such open rebellion must be suppressed, even at massive human cost?

but he was right to fight against slavery.

Lincoln never opposed a Constitutional Amendment that would have barred Congress in interfering with states' right to slavery and wanted ship Africans to remote places since he believed that they couldn't get along with the more "superior race".

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2715797?seq=1
http://www.geocities.com/ghostamendment/

He was right within this context: The rebellion by the South was based on what they perceived to be their "right" to own black human beings as slaves, in order to further and to maintain their economic interests.

Lincoln was correct in disabusing them of that notion.



horseshoecrab

after the civil war was over?

Lee's surrender. Johnson and congress would be responsible for the aftermath. I believe that was the reason Johnson was impeached. They were at odds, how to bring the Southern states back into the union.

Slavery was evil and wrong and yet it was legal.

There was nothing in the Constitution preventing a state from seceding.

Lincoln shouldn't have sent reinforcements to Fort Sumter.

The South should never have fired on Fort Sumter or taken any other armed action.

The sole positive result of the Civil War was the abolishment of slavery, but for a hundred years afterward there was no equality.

Approximately 600,000 Americans both North and South died in that war with a total population of less than 40 million and they were using 19th century weapons. The emotional scars from that devastation still exist and the hate filled demagogues on both sides are only too happy in pouring salt in that wound for their own purposes.

This sentence is easy for me to say because my ancestors weren't slaves however I believe if cooler heads had prevailed the South would have eventually evolved out of slavery just as more industrialized states in the North did prior to that. I believe cultural evolution is not exclusive to any particular region of the United States, some areas just take longer than others, usually the more sparsely populated ones are slower in adapting to change.

Having said all of the above, I'm ecstatic that slavery isn't legal today, that we're still one nation and that much progress has been made in regards to racial relations.

It wasn't just about bringing the southern states back into the union or ending slavery. Although most of the war was fought in the South, Lincoln also had to defend parts of the North from southern aggression, such as in the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam. The South also had plans to capture Washington D.C. While we might quibble today over what actions Lincoln should have taken, I think that he really had no choice, given all the trials that he faced.

All the first battles in the Civil War were Southern attempts to capture D.C.

I am all for using force to protect oneself from attack.



Maybe if the South hadn't been dicks, slavery would have died out naturally like it did in Brazil.

both of which were Union attempts to capture Richmond. The South "fired first," but because the Federals refused to evacuate (and indeed resupplied) a fort on what was "Confederate territory."

The South had repeatedly offered to compensate the North generously for the forts. At the time of the attack, the North had already deployed an armada to resupply the fort by force, so the conflict had already been written in stone by the North prior to the battle. The South knew that Major Robert Anderson would not surrender the fort without at least some show of force and indeed they had no real intentions of killing anyone. The only death during the actual battle was a Confederate soldier who died as a result of a cannon misfire.

So any notion that the South "started the war" is really playing quite loose with the historical facts. Even if you could believe that, no sane person would start a war that killed well over a million people over a minor skirmish that didn't result in any hostile fire deaths. The North was intent on retaking the South by force from the very beginning.

Firstly, there were many military engagements between 1st Manassas and the Peninsula. That's almost a year between the federal retreat and the first landings in Virginia. Literally hundreds of engagements took place, some of them major, e.g. Shiloh, Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, etc.

In any case the term "battle" is an abstraction meant to convey the coming together of a large body of forces in a somewhat controlled manner so as to engage in military operations against one another. The term "large" in this definition is relative.

If one takes the larger view of a battle, though, the first battles of the Civil War took place even before Sumter, when secessionist forces overwhelmed federally controlled outposts with the specific intent of capturing military stores, often in states like Missouri and Kentucky that never officially voted to secede and certainly had not even in their rump manifestations at the time these actions were engaged. That no major resistance or military response was offered to these actions does not omit them from being "battles" in this larger sense, or more properly militarily offensive actions. In addition, prior to 1st Manassas, secessionist forces were invading federal territory in the West and illegally attempting to wrest support from Indian tribes to support an insurrection against federal control in the area.

Further, the term "Confederate territory" has no legal meaning, which was the point of the whole matter concerning several eastern coastal forts. That was, in fact, the whole problem. In the case of Sumter, the state of South Carolina had ceded ownership of a mostly man-made island on which it was built to the United States collectively. The common myth is that Anderson relocated to Sumter because it was more militarily defensible. This would be true only if one believes a small island that is surrounded by other forts within firing range and a harbor controlled by opposing forces preventing resupply is "militarily defensible." He moved there, in part, because that was more clearly federal land and arguably the least important of the forts in Charleston Harbor. (All of the forts had been built to compliment one another. Sumter plugged a hole, but it was not entirely finished yet.)

Federal property in which the first shots were fired in anger against the Union. Lincoln was 100% correct, sorry.

... and that includes JOINING a 'union' ... then wouldn't that also include seceding from that 'union' OF STATES? After all, if a "democratic process" arrives at such a decision, isn't it "anti-democratic" to thwart it?

:evilgrin:

:spray:

This is the premise on which the country was founded. Arbitrary collections of state governments do not have any right to secede, anymore than Mercury has a right to secede from Ford Motors. States are creations of the Federal Government, subject to Federal sovereignty. The Federal government is not required to disband whenever some collection of clowns comes along and says they are seceding.

And Lincoln did not believe that there was no right to rebellion, he believed that there was no right for the rebels to win.

The Founding Fathers were adamant that there was no right to rebellion within a representative government: rebellion, in their eyes, was only legitimate against a tyranny. It was for that reason that the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays Rebellion were quickly and forcefully subdued. Lincoln held the same view; secession and rebellion against a legitimate government was illegitimate.

Then we'll talk. He goes into this issue in great detail. His arguments are sound. You are entitled to your opinion, but it is just an opinion, not a fact. The people have the ultimate right to decide what is representative and what is tyranny. The founders were all over that place on the issue, and their opinions were subject to change. The argument has never stopped. The Declaration of Independence, which I consider to be the founding document for our republic, was quite clear.

My point, in any case, is that state governments have no such prerogatives, and they never did.

PRECEEDED the Federal union. I suppose one could make the argument that states added since are "creations" of the Federal govenment, but certainly not the original thirteen.

They never existed as independent states, with a few later execeptions (Texas, California), and their status as states is always derivative. The Constitution begins "We the people", not "We the states". That is no accident. The Constitution was instituted to replace the Articles of Confederation precisely in order to make these matters clear.

But the lives were worth ending slavery and implementing the Constitutional Amendments that came in the wake of the Civil War, some of which (like the 14th) are among the most important protections for equality and liberty that we have. That is what most people consider to be the redeeming feature of the Civil War--the thing that made the terrible expense of human life worth it in the end.

If the war had truly been about NOTHING but state power and the issue of rebellion/secession, if slavery and the abolition of it hadn't been an issue, then (1) there wouldn't have been as many deaths, and (2) the South would probably have won its independence without too much of a struggle.

This is why when stupid rednecks who try to claim that the war was solely about "state's rights" start blathering at me, I tell them to STFU. Many of those people (both Northern and Southern) wouldn't have been willing to send their kids off to die horribly without the motivation of either abolishing or maintaining slavery. People are a lot less gung-ho about war and death without a moral imperative for supporting it, and "keeping the union intact" just isn't much of a rallying cry all by itself.

That was clearly only a secondary goal, and was in fact only invoked halfway through the war as a means of solidifying public opinion both at home and abroad.

That is not to say, of course, that slavery was not the principal cause of the civil war, nor to say that Lincoln did not wish to abolish slavery. However, that was not the goal he pursued except as a means towards preserving the Union.

But whatever Lincoln's goal, the only thing that made the Civil War worth it to the People was the abolition of slavery. Lincoln's goals notwithstanding, if he hadn't had the slavery issue to sell the war with, he wouldn't have had the support he needed to wage it successfully. I think that what matters to the People is the most important thing, no matter what our politicians do and say. Without us supporting them, their goals and personal justifications are meaningless.

Without the support of the abolitionists (who represented an enormous wing of his own party), Lincoln would have been unable to sustain the war.

the Union will lose. We don't have a moral imperative for opposing secession this time--if anything, we have resentful, angry people on both sides who'd probably be all-too-glad to see the last of each other. Without that moral motivation, the kind of stalwart support for war and the death and misery involved just isn't going to be there. Oh, I'm sure there will be SOME support--mostly from Southern liberals and Northern conservatives who don't want to get stuck living in a nation founded on the opposing ideology's principles--but enough broad, national support for the kind of death and destruction that always comes of a Civil War? I just don't think we'd have it.

Of course, I also don't think it's actually going to HAPPEN--the South needs federal government money a lot more than the federal government needs the South--but on the rare chance that it does, then I'd say the Union as we know it is probably over.

I agree with your above statement that the abolition of slavery is the only thing that made the suffering and sacrifice of lives worthwhile, even if Lincoln justified it in terms that would warm the hearts only of political philosophers.

As for would an attempt fall out the same way today? Maybe not!? Currently all the noises for secession seem to be coming from the right -- Rick Perry, Sarah Palin's husband, etc. But not very long ago -- during the George W. Bush regime -- there was serious discussion on DU about the chances of a group of Blue states (who incidentally tend to be the "givers" in transfer of money thru the Federal treasury) seceeding. Had that regime continued for another presidential term or two, this movement might have gotten more traction.

Personally, I think a political entity SHOULD have the right to secede, but hopefully through negotiation rather than rebellion or war. It's true that this seldom happens, but there ARE some cases where it's worked, such as in the former Czechoslovakia.

And on occasion, border towns negotiate to be transfered from one state to another, sometimes successfully. The big difference here is that towns aren't considered sovereign, whereas the states are. Hmmm... what would happen if, say, one of our northern tier of states petitioned to become part of Canada? A good premise for a science fiction novel, maybe.... However if we don't get some form of universal health care going, I can even imagine it happening.

The abolition of slavery threatened to undermine the war effort. Prior to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, there was vast concern about and attempt to counteract the perception that abolition would be taken as the war's major aim after its issuance. Lincoln didn't so adamantly maintain that his primary goal was preservation of the Union only to express his opinion of the matter. He did this to reassure the populace that this was, in fact, his primary goal and that the abolition of slavery in the rebellious territories was only enacted as a war measure to deprive the rebellious forces of a valuable resource.

The public at large was not behind the idea of abolition, certainly not as a reason for prosecuting a war. They were, by and large, behind the concept of maintaining the Union.

That said, in the 1860s, this goal of maintaining the Union was in fact presented and accept as a moral cause on a level modern society has trouble understanding clearly. The ghosts of the Founding Fathers loomed closely over this generation. They saw themselves as the benefactors of great and worthy men who had anointed them with the responsibility of preserving a great and noble endeavor. I use these somewhat superfluous words to describe what is essentially a political entity because those contemporary to the Civil War used these words and believed fundamentally in the concepts behind their use. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was no accident of random thought. He invoked the spirit of the Founders and drew on a widely held belief that Union, in and of itself, was something almost holy and worth the sacrifice of so much blood and treasure.

Of course behind the idea of "Union" was something else again, many concepts in fact, but these concepts were largely personal. For some, the war did become a holy crusade against slavery, certainly among the formerly enslaved themselves who took up arms in support of the Union cause. But taken as a whole, based on volumes of letters and diaries and more official correspondence from soldiers, politicians, and those at home, the moral thrust of the war had little to do with the enslaved and very much to do with the preservation of a set of ideas embodied in a political structure known as the United States. Certainly those ideas would one day also invoke a more complete accounting for the moral social causes of the end of slavery and civil rights in general, but as for the war itself, these ideas were focused elsewhere.

That said, where the morality of slavery abolition did help was in recruiting the afore mentioned formerly enslaved and, significantly, in selling the Union cause to Europe, specifically England. Lincoln took a shrewd, and dangerous, political maneuver in setting in motion the end of slavery when he did, but he did it, in part, to invoke that moral cause in the eyes of Europe. The EP did in fact make the war largely about ending slavery, at least in the mind's of Europeans, and thereafter no chance existed of direct, official English or French support or recognition of the Confederacy.

In short, I agree with your basic premise that a moral cause in which the people at large believed was required to justify the war, but not with the specific application of it.

Especially when the massive cost in human lives and resources was fully realized. Lincoln just barely survived reelection and that was with the South not voting at all.

So even though Lincoln was unpopular at the time, history has judged him right. I tend to agree with that assessment, although I do believe Lincoln does deserve some of the blame for the massive civilian death toll at the time. Still it's hard to judge the people of that day by today's standards.

Lincoln is not known to have believed that a "right of rebellion" did not exist within a representative government. He is known to believe that a *legal* right of rebellion did not exist within the representative government of the United States.

This may seem to be a very fine distinction without much import, but it is in fact the crux of the whole debate over Lincoln's actions and his subsequent actions as President for which his constitutional authority to act as he did could be called into question.

The problem with secession in the 1860s was that it was enacted unilaterally, which Lincoln rightly asserted was improper according to the Constitution. Secession was not actually impossible according to this line of reasoning. The mechanism for secession was built into the Constitution via the amendment process and, potentially, articles in the main body. (Since none of this was tried, this is simply theory and actually mostly part of a rhetorical legal argument.) Where the southern states failed was in declaring secession without the acquiescence of the other states. This in turn speaks to Lincoln's conception of "union" and the nature of what representative government actually was. It is a core of the states' rights vs. federal authority argument. The southern states and others who supported secession tried to claim a legal right to secede unilaterally.

Lincoln, then, asserted the fallacy of this legal argument. The actions he initially undertook at the outset of the war were, legally, an attempt at nothing more than to exercise federal authority over collecting customs and protecting the domain of collectively owned property of the United States in the form of several forts along the coast.

And, yes, he was right in doing that.

The response to these attempts to exercise legal authority was met with a violent response in the firing on the Star of the West and then Ft. Sumter. The secessionists had previously engaged in violent acts to capture federally controlled military stores and outposts, with no federal response. Your question, then, becomes one of whether facing such violence with like violence in a continued attempt to assert legal authority was proper. This could be debated on both philosophical and legal grounds or some combination thereof.

For my part I believe Lincoln's actions were carefully measured at the outset but that a combination of delusion poor management of the armed forces in the role of what was essentially a federalized policing agency and increasingly violent responses by those engaged in rebellion worked together to escalate the matter out of any individual's direct control. Lincoln did not, in other words, envision a scenario in which rebellion had to be suppressed at such a "massive human cost." But the whole thing became a self-feeding monster.

It's just a damn shame that he was murdered before he could finish the job. His assassination was one of the darkest moments in our history and one of the biggest game changers. Things would have been much different had he been able to see reconstruction through. Much different indeed.

I'll offer my opinion.

Rebellion in the abstract is morally right (It says so in our Declaration of Independence) but illegal by definition. If it wasn't illegal there could be no nation. In the specific case of the American South, however, it was also morally wrong, because the purpose of the rebellion was to perpetuate slavery. So in that case it was both legally and morally wrong, so I believe that Lincoln was right to supress it.

We the people have a right to rebel against a non-representative government but states have no right to secede. In fact, Lincoln would be right totally independent of the issue of slavery. His job was to uphold the Constitution and preserve the Union. Running a massive country cannot be left to herding cats.