Secession Obsession

Donald Trump recently chastised the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, for not having done enough to prevent the Civil War, and he said that he should have made a deal with the slave states that had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected President in 1860.  What Trump had no idea of was that Lincoln did try to make a deal with the slave states.  He said he wouldn't interfere with slavery in their jurisdictions so long as the federal government was allowed to forbid slavery in the territories, but the South insisted on the extension of "the peculiar institution" to achieve economic and political parity with the industrialized free states in the North.

The South, in fact, didn't have to make a deal with Lincoln at all.  Indeed, the South had plenty of reasons not to secede.  Among them:

First, as noted in an earlier blog entry from this month, Lincoln was a minority President, having been elected with 39 percent of the vote.  The truth was that over six in ten voters considered Lincoln too dangerous and radical to be President, and Lincoln had to tread carefully to prove otherwise if he hoped to govern.

Second, the Republican platform of the 1860 presidential campaign that they had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed.  Although Lincoln personally hated slavery, he knew there was no way he could abolish it through executive order.

Third, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which guaranteed the rights of slave owners to take their slaves into free states and back to their home states, was the law of the land, and not even the President of the United States can reverse a Supreme Court decision.   

Fourth - and this is an important point - even though the Democrats had been so divided that the nominated two presidential candidates in the 1860 campaign, they had succeeded in electing majorities in both the House and Senate, meaning that they could block any legislation or presidential legislative proposal that Southerners opposed.

Which pretty much settles it.  The main cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery.  It was Southern stupidity.  Stupidity has long been associated with the South, of course, but it's mainly been associated with rednecks.  But stupidity, it turns out, has extended to the ruling classes - all the way back to the antebellum years.   The leaders of the Southern states had all of these reasons for not seceding, yet they were so intent on keeping fellow human beings in bondage for the benefit of free labor - nay, expanding the institution at a time when other countries had already abandoned it - that they went ahead and tried to form a separate country, the Confederate States of America, and they got the whupping they richly deserved.

And what Donald Trump didn't get was the moral rectitude of Lincoln's effort to contain slavery in 1861, when he took office, and his move to emancipate the slaves and grant them full citizenship in 1864 and 1865 to bring about a new birth of freedom.  Freedom . . . yeah, that's something he doesn't get.