Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

of these historians had come of age as the Progressive movement was withering on the vine and American entry into the First World War was turning into a sucker’s bad bargain. Just as it was easy to believe that irrationality had brought on the Great War and the rise of even more lethal forms of political madness, it was not difficult for embittered Progressives to cast the same dim light on the Civil War. The Civil War was, in these arguments, just one more function of political irrationality, with personal blundering in one case, structural folly in another.

The difficulty with this accusation of irrationality arises from the ease with which it permits us to discount the meaning of politics in a democracy, and perhaps even democracy itself, since the Progressives had a distinctly uneasy relationship to democracy. As much as Randall, Craven, and Owsley were not wrong to discover exaggerated rhetoric, policy blunders, and brainless leadership causing serious abrasion between North and South, it is only from the comfortable point of view of another century that all the rhetoric seems exaggerated, all the policies inarguably blunders, and all the leadership uncomprehending of the abyss toward which they were pedaling.

Looked at on their own terms, both the South’s fears of territorial and economic strangulation and the North’s fears of a “slave power” conspiracy are anything but irrational, and only someone who refuses to think through the evidence available to Americans in the 1850s would find either of them at all illogical. “Is it nothing to yell about,” asked South Carolinian William Gimball in a letter to Elizabeth Gimball in 1861, “that we are prevented from carrying our property into the common territory of the United States? Is it nothing to yell for that the government is to be in the hands of men pledged to carry on the ‘irrepressible conflict’ against us? Is it nothing that they send incendiaries to stir up the slaves to poison & murder us? Is it nothing that our brothers at the North rob us of our property and beat us when we reclaim it?”3

On the Northern side, Abraham Lincoln is not usually considered a candidate for irrationality, but he was convinced of the existence of a “slave power” conspiracy and in one of his most famous speeches accused a U.S. senator, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and two presidents of being its aiders and abettors. John Bigelow, whom Lincoln would appoint as his chargé d’affaires in Paris in 1861, reduced the contest between North and South to “a struggle… between the aristocratic or privileged element in our government and the democratic. The two cannot live in peace together.”4

Similarly, only the benefit of hindsight allows us to write off the succession of compromises, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the last-minute attempts to broker compromise under the nose of secession and disunion in 1861, as evidences of widening failure. Until the firing of the very first gun, Northerners and Southerners were driven not by irrationality but by the clearest political logic on offer. “As long as slavery is looked upon by the North with abhorrence; as long as the South is regarded as a mere slave-breeding and slave-driving community; as long as false and pernicious theories are cherished respecting the inherent equality and rights of every human being, there can be no satisfactory political union between the two sections,” declared the New Orleans Bee in December 1860. While the premises of that proposition may be questionable, the logic that flowed from them was not. “If one-half the people believe the other half to be deeply dyed in iniquity; to be daily and hourly in the perpetration of the most atrocious moral offense,” continued the editor of the Bee, “how can two such antagonistic nationalities dwell together in fraternal concord under the same government?”5 Far from reeking of irrationality, secession and disunion were perfectly coherent and logical political choices within a political system that all along had confirmed that secession and disunion were viable options.

By the same token, the political system did not break down—the Southern states simply decided that it had fallen into the wrong hands and that they would no longer choose to use it.6 Far from losing confidence in that system, Northerners and Southerners struggled for workable compromises right down to the last minute, even while the room for creating nation-saving compromises narrowed beyond all hope of maneuver, and they continued to agitate for them almost all the way through the war in the form of Northern and Southern peace movements. If there is anything that is genuinely appalling in the political context of the Civil War, it is the dominance of the most glittering and hard-edged political rationality. It was the hard edge of that rationality that, in the end, made a final compromise impossible.

THE LITTLE ENGINE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The Dred Scott decision was a deep embarrassment for Stephen A. Douglas. The doctrine of popular sovereignty, on which Douglas had pegged his hopes for achieving sectional peace (and achieving his own nomination to the presidency), initially assumed that the inhabitants of any given territory could, if they wished, exclude slavery simply by passing the active legislation necessary to ban it from their midst. The Dred Scott decision, however, made it clear that no one—not Congress, not the inhabitants of a territory, not even a territorial legislature—had any power to keep any United States citizen from taking property (which had now become a euphemism for slaves) anywhere a citizen wanted and erecting the slave system in any territory of the Union. If the decision was pressed far enough, it might also open the way to claiming that no state could ban slavery, either.

Douglas was nothing if not resourceful. He “was a wonderful man with the people … When he came through the State, the whole Democratic party was alive and ready to rally to his support.” Once the initial shock of the Dred Scott decision wore off, Douglas announced