Future
governor of North Carolina, Quaker and Unionist Jonathan Worth,
believed his State was driven out of the Union by Lincoln’s actions,
which was forcing his fellow citizens to not only violate the United
States Constitution by allowing a president to raise an army, but to
also wage war against other States. On 30 May 1861 he wrote: “We are in
the midst of war and revolution. North Carolina would have stood by the
Union but for the conduct of the national administration, which for
folly and simplicity exceeds anything in modern history.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
“Let Us Suppose There Were No Grounds for Secession . . . .
If
it was unconstitutional, did the opponents of secession have the right
to combat it with equally unconstitutional measures? Was the president’s
subsequent response any less illegal than the actions of the secession
conventions, merely because his actions followed theirs chronologically?
Beyond
the question of right, was it wise to meet secession with extralegal
force? Was the preservation of the national borders worth the precedent
of the chief executive initiating warfare, arbitrarily suspending civil
liberties, jailing thousands on suspicion or political whim, using the
military to manipulate elections, and even overthrowing the legitimate
governments of States?
Perhaps
most relevant then and now, especially considering the potential for
the repetition and expansion of those infringements under increasingly
numerous and nebulous emergencies, is the question of whether those
infringements were even necessary.
Did
the permanent weakening of America’s best protection against tyranny
not exceed the violence done to the Constitution by the secession of
seven States, and might that fundamental document not have survived in
firmer health with the remaining twenty-seven States adhering to it all
the more strictly?
For
that matter, would the bifurcation of the United States have been worse
than the war waged to prevent it? The instinctive reply (after
requisite reference to the abolition of slavery) asserts that the
precedent of secession would have led to further divisions, until the
former nation had been thoroughly Balkanized; Lincoln himself alluded to
that potential fragmentation in his first inaugural.
Yet
the very choice of the pejorative “Balkanized,” which is so often
employed in that argument, carries an assumption that a continent of
smaller republics would not have been preferable.
Nationalist advocates
can and have produced abundant evidence of economic and social
development under the reconstructed United States, but that evidence
does not necessarily suggest that equivalent development would have been
impossible under another political and geographic configuration.
Although
it would likely have increased internal tension in the North, unopposed
secession in 1861 ought, at least initially, to have eased the conflict
between the sections – rather than aggravating it, as “Balkanization”
implies.
Disunion
would have made slavery a national issue within the Confederate States,
rather than a divisive sectional problem within the United States,
thereby eliminating what Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. considered one of
the foremost impediments to a peaceful, internal solution for that
evil. The obstacles to proving any hypothesis of separation as a viable
alternative apply equally to any assertion of it as an unacceptable
solution.
If
Lincoln considered the issue of secession negotiable at some point on a
scale of increasing resistance, it seems that such devastating
mortality would have figured fairly high on that scale. Had he been
able to foresee the harvest of death his choices would yield, anyone as
reasonable as the sixteenth president might understandably have opted
against the carnage and accepted the departure of seven fractious
provinces in return for a smaller but more peaceable federation.
Of
course ho owned no such foresight; the resort to arms seldom fails to
inflict far greater suffering than either belligerent expects, but it
took a peculiar blend of circumstances to turn the American Civil War
into an unpredictable bloodbath.
It
was Lincoln, however, who finally eschewed diplomacy and sparked a
confrontation when he fully understood the volatility of the situation.
Although he avoided the political blunder of firing the first shot, he
backed himself into a corner from which he could escape only by
mobilizing a national army, and thereby fanning the embers of Fort
Sumter into full-scale conflagration.
(Mr. Lincoln’s War, William Marvel, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, pp. xv-xvii)
