28. “Lincoln’s war implied, and theGettysburg Address set to words, a firm message to the States of the Union, ‘I love you all, and if you leave me, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.’ The Address was not the sagely comments of a wise statesman, rather the vain, obsessive ranting of a power-hungry demon engaging in a blood-thirsty mission of self-aggrandizement, no matter the volume of corpses required to attain it.”
--Lewis Goldburg The Salisbury PostVERBATIM POSTToward the end of June 1863, warm summer breezes blew across farm lands of southern Pennsylvania near a little town called Gettysburg. By July 1, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Commanding, Army of Northern Virginia, had established his headquarters in a small farmhouse. Sporadic cannon fire echoed across the hills as Union and Confederate troops struggled for positions on strategic grounds.
Hundreds of miles south, the Siege of Vicksburg, Miss., began May 18, and in another stroke of irony would end on July 4, 1863, one day after Confederate forces took a brutal three-day beating at Gettysburg. Events of July 3 and 4 would be a turning point of the war, giving control of the Mississippi River to the Union and severing communications with the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department.
Both sides suffered enormous losses. Thousands of men lay wounded or dead under the sun’s searing glare. Future generations would ask how President Abraham Lincoln, without the consent of Congress, could have set such an illegal force in motion. But what was this “civil war” about? Even potential allies of the Confederacy, the British especially, agreed that slavery was on its last legs in the South, so surely slavery wasn’t the reason.
Lincoln had said, “I will proclaim emancipation entirely, or partially, or not at all, according to whichever of these measures shall seem best for the Union.” A man of many faces, Lincoln wrote in 1855: “I think I am a Whig, but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist … I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery ….” Typical of Whigs, Lincoln favored high tariffs, a strong centralized government, and a loose interpretation of the Constitution.
As shown by his statement on the floor of Congress on Jan. 12, 1848 concerning the secession of Texas from Mexico, there was a time when he approved of secession: “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better...” (Edgar Lee Masters, “Lincoln the Man,” 1931.)
In 1861, the majority of Americans agreed the Constitution granted the right of secession to individual states. Principles of secession were taught at the antebellum West Point. In their articles of ratification, Virginia and New York included provisions for withdrawal from the Union if dissatisfaction arose from constitutional government. Arguments for New York accepting the compact produced the Federalist Papers. However, immediately upon taking office, Lincoln launched a series of unconstitutional acts that still stun historians.
On Thursday, Nov. 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg, a group convened to dedicate the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Important Washington dignitaries were present. The keynote speaker was the prominent Edward Everett of Massachusetts, who spoke for two hours and received a strong ovation. President Lincoln, who sat with the audience, was not on the program. But as a matter of protocol, he was asked to say a few words. His 300 words took just a few minutes, followed by faint applause.
From this point, I borrow heavily from Charles Adams’ classic, “When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.” Adams is from Canada and was living in New York when he published his book in 2000. He recalls a college class in logic in which the Gettysburg Address was analyzed.
“Four score and seven years ago…”
Simple math dictates the year would have been 1776. The Declaration of Independence was signed, the Revolutionary War started. The declaration only explained why the 13 colonies separated from Great Britain. It did not create a government or contain any provision for government power. The articles stated this confederation was established by “sovereign states.” To be accurate, Lincoln should have said “four score and two years ago,” or better still, “three score and fourteen years ago,” moving the date up to the time of the Constitution.
Northern newspapers, such as the “New York World” challenged Lincoln with sharp criticism for the historical stupidity: “This United States was not created by the Declaration of Independence but resulted from the ratification of the compact known as the Constitution.” Others accused Lincoln of “gross ignorance or willful misstatement.” Yet today, that gross ignorance is literally chiseled in stone as if having been delivered from Mt. Sinai.
“Our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation…”
The federal compact among the former 13 colonies, the new “sovereign states” as defined in the Articles of Confederation in 1781, was not a nation as that term was and is currently used. Actually, each state was a nation, as in John Adams referring to “My nation of Massachusetts.”
Dr. Carl Degler, professor of history at Stanford University, lecturing at Gettysburg College in 1990, explained: “The Civil War, in short, was not a struggle to save a failed union, but to create a nation that until then had not come into being.”
Lincoln’s “new nation” came about by force of arms in the War Between the States. And, according to Degler, Lincoln had much in common with Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, who, in the 19th century, built a united Germany believing that “blood and iron” were the main force for national policy.
Northern peace Democrats called for “the Constitution as it is; the Union as it was,” which made sense. But wanting no part of it, Lincoln tightened control over the federal government. Created by “blood and iron,” Lincoln’s new nation had no constitutional basis, no peaceful legal process. When it came to blood, Lincoln surpassed all. On a proportionate basis, the slaughter of Confederate men matched the losses incurred only by the Russians and Germans in World War II.
Just as Julius Caesar created an imperial order out of a republic, Lincoln created a nation out of a compact among states, and both men used their military forces to do so. Lincoln’s Gettysburg reference to the Founders having created a new nation simply was not true. The scorched-earth campaigns practiced by Generals W.T. Sherman and U.S. Grant also affected the North, with Grant having been responsible for killing nearly a generation of Northern youth.
“Conceived in liberty…”
The British still direct criticism to us for the absurdity of the Declaration of Independence. The term “all men” meant all white men, as white women weren’t much better off than blacks.
Scarcely known is that when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation — another widely misinterpreted document — women’s rights groups asked, How about us, too? So the declaration that Lincoln refers to in his address was not conceived in liberty or dedicated to the proposition that all of humankind were created equal.
“Today we are engaged in a great civil war…”
We have never had a “civil war” in America, unless you count the American Revolution as a civil war. A civil war consists of two factions trying to seize control of the same government, which happened in Russia in 1917 and China in 1948. The same is happening today in Syria where President Bashar al-Assad is sanctioning the Syrian Army in killing his own people — much as Lincoln sanctioned Sherman and Grant in riding roughshod over the South in 1861 to 1865.
In 1861 there wasn’t a “civil war,” because the South wanted nothing to do with the Washington government except to enjoy a peaceful separation and coexistence. The South wanted to go its way in peace and sent a delegation to Washington to discuss how the two regions could work together and complement each other. Lincoln refused to see the delegation. The war could have been prevented right there.
But the war did happen, and in the North, it was called the War of Rebellion, when it was really a War for Southern Independence. The Southern states had withdrawn from the Union by democratic process, the same used to join the union. Getting down to bare basics, the war was one of conquest by the North meant to destroy the Confederacy and establish a new political leadership over the conquered territories.
Illiterate former slaves were given the vote. The rest of Southern Society, the former governing groups, was disenfranchised. Poor, mostly illiterate, blacks were told how to vote by Union soldiers, and they did so. Many of the same blacks were appointed to positions of responsibility, in some cases, high offices, with the power to carry out orders from their white, Northern puppet-masters. This infuriated the conquered people, creating a fanaticism for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws that were passed down for generations. Reconstruction became a prolonged period of disunity. Only in our present time has that zeal started losing its grip on Southern Society.
“Testing whether that nation can long endure…”
That statement seems to presuppose that the South wanted to conquer the Northern federation, an absurdity as great as to say the revolting colonies in 1776 were out to destroy the British nation. The 13 colonies’ withdrawal from the British Empire in 1776 was the same as the attempt of the Southern states to withdraw in 1861 from the 1789 federation. Realistically, the 1789 federation was not in any danger; it would have endured with secession. Unlike Grant, Lee was not out to conquer the North. This logic was as absurd as the rest of Lincoln’s speech.
“A final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live…”
Again, “that nation” was not in danger of dying — that was not the Southern Confederate policy and Lincoln knew it.
“And that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth….”
Why did Lincoln even suggest that secession by the Southern states would mean democracy would perish from the earth — in America or elsewhere? That was nonsense and Lincoln knew it. But no one would rebut his argument. To have countered Lincoln on any point meant risking arrest by Union soldiers and indefinite internment in an unidentified prison.
Professor Jeffrey Hummel in his Civil War book, “Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men,” wrote: “[It] just is plain nonsense,” Lincoln’s repeated assertion that secession would amount to a failure of the American experiment with democracy and liberty.
The “London Times” best understood what was going on in America with Lincoln’s illegal Northern invasion to prevent secession: “If Northerners … had peacefully allowed the seceders to depart, the result might fairly have been quoted as illustrating the advantages of Democracy. [B]ut Republicans put empire above liberty, and resorted to political oppression and war … Democracy broke down … when it was upheld … by force of arms.”
• • •
Bill Ward is a writer and historian living in Salisbury. Contact him at wardwriters @carolina.rr.com.
