Money quote:
The War of 1861 settled the issue of secession through brute force that cost 600,000 American lives. We Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech: “It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.
I started to do a post on this topic the other day, but I was tired and I ultimately decided against posting what I had, as some of my metaphors were unhelpful.
Here are a few facts, though.
1) There were four slave-holding States which fought on the Union side, and Lincoln made no concerted effort to change this. In fact, they were specifically EXEMPTED from the Emancipation Proclamation.
Further, that Proclamation–which he knew would infuriate the South and make them fight harder–was delayed as long as possible, and only issued to prevent Britain (and possibly France) from supporting the South, whose cotton was getting harder to obtain through the blockades.
2) Lincoln, in my understanding, was on record often as saying that he was quite willing to tolerate the continuation of slavery in the South as a condition of preserving the Union. As I recall the matter–and my memory is good, but far from perfect–it was the Radical Republicans who were elected around Lincoln who were feared, and whose ascension ultimately led to their decision to secede.
Underlying all this, of course, was the many decades old debate, at that time, about who should decide if newly admitted States would allow slavery, or not. Lincoln took the position that no new slave-holding States should be admitted and that this was the purview of the Federal Government; in the famous debates, Stephen Douglas took the position that all moral questions–including that of slavery–ought to be decided by the States.
It was the de facto political victory of Lincoln and his Republicans which caused the South to despair that over time their ability to defend themselves in Congress would evaporate, and everybody was already beyond pissed anyway. That’s what pushed the South Carolinians into their assault on Fort Sumter. Even then Lincoln did not need to respond with a national call-up of troops, but he did. On April 15, 1861,. if memory serves, which I count as the ACTUAL beginning of the Civil War. Until then, other options were possible.
All of the bloodshed and tears and pain and hunger, the rapes, beatings, and premature deaths, inflicted on soldiers and civilians and slaves alike, provoke little or no reaction today. But the first modern war was fought to suppress the rights of States which JOINED a Union, to LEAVE that Union the same way.
Of course one can echo Samuel Johnson in asking “Why is it the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves”, but one cannot easily miss the fact that that war was fought mainly for the right of secession, and that what was invoked on both sides was State’s Rights, with one side declaring them, and the other side calling them traitors.
Nowadays, it is easy and fashionable to project our present hypersensitive selves back to that era, and applaud Chamberlain (I have stood in that spot, and it provoked powerful emotions) for his spirited defense, which we assume was in defense of Kunta Kinte and the Underground Railroad. But this is mistaken. You cannot use todays mores to assume anything about those of yesteryear.
Here are his words:
I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our country from desolation, and defend the national existence against treachery.
Treason. Traitor. These were the words the men of the North used against the rebels of the South. They did not spite them their slave-holding. They spited them their LEAVING.
When you really get that, and really get that slavery was never really an economically efficient system, and that without a Civil War would over some period of time–perhaps 50-75 years–have given way under social, political, and economic pressures to a gradual and authentic increase in the liberty and status of black people, one must conclude–this is my opinion–that the Civil War was not worth it.
And as I say often to those who say “but the slaves were FREED”: no, no they weren’t. They were converted from actual property to serfs confined to small patches of dirt they worked on without rest for a pittance, all while under constant danger of attack from Southerners infuriated by the devastation of the war.
Removing the Confederate Flag will not bring the absent fathers of young black kids home. It will not win their mothers high school educations, or the will to work hard where it has been indoctrinated out of them. It will not make the scraps from the table that the Democrats throw from time to time equal to a dignified or comfortable existence. It will not win them self respect, or the respect of others. Some people want to praise them no matter what they do. Some want to condemn them no matter what they do.
The rest of us wait, and watch.