What the North Got Wrong (PRIOR TO CIVIL WAR)

[Demeter]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/what-the-north-got-wrong/

In the years and months preceding the Civil War, the Republicans in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular made many mistakes or misjudgments. And these errors were vitally important in bringing on the war. But this is not to say that defective statesmanship was the problem. For the mistakes made were rooted in Republican ideology, and that ideology was, in turn, rooted in the social and economic conditions of the antebellum North.

The first error that the Republicans made was to underestimate the danger of secession. In the presidential contest of 1860, southerners warned again and again that a Republican victory would mean secession. Again and again the Republicans dismissed the warning. Hamilton Fish of New York declared that the “jails and lunatic asylums” would be “of sufficient capacity to accommodate all the disunionists in the land.” Lincoln for his part dismissed all talk of secession as “humbug.”

A second major error, closely related to the first, was to underestimate the danger, and the cost, of war, if and when it did come. The New York Tribune announced that in the event of war “a small fleet of seagoing steamers and an army of 20,000 or 30,000 men” would be enough “to hold the entire South in perpetual check,” while The Times believed that a month would be sufficient time to quell this “local commotion.” These were ill-fated predictions indeed, when one considers that the war would ultimately claim some 600,000 casualties on both sides.

A third error was more subtle, but equally momentous. The Republicans were a new party. They had sprung into existence in the mid-1850s to combat the spread of slavery. Most Republicans believed, with Lincoln, that preventing the extension of slavery would ultimately consign it to death, though most were vague about the timing and the details of this process. But however recent the party’s birth, its leaders insisted that its antislavery principles were coeval with the nation itself. They were the principles of 1776 and of 1787 and the new party was seeking merely to restore the Republic’s true, time-honored character. This assumption was enormously important in the aftermath of Lincoln’s election in 1860. Historians have debated the new president’s motives when he assumed office. Was maintaining the union his top priority or was opposition to slavery uppermost? Lincoln himself can be quoted both ways and some scholars have even accused him of duplicity. In fact neither motive was uppermost. The reality was that maintaining the union and containing slavery (with a view to destroying it ultimately) were not distinct goals; they were in Lincoln’s eyes the same goal, since the union was itself an antislavery entity. To be true to the union was to oppose slavery. To accept the permanent existence of slavery was to betray the union.

This view of the Founding Fathers, it should be noted, was the antithesis of that of the secessionists, who were equally confident that they had the Constitution entirely on their side and that they alone were true to the spirit of 1776...

[RandomThoughts]

1. The use of 'Republican' in that article is label trap.

The meaning of 'Republican' then and now has changed since then.

[rfranklin]

2. The Civil Rights Act was the turning point...

All the racist Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party and flocked to the open arms of the Republicans who were implementing their "Southern Strategy."

[ladywnch]

4. the meaning of Republican has changed since Goldwater's day too

Goldwater would be called a progressive by today's repubs.

[yellowcanine]

3. Both sides made some major miscalculations. But this is almost always true with war.

I don't see the miscalculations of the North as a particular cause of the war. And I don't see how one can call electing a Republican President in 1860 a "miscalculation." Only in hindsight, one can never predict group madness, which secession certainly was. It seems to me that the war was probably inevitable after the Kansas debacle. The South was determined not only to keep their slaves but also to extend slavery into new territories. The North would have accepted the status quo for a while anyway - but not extending slavery.

[struggle4progress]

5. It's hard to see how "many mistakes" by Lincoln, in the "months preceding the Civil War,"

could have led to the war. South Carolina seceded in December 1860; other states followed; and a number of southern seizures of federal installations occurred before Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March 1861. The seige of Fort Sumpter began before the inauguration, and the attack on Fort Sumpter in mid-April, about six weeks after the inauguration

It is difficult to attribute the war to "mistakes." The plantation owners had an enormous economic stake in the chattel system, and that provided motive for ideological justifications. But the hypocrisy of slave-holding, in a country that prided itself on its democracy, had long been apparent; even men like Jefferson had been disquieted by it: The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. See http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s28.html

Lincoln's position was scarcely an immediate and direct challenge to slavery, though it did suggest a gradual erosion of the power of slaveholders in the Federal system: We must not disturb slavery in the states where it exists, because the Constitution, and the peace of the country both forbid us — We must not withhold an efficient fugitive slave law, because the constitution demands it — But we must, by a national policy, prevent the spread of slavery into new territories, or free states, because the constitution does not forbid us, and the general welfare does demand such prevention — We must prevent the revival of the African slave trade, because the constitution does not forbid us, and the general welfare does require the prevention. See http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/abraham-lincoln-papers/history3.html

Secessionists had been pushing for dissolution for many years before Lincoln's election, and the election provided a convenient focal point for mobilizing pro-dissolution forces, prepared by years of secessionist propaganda