Lincoln's Great Calamity

Lincoln’s reluctance to openly discuss the secession crisis and treat with Southern commissioners deepened the divide between the sections and assured that war would result. By putting his party unity above the interests of the country, Lincoln intentionally drifted or unknowingly blundered into a war against Americans that shattered the Founders republic.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

Lincoln’s Great Calamity:

“The scene now shifted to Washington, where opportunism, indecision, chicanery, confusion, and Machiavellian deception of the worst sort were inextricably combined – never, it seems, to be certainly unraveled. The age of Lincoln settled down upon the country with his inauguration on March 4 – in fact, his shadow had fallen heavily over the land and upon [President James] Buchanan since the election in the preceding November. During these four months and until the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln showed less understanding of conditions in the South and gave less evidence of broad statesmanship than was ever again to characterize him.

When he might have made some clear unequivocal statement following his election which could have reassured the South of his real intentions toward that region – a statement that was frequently called for and many hungered for – he dismissed the subject by advising inquirers to read what he had already said. Having said nothing to head off secession, when it came he failed to realize its strength and widespread support. A modern authority on the secession movement has declared, “Had the Republicans, therefore, deliberately sought the most efficient method of furthering the secession movement they could have found none better than their refusal to listen to methods of conciliation.”

The conglomerate composition of the Republican party was also another important element in forming the attitude Lincoln held toward the secession movement. As various groups of Republicans stood for various things…it was not as bald a decision in Lincoln’s mind to say that he was willing to see his country disintegrate, but never his party.

The question which has troubled subsequent generations is whether Lincoln was the marplot and bungler or the cunning villain and provocateur; whether he stumbled into war at Sumter or whether he planned it. If Lincoln wanted to successfully relieve the fort, why did he tell the Confederates of the expedition which had set out? Some would answer by saying that Lincoln thus deliberately provoked the Confederates to fire on Sumter. Others say that Lincoln got caught in his own web of confusion and blundered into a war that he by no means planned or wanted. And if war must come, how much more valuable would it be to have the enemy strike the first blow! It would unite all diverging factions.

[Judge John A.] Campbell believed the “equivocating conduct of the [Lincoln] Administration” was “the proximate cause of the great calamity,” and [Jefferson] Davis bitterly commented: “The crooked paths of diplomacy can scarcely furnish an example so wanting in courtesy, in candor, and directness as was the course of the United States Government toward our commissioners in Washington”; and in the light of the fact that a Federal fleet was off the bar, it was an “unfounded pretense that the Confederate States…[were] the assailants.”

(A History of the South, Volume VII, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865, E. Merton Coulter, LSU Press, 1950, pp. 35-38)