[As part of The American Interest’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I will be playing Civil War pundit from time to time: that is, I will post pieces about Civil War events as if they were happening now. The goal of these posts is to illuminate the issues and problems of the Civil War era for readers today. These posts will be cross posted at The Long Recall, the day by day aggregator of news and opinion we have been compiling since the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s election last November.]
Abraham Lincoln has not held national office since he failed to win a second term in the House of Representatives in the election of 1848. Since then he has lost two races for a seat in the United States Senate and made some inspiring speeches.
Now one of the least experienced men ever elected president has taken the oath of office as the United States faces its greatest crisis since General Washington was at Valley Forge. Worse, President Lincoln has less political support than any of his predecessors; not since records of the popular vote were first made in the 1820s has any president been elected with a lower percentage of the people’s vote.
Since Lincoln’s election, seven states have taken the unprecedented step of “seceding” from the United States and forming a second American confederacy. The “Confederate States of America” as the seceding states style themselves — newly augmented by the addition of Texas, a single state larger than New England and New York combined — have also inaugurated a new president. Mr. Jefferson Davis delivered his inaugural address in Montgomery, Alabama on February 18.
The contrast between the two speeches could not be more marked. “President” Davis (who as a former Secretary of War and US Senator has the Washington experience Lincoln so painfully lacks) delivered a confident, forward looking speech. President Lincoln was cautious and hesitating, relying more on nostalgia for the undivided union of old than on any promise he sees in the future. President Davis (we give him the title without conceding his legal right to it) looked outward, to states he believes will soon be joining his confederacy and to the foreign powers he hopes will recognize his government. President Lincoln looked inward, pleading with the wavering states to remain. President Davis spoke a language of threat and war; President Lincoln spoke of compromise and peace. President Lincoln is searching for concessions and constitutional amendments; President Davis says that the goal of independence must be “inflexibly pursued” and threatens the North with “the suffering of millions” if it attempts to halt the new confederacy from making good its secession.
Where the two speeches come closest is where both statesmen try to evade the tough realities that drive their sections apart. In language carefully calculated to appeal to the global British superpower whose attitude will do much to determine the course of American events, President Davis speaks of the policy of his new government as being based on peace and free trade. Sweet music in London, where high United States tariffs and southern attempts to acquire new territory for slavery expansion in Central America are resented and feared.
But does Davis mean it? Yes on free trade — the North’s beloved high tariffs against British goods have subsidized northern manufacturers and raised prices for Southern planters. But the answer must be no on peace abroad: the logic behind the secession movement is that slavery must expand or die. Cotton is of all crops the most destructive to the soil. It was falling yields in old cotton fields in South Carolina and Georgia that drove so many planters to the rich soils of Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. In time, those states too will begin to lose their fertility. Slavery needs new soil, or it will die.
This is why Southern interests have long promoted the annexation of Cuba; it is why Southern adventurers have attempted to “filibuster” their way to the conquest of tropical empires, most notably the late William Walker‘s ill-fated expedition to Nicaragua. When Southerners are being honest, they openly admit that slavery must expand or die. That necessity will impose an expansionist policy on an independent South that will bring it into collision sooner rather than later with Great Britain.
If Davis is disingenuous about the South’s long term ambitions, Lincoln is at least equally deceitful about his own stance on slavery. Like the Southern hardliners, Lincoln and many other “moderate” Republicans believe that slavery must expand or wither on the vine. Lincoln is not offering to accept a constitutional amendment banning federal interference with slavery where it exists out of a newfound affection for the South’s “peculiar institution”; he believes that once slavery is contained, it must sooner or later wither away. The rich Delta soil will lose its fertility; yields will drop; plantations will become steadily less profitable and their owners will be less attached to a form of property that is becoming less remunerative and they will also become less influential in their state legislatures as their wealth slowly erodes.
If the South believed that the status quo could protect slavery, there would be no secessionist movement in the cotton states. If the North believed that slavery could survive indefinitely without expansion, the fragile coalition between radical abolitionists and conservative business interests that makes up Lincoln’s Republican Party would soon fly apart. If the American states are to have a civil war it will not be over the existence of slavery in the South; it will be that the North will not remain in the Union unless slavery is put on the path toward ultimate extinction, while the South demands not only the right for slavery to exist for today but also the right for slavery to expand so that it will be with us forever.
The two presidents today are competing for the support of two different constituencies: the eight slave states still in the Union and the British government. Among the slave states still loyal to the original constitution, the attitudes of Missouri, Kentucky and Virgina are crucial. As it is, the current seven state Confederacy is limited to the Deep South; it is large, and much of it is wild and difficult to conquer and hold, but in population, resources and railways it is the most backward part of the old United States. Its hold on the lower Mississippi is tenuous; its long coastlines are vulnerable to superior Northern naval power.
All this changes if Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia jump ship. Geography would ensure that North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas would follow. The accession in manpower, manufacturing and wealth would be immense; the new Confederacy’s armies would lie on along the Potomac and the Ohio, in striking distance of the Federal capital and the Great Lakes. Faced with the loss of its shipping routes along the Mississippi as well as the threat to rail connections in the Ohio valley, states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa might accept Southern secession in exchange for free navigation of the Mississippi and peace in Ohio. (Jefferson Davis alluded to this possibility in his speech, saying that the South had no quarrel with its neighbors to the Northwest.)
Those wavering states are the primary audiences to which the two rival presidents addressed their remarks. Lincoln is desperate to keep them in, and Davis to coax them out. Lincoln has the harder task. For one thing, if he is to keep the skittish slave states from seceding, he has to give up his strongest card in foreign policy. If he makes this a contest over slavery, Great Britain — the world power that for thirty years has been carrying on a global effort to abolish both the slave trade and slavery — will almost certainly ignore its love of Southern cotton and back the North. But if Lincoln gains Britain by playing the slavery card, he will lose the Upper South and, with it, any real prospect of reuniting the country.
He will also lose much of the moderate Northern opinion that he badly needs. Lincoln won a majority of the popular vote in the North, but not everyone who voted Republican was voting for civil war. He cannot look like the aggressor if he is to keep the North behind him. And he certainly cannot look abolitionist: John Brown could only find a handful of men to invade the South in the hopes of launching an anti-slavery war. The Northern people will not follow Lincoln into a war to free the slaves.
And so yesterday in Washington, the most anti-slavery president in the history of the United States made the most far-reaching concessions to the slave states that any president has ever offered. He not only promised to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act; he accepted a constitutional amendment that would effectively ban all federal interference in southern slavery forever.
It will not be enough. For Davis and his followers, it is not enough to preserve the status quo. Abraham Lincoln, they insist, must either accept the extension of slavery or watch the United States shrink. Lincoln will not accept either choice without a fight. The two governments, and the people they represent, are on a collision course.
On their relative success will hang the future of both of the American unions now struggling to control the future of what once looked to be the most successful experiment in republican government in the long and sorry history of the world.