Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
University, Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, and Alison Henry
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION,
A CHRONICLE OF THE EMBATTLED NORTH
Volume 29 In The Chronicles Of America Series
By Nathaniel W. Stephenson
Allen Johnson, Editor
New Haven: Yale University Press Toronto: Glasgow
Brook & Co. London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1918
PREFACE
In spite of a lapse of sixty years, the historian who attempts to
portray the era of Lincoln is still faced with almost impossible demands
and still confronted with arbitrary points of view. It is out of the
question, in a book so brief as this must necessarily be, to meet all
these demands or to alter these points of view. Interests that are
purely local, events that did not with certainty contribute to the final
outcome, gossip, as well as the mere caprice of the scholar--these must
obviously be set aside.
The task imposed upon the volume resolves itself, at bottom, into just
two questions: Why was there a war? Why was the Lincoln Government
successful? With these two questions always in mind I have endeavored,
on the one hand, to select and consolidate the pertinent facts; on the
other, to make clear, even at the cost of explanatory comment, their
relations in the historical sequence of cause and effect. This purpose
has particularly governed the use of biographical matter, in which the
main illustration, of course, is the career of Lincoln. Prominent as it
is here made, the Lincoln matter all bears in the last analysis on one
point--his control of his support. On that the history of the North
hinges. The personal and private Lincoln it is impossible to present
within these pages. The public Lincoln, including the character of his
mind, is here the essential matter.
The bibliography at the close of the volume indicates the more important
books which are at the reader's disposal and which it is unfortunate not
to know.
NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON. Charleston, S. C., March, 1918.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION
INDEX
I. THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC
II. THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION
III. THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY
IV. THE CRISIS
V. SECESSION
VI. WAR
VII. LINCOLN
VIII. THE RULE OF LINCOLN
IX. THE CRUCIAL MATTER
X. THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY
XI. NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR
XII. THE MEXICAN EPISODE
XIII. THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864
XIV. LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHAPTER I
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC
"There is really no Union now between the North and the South.... No two
nations upon earth entertain feelings of more bitter rancor toward each
other than these two nations of the Republic."
This remark, which is attributed to Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio,
provides the key to American politics in the decade following the
Compromise of 1850. To trace this division of the people to its ultimate
source, one would have to go far back into colonial times. There was a
process of natural selection at work, in the intellectual and economic
conditions of the eighteenth century, which inevitably drew together
certain types and generated certain forces. This process manifested
itself in one form in His Majesty's plantations of the North, and in
another in those of the South. As early as the opening of the nineteenth
century, the social tendencies of the two regions were already so far
alienated that they involved differences which would scarcely admit of
reconciliation. It is a truism to say that these differences gradually
were concentrated around fundamentally different conceptions of
labor--of slave labor in the South, of free labor in the North.
Nothing, however, could be more fallacious than the notion that this
growing antagonism was controlled by any deliberate purpose in either
part of the country. It was apparently necessary that this Republic in
its evolution should proceed from confederation to nationality through
an intermediate and apparently reactionary period of sectionalism. In
this stage of American history, slavery was without doubt one of the
prime factors involved, but sectional consciousness, with all its
emotional and psychological implications, was the fundamental impulse of
the stern events which occurred between 1850 and 1865.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the more influential Southerners
had come generally to regard their section of the country as a distinct
social unit. The next step was inevitable. The South began to regard
itself as a separate political unit. It is the distinction of Calhoun
that he showed himself toward the end sufficiently flexible to become
the exponent of this new political impulse. With all his earlier fire
he encouraged the Southerners to withdraw from the so-called national
parties, Whig and Democratic, to establish instead a single Southern
party, and to formulate, by means of popular conventions, a single
concerted policy for the entire South.
At that time such a policy was still regarded, from the Southern point
of view, as a radical idea. In 1851, a battle was fought at the polls
between the two Southern ideas--the old one which upheld separate state
independence, and the new one which virtually acknowledged Southern
nationality. The issue at stake was the acceptance or the rejection of
a compromise which could bring no permanent settlement of fundamental
differences.
Nowhere was the battle more interesting than in South Carolina, for it
brought into clear light that powerful Southern leader who ten years
later was to be the masterspirit of secession--Robert Barnwell Rhett. In
1851 he fought hard to revive the older idea of state independence
and to carry South Carolina as a separate state out of the Union.
Accordingly it is significant of the progress that the consolidation
of the South had made at this date that on this issue Rhett encountered
general opposition. This difference of opinion as to policy was not
inspired, as some historians have too hastily concluded, by national
feeling. Scarcely any of the leaders of the opposition considered the
Federal Government supreme over the State Government. They opposed Rhett
because they felt secession to be at that moment bad policy. They saw
that, if South Carolina went out of the Union in 1851, she would go
alone and the solidarity of the South would be broken. They were not
lacking in sectional patriotism, but their conception of the best
solution of the complex problem differed from that advocated by Rhett.
Their position was summed up by Langdon Cheves when he said, "To secede
now is to secede from the South as well as from the Union." On the basis
of this belief they defeated Rhett and put off secession for ten years.
There is no analogous single event in the history of the North,
previous to the war, which reveals with similar clearness a sectional
consciousness. On the surface the life of the people seemed, indeed, to
belie the existence of any such feeling. The Northern capitalist class
aimed steadily at being non-sectional, and it made free use of the word
national. We must not forget, however, that all sorts of people talked
of national institutions, and that the term, until we look closely
into the mind of, the person using it, signifies nothing. Because the
Northern capitalist repudiated the idea of sectionalism, it does not
follow that he set up any other in its place. Instead of accomplishing
anything so positive, he remained for the most part a negative quantity.
Living usually somewhere between Maine and Ohio, he made it his chief
purpose to regulate the outflow of manufactures from that industrial
region and the inflow of agricultural produce. The movement of the
latter eastward and northward, and the former westward and southward,
represents roughly but graphically the movement of the business of that
time. The Easterner lived in fear of losing the money which was owed him
in the South. As the political and economic conditions of the day made
unlikely any serious clash of interest between the East and the West, he
had little solicitude about his accounts beyond the Alleghanies. But a
gradually developing hostility between North and South was accompanied
by a parallel anxiety on the part of Northern capital for its Southern
investments and debts. When the war eventually became inevitable,
$200,000,000 were owed by Southerners to Northerners. For those days
this was an indebtedness of no inconsiderable magnitude. The Northern
capitalists, preoccupied with their desire to secure this account, were
naturally eager to repudiate sectionalism, and talked about national
interests with a zeal that has sometimes been misinterpreted. Throughout
the entire period from 1850 to 1865, capital in American politics played
for the most part a negative role, and not until after the war did it
become independent of its Southern interests.
For the real North of that day we must turn to those Northerners who
felt sufficient unto themselves and whose political convictions were
unbiased by personal interests which were involved in other parts of the
country. We must listen to the distinct voices that gave utterance to
their views, and we must observe the definite schemes of their political
leaders. Directly we do this, the fact stares us in the face that the
North had become a democracy. The rich man no longer played the role
of grandee, for by this time there had arisen those two groups which,
between them, are the ruin of aristocracy--the class of prosperous
laborers and the group of well-to-do intellectuals. Of these, the latter
gave utterance, first, to their faith in democracy, and then, with all
the intensity of partisan zeal, to their sense of the North as the
agent of democracy. The prosperous laborers applauded this expression
of an opinion in which they thoroughly believed and at the same time gave
their willing support to a land policy that was typically Northern.
American economic history in the middle third of the century is
essentially the record of a struggle to gain possession of public land.
The opposing forces were the South, which strove to perpetuate by this
means a social system that was fundamentally aristocratic, and the
North, which sought by the same means to foster its ideal of democracy.
Though the South, with the aid of its economic vassal, the Northern
capitalist class, was for some time able to check the land-hunger of
the Northern democrats, it was never able entirely to secure the control
which it desired, but was always faced with the steady and continued
opposition of the real North. On one occasion in Congress, the heart
of the whole matter was clearly shown, for at the very moment when the
Northerners of the democratic class were pressing one of their frequent
schemes for free land, Southerners and their sympathetic Northern
henchmen were furthering a scheme that aimed at the purchase of Cuba.
From the impatient sneer of a Southerner that the Northerners sought to
give "land to the landless" and the retort that the Southerners seemed
equally anxious to supply "niggers to the niggerless," it can be seen
that American history is sometimes better summed up by angry politicians
than by historians.
We must be on our guard, however, against ascribing to either side
too precise a consciousness of its own motives. The old days when the
American Civil War was conceived as a clear-cut issue are as a watch in
the night that has passed, and we now realize that historical movements
are almost without exception the resultants of many motives. We have
come to recognize that men have always misapprehended themselves,
contradicted themselves, obeyed primal impulses, and then deluded
themselves with sophistications upon the springs of action. In a word,
unaware of what they are doing, men allow their aesthetic and dramatic
senses to shape their conceptions of their own lives.
That "great impersonal artist," of whom Matthew Arnold has so much to
say, is at work in us all, subtly making us into illusions, first to
ourselves and later to the historian. It is the business of history, as
of analytic fiction, both to feel the power of these illusions and to
work through them in imagination to the dim but potent motives on which
they rest. We are prone to forget that we act from subconscious quite as
often as from conscious influences, from motives that arise out of the
dim parts of our being, from the midst of shadows that psychology has
only recently begun to lift, where senses subtler than the obvious make
use of fear, intuition, prejudice, habit, and illusion, and too often
play with us as the wind with blown leaves.
True as this is of man individually, it is even more fundamentally true
of man collectively, of parties, of peoples. It is a strikingly accurate
description of the relation of the two American nations that now found
themselves opposed within the Republic. Neither fully understood the
other. Each had a social ideal that was deeper laid than any theory of
government or than any commercial or humanitarian interest. Both knew
vaguely but with sure instinct that their interests and ideals
were irreconcilable. Each felt in its heart the deadly passion of
self-preservation. It was because, in both North and South, men were
subtly conscious that a whole social system was the issue at stake, and
because on each side they believed in their own ideals with their whole
souls, that, when the time came for their trial by fire, they went to
their deaths singing.
In the South there still obtained the ancient ideal of territorial
aristocracy. Those long traditions of the Western European peoples
which had made of the great landholder a petty prince lay beneath the
plantation life of the Southern States. The feudal spirit, revived in a
softer world and under brighter skies, gave to those who participated in
it the same graces and somewhat the same capacities which it gave to the
knightly class in the days of Roland--courage, frankness, generosity,
ability in affairs, a sense of responsibility, the consciousness
of caste. The mode of life which the planters enjoyed and which the
inferior whites regarded as a social paradise was a life of complete
deliverance from toil, of disinterested participation in local
government, of absolute personal freedom--a life in which the mechanical
action of law was less important than the more human compulsion of
social opinion, and in which private differences were settled under the
code of honor.
This Southern life was carried on in the most appropriate environment.
On a landed estate, often larger than many of Europe's baronies, stood
the great house of the planter, usually a graceful example of colonial
architecture, surrounded by stately gardens. This mansion was the center
of a boundless hospitality; guests were always coming and going; the
hostess and her daughters were the very symbols of kindliness and ease.
To think of such houses was to think of innumerable joyous days;
of gentlemen galloping across country after the hounds; of coaches
lumbering along avenues of noble oaks, bringing handsome women to visit
the mansion; of great feastings; of nights of music and dancing; above
all, of the great festival of Christmas, celebrated much as had been the
custom in "Merrie England" centuries before.
Below the surface of this bright world lay the enslaved black race. In
the minds of many Southerners--it was always a secret burden from which
they saw no means of freeing themselves. To emancipate the slaves, and
thereby to create a population of free blacks, was generally considered,
from the white point of view, an impossible solution of the problem.
The Southerners usually believed that the African could be tamed only
in small groups and when constantly surrounded by white influence, as in
the case of house servants. Though a few great capitalists had taken
up the idea that the deliberate exploitation of the blacks was the high
prerogative of the whites, the general sentiment of the Southern people
was more truly expressed by Toombs when he said: "The question is not
whether we could be more prosperous and happy with these three and a
half million slaves in Africa, and their places filled with an equal
number of hardy, intelligent, and enterprising citizens of the superior
race; but it is simply whether, while we have them among us, we would be
most prosperous with them in freedom or in bondage."
The Southern people, in the majority of instances, had no hatred of the
blacks. In the main they led their free, spirited, and gracious life,
convinced that the maintenance of slavery was but making the best of
circumstances which were beyond their control. It was these Southern
people who were to hear from afar the horrible indictment of all
their motives by the Abolitionists and who were to react in a growing
bitterness and distrust toward everything Northern.
But of these Southern people the average Northerner knew nothing.
He knew the South only on its least attractive side of professional
politics. For there was a group of powerful magnates, rich planters or
"slave barons," who easily made their way into Congress, and who played
into the hands of the Northern capitalists, for a purpose similar to
theirs. It was these men who forced the issue upon slavery; they warned
the common people of the North to mind their own business; and for doing
so they were warmly applauded by the Northern capitalist class. It was
therefore in opposition to the whole American world of organized capital
that the Northern masses demanded the use of "the Northern hammer"--as
Sumner put it, in one of his most furious speeches--in their aim to
destroy a section where, intuitively, they felt their democratic ideal
could not be realized.
And what was that ideal? Merely to answer democracy is to dodge the
fundamental question. The North was too complex in its social structure
and too multitudinous in its interests to confine itself to one type
of life. It included all sorts and conditions of men--from the most
gracious of scholars who lived in romantic ease among his German and
Spanish books, and whose lovely house in Cambridge is forever associated
with the noble presence of Washington, to the hardy frontiersman,
breaking the new soil of his Western claim, whose wife at sunset shaded
her tired eyes, under a hand rough with labor, as she stood on the
threshold of her log cabin, watching for the return of her man across
the weedy fields which he had not yet fully subdued. Far apart as were
Longfellow and this toiler of the West, they yet felt themselves to be
one in purpose.
They were democrats, but not after the simple, elementary manner of the
democrats at the opening of the century. In the North, there had come
to life a peculiar phase of idealism that had touched democracy with
mysticism and had added to it a vague but genuine romance. This new
vision of the destiny of the country had the practical effect of making
the Northerners identify themselves in their imaginations with all
mankind and in creating in them an enthusiastic desire, not only to give
to every American a home of his own, but also to throw open the gates of
the nation and to share the wealth of America with the poor of all the
world. In very truth, it was their dominating passion to give "land to
the landless." Here was the clue to much of their attitude toward the
South. Most of these Northern dreamers gave little or no thought to
slavery itself; but they felt that the section which maintained such a
system so committed to aristocracy that any real friendship with it was
impossible.
We are thus forced to conceive the American Republic in the years
immediately following the Compromise of 1850 as, in effect, a dual
nation, without a common loyalty between the two parts. Before long the
most significant of the great Northerners of the time was to describe
this impossible condition by the appropriate metaphor of a house
divided against itself. It was not, however, until eight years after the
division of the country had been acknowledged in 1850 that these
words were uttered. In those eight years both sections awoke to the
seriousness of the differences that they had admitted. Both perceived
that, instead of solving their problem in 1850, they had merely drawn
sharply the lines of future conflict. In every thoughtful mind there
arose the same alternative questions: Is there no solution but fighting
it out until one side destroys the other, or we end as two nations
confessedly independent? Or is there some conceivable new outlet for
this opposition of energy on the part of the sections, some new mode of
permanent adjustment?
It was at the moment when thinking men were asking these questions that
one of the nimblest of politicians took the center of the stage. Stephen
A. Douglas was far-sighted enough to understand the land-hunger of
the time. One is tempted to add that his ear was to the ground. The
statement will not, however, go unchallenged, for able apologists have
their good word to say for Douglas. Though in the main, the traditional
view of him as the prince of political jugglers still holds its own, let
us admit that his bold, rough spirit, filled as it was with political
daring, was not without its strange vein of idealism. And then let us
repeat that his ear was to the ground. Much careful research has indeed
been expended in seeking to determine who originated the policy which,
about 1853, Douglas decided to make his own. There has also been much
dispute about his motives. Most of us, however, see in his course of
action an instance of playing the game of politics with an audacity that
was magnificent.
His conduct may well have been the result of a combination of motives
which included a desire to retain the favor of the Northwest, a wish
to pave the way to his candidacy for the Presidency, the intention to
enlist the aid of the South as well as that of his own locality, and
perhaps the hope that he was performing a service of real value to his
country. That is, he saw that the favor of his own Northwest would be
lavished upon any man who opened up to settlement the rich lands beyond
Iowa and Missouri which were still held by the Indians, and for which
the Westerners were clamoring. Furthermore, they wanted a railroad that
would reach to the Pacific. There were, however, local entanglements and
political cross-purposes which involved the interests of the free State
of Illinois and those of the slave State of Missouri.
Douglas's great stroke was a programme for harmonizing all these
conflicting interests and for drawing together the West and the South.
Slaveholders were to be given what at that moment they wanted most--an
opportunity to expand into that territory to the north and west of
Missouri which had been made free by the Compromise of 1820, while the
free Northwest was to have its railroad to the coast and also its chance
to expand into the Indian country. Douglas thus became the champion of a
bill which would organize two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, but
which would leave the settlers in each to decide whether slavery or free
labor should prevail within their boundaries. This territorial scheme
was accepted by a Congress in which the Southerners and their Northern
allies held control, and what is known as the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was
signed by President Pierce on May 30,1854.*
*The origin of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill has been a much
discussed subject among historians in recent years. The
older view that Douglas was simply playing into the hands of
the "slavepower" by sacrificing Kansas, is no longer
tenable. This point has been elaborated by Allen Johnson in
his study of Douglas ("Stephen A. Douglas: a Study in
American Politics"). In his "Repeal of the Missouri
Compromise", P.O. Ray contends that the legislation of 1854
originated in a factional controversy in Missouri, and that
Douglas merely served the interests of the proslavery group
led by Senator David R. Atchinson of Missouri. Still
another point of view is that presented in the "Genesis of
the Kansas-Nebraska Act," by F. H. Hodder, who would explain
not only the division of the Nebraska Territory into Kansas
and Nebraska, but the object of the entire bill by the
insistent efforts of promoters of the Pacific railroad
scheme to secure a right of way through Nebraska. This
project involved the organization of a territorial
government and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
Douglas was deeply interested in the western railroad
interests and carried through the necessary legislation.