Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

“The war was a struggle between two conflicting capitalist systems—one reactionary, based on slave labor, and fearful of change; the other progressive, competitive, innovative, and democratic. Although the slave system presented no obstacle to the growth of industrial capitalism as an economic system (Here is where Moore differs from Beard), it did present a ‘formidable obstacle to the establishment of an industrial capitalist democracy […] at least any conception of democracy that includes the goals of human equality, even the limited form of equality of opportunity, and human freedom […] Labor-repressive agricultural systems, and plantation slavery in particular, or political obstacles to a particular kind of capitalism at a specific historical stage.’”

Barrington Moore’s layered analysis of the Civil War establishes the economic undercurrents to its idealized struggle. While the North objected to slavery, this emerged equally out of a desire to empower its industrial economy over the Southern agrarian economy as it did to eradicate the oppression of African Americans. As such, the Civil War can be seen as a conflict between two economic systems as much as it was a conflict between two armies.

“Many secessionists conceded that their movement was essentially a counter-revolution against the anticipated revolutionary threat to slavery […] The Black Republicans were the real revolutionaries, southerners insisted, ‘a motley throng Sans culottes […] infidels and freelovers, interspersed by bloomer women fugitive slaves and automation an amalgamationists […] active and bristling with terrible designs and as ready for bloody and forcible realities as ever characterized the ideals of the French Revolution.’” 

Southerners saw secession as a revolution against rising Republican power in line with the initial revolution that founded the nation, or alternatively as a counter-revolution to the Republican revolution against slavery. In this coverage of statements by Confederate speaker James B. D. DeBow, McPherson shows the latter opinion, that secession was in fact a counter-revolution. This speech invoked the recent bloody history of the French Revolution to charge Republicans with needless violence. The comparison occurred commonly among Southern speakers.

“For Lincoln it was the Union, not the Confederacy, that was the true heir of the Revolution of 1776. That revolution had established a republic, a democratic government of the people by the people. This republic was a fragile experiment in a world of kings, emperors, tyrants, and theories of aristocracy. If secession were allowed to succeed it would destroy the experiment.”

Throughout the Civil War, Lincoln’s primary goal was not to emancipate slaves but to preserve the American republic. This, Lincoln believed, was the key facet of America’s identity, and so needed to be maintained for the future of the nation. Lincoln rejected ideas that the secession was either a revolution or counter-revolution, and indeed never spoke of his own acts as revolutionary—they were instead necessary protections of the nation and Constitution forged in the Revolution of 1776.

“He was bound by the Constitution, which protected the institution of slavery in the states. In the first year of the war the North fought to preserve this Constitution and restore Union as it had existed before 1861. Lincoln’s theory of the war held that since the secession was illegal, the confederate states were still legally in the Union although temporarily under the controls of insurrectionists.”

Lincoln’s conservative stance on emancipation was a political maneuver. Slavery was enshrined as legal in the Constitution, and he needed to preserve the Constitution’s invincibility as a legal document to justify the illegality of the Confederacy, and thereby the Republicans’ right to quash it as a rebellion. Lincoln conceived of the war’s complex legal realities through reduction to simple principles. He placed his utmost faith in the Constitution as the defining document of American law, and he used the 13th Amendment as a strategic move within his battle against the Confederacy.

“The old cliché, that the proclamation did not free a single slave because it applied only to the Confederate states where Lincoln had no power, completely misses the point. The proclamation announced a revolutionary new war aim—the overthrow of slavery by force of arms if and when Union armies conquered the South. Of course, emancipation could not be irrevocably accomplished without a constitutional amendment, so Lincoln threw his weight behind the 13th Amendment, which the House passed in January 1865.”

McPherson interprets the Emancipation Proclamation as a both legal document and one that provides history on the progress of the Civil War. Though ostensibly a declaration of the freedom of slaves, the proclamation was also a declaration of officialized hostility toward the South and the intent of its destruction. While it did not immediately free a single slave, this proclamation’s effect on Union army actions saved millions of lives. This passage also foregrounds the 13th Amendment’s importance as the legal backbone of this movement, as an amendment was required to keep secession illegal while legitimizing emancipation.

“In the second respect in which the Civil War has been viewed as a revolution—its achievement of the abolition of slavery—Lincoln fits the pattern of a revolutionary leader. He was a reluctant one at first, to be sure, but in the end he was more radical than Washington or Jefferson or any of the leaders of the first revolution. They led a successful struggle for independence from Britain but did not accomplish a fundamental change in the society the led. Lincoln did preside over such a change.”

Chapter 2 depicts Lincoln as the key figure in the second American revolution in three ways: first in his refusal to understand secession as revolution or counter-revolution, second in his support of emancipation, and third in his role in the destruction of the Southern economy and creation of a new national economy. The passage above details the second of these three important impacts, showing how Lincoln was molded into a revolutionary leader through the exigencies of history and his obligation to uphold the Constitution. Ironically, his work to preserve the Union fundamentally changed the history of this Union as we see it today.

“During the war, Republicans passed […] a higher tariff in 1861; a homestead act, a land-grant college act, and the Pacific railroad act providing loans in land grants for a transcontinental railroad in 1862; and a national banking act of 1863, which, along with the legal tender act of the previous year authorizing the issues of a federal currency, the famous greenbacks, gave the national government effective control over the nation’s currency for the first time. In addition, to finance the war the government marketed huge bond issues to the public and passed an Internal Revenue Act which imposed a large array of federal taxes for the first time, including a progressive income tax.” 

During the Civil War the Union army purposefully dismantled the South’s economic system by destroying agricultural land, emancipating slaves, and passing watershed economic legislation that empowered Northern industries and centralized economic power in the federal government. These moves all worked to disempower the South’s traditional agrarian economy, and thereby the Confederate army. These acts also established the United States as the nation we know today, partly forming the backbone of the country’s current economic features.

“My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery […] What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”

In a letter to Horace Greeley in 1862, Lincoln clearly establishes the order of his loyalties. This clear passage reminds us how history has the quality of fictionalizing its figures into the ends, and not the causes, of their acts.

“A modern historian has pointed out that from the beginning Americans have ‘associated liberty primarily with their rejection of coercive authority,’ especially the authority of government […] the main sphere of liberty is political, and that the greatest potential threat to the liberties and rights of the individual comes from the government itself.”

The collective consciousness of the United States was founded on the rejection of governmental oppression, as concretized in the Revolution of 1776, which cast off British taxation and established the United States. This political disposition made it difficult for Southern states to accept emancipation and the confiscation of all slave property in the South without any form of compensation. To many, this was an oppressive theft of property by an autocratic government, not an institutional success for liberty.

“Our reliance [must be] in the love of liberty […] The preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all land, everywhere. Destroy the spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them […] He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves. […] Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.”

In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln eloquently rebuked the idea that liberty was only for white men using an ideological and moral argument. Lincoln’s goals was to destroy slavery for the sake of the American identity and the nation’s success as a unified state espousing liberty for all. His belief shines through in this deeply rhetorical passage. Here Lincoln uses the metaphor of despotism as a seed that one plants through one’s own actions to conjure powerful imagery of chains on the wrists of free people and to encourage his listeners to empathize with the plight of slaves. Note the use of biblical imagery: Lincoln tells his listeners they will sow the seeds of despotism “around [their] own doors” and then find themselves in chains—this references Exodus, in which the Jews were freed from slavery after the spirit of the lord passed over their doors but infected their Egyptian slavemasters with plague.

“Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it […] If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving.”

In another example of eloquence in the debates with Douglas, Lincoln combines moral and political points to discuss the worthiness of America’s future as a nation and the responsibility of all people living today to create this future by upholding its past. Lincoln foregrounds the decision that the people of America make in the very moment of his speech as echoing throughout the history of the United States (reflecting the Constitution) and the future of its union.

“Historians who note that Schimmelfennig turned out to be a mediocre commander miss the point. Their criticism is grounded in a narrow concept of military strategy. But Lincoln made this and similar appointments for reasons of national strategy. Each of the political generals represented an important ethnic, regional or political constituency in the North. The support of these constituencies for the war effort was crucial.”

Understanding Lincoln’s motivations for selecting his “political generals” helps us assess Lincoln as a military strategist. While misread by many of his contemporaries as well as modern historians as an ineffective display of military decision-making, these actions show that Lincoln took a gestalt view of the war effort within the larger machinations of US politics, and was thereby able to produce his successes.

“Like World War I, the Civil War started out as one kind of war and evolved into something quite different. But in contrast to World War I, the government of the victorious side in the Civil War developed a national strategy to give purpose to a military strategy of total war, and preserved a political majority in support of this national strategy through dark days of defeat, despair, and division. This was the real strategic contribution of Abraham Lincoln to Union victory. His role in shaping a national strategy of unconditional surrender by the Confederacy was more important to the war’s outcome than his endless hours at the War Department sending telegrams to generals and devising strategic combinations to defeat Confederate armies.”

To describe Lincoln’s strategic behavior during the civil war, McPherson employs Clausewitz’s distinction of military strategy and national strategy (69). Here, Lincoln’s success as a war strategist are weighed against leadership during other American wars, and his overall history as a successful commander in chief is connected to his ability to envision a national strategy in line with the military strategy, remaining aware of both sides of the war without focusing solely on either. The success of the Union army depended not on its successes in individual battles but on how these battles (and the Republican Party’s political movements) contributed to an overall national strategy of Confederate surrender.

“A conservative, gradualist policy on slavery was clearly of a piece with the limited-war strategy that had governed Union policy during the first year of the war. The very evening that he learned of the border-state rejection of his gradual emancipation plan (July 12, 1862), the president made up his mind to issue an emancipation proclamation. […] Lincoln now believed emancipation to be ‘a military necessity absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union…the slaves [are] undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service,’ he went on, ‘and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us […] We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.’”

Lincoln initially rejected emancipation, especially in border states, so as not to lose the political support of these bipartisan regions. Lincoln even reversed the decrees of commanders who emancipated slaves in territories they captured to maintain slavery and thereby the support of these states. Though he did develop a gradual emancipation plan, Lincoln’s decision to fully embrace emancipation came only after his embrace of total war with the South and the rejection of gradualist emancipation policies by leadership in the border states. Lincoln understood that to win the war, slavery had to be destroyed, as it formed the backbone of the economy that opposed him. Lincoln’s decision was not an ethical choice but a military strategy.

“Emancipation and the enlistment of slaves as soldiers tremendously increased the stakes in this war, for the South as well as the North. Southerners vowed to fight ‘to the last ditch’ before yielding to a Yankee nation that could commit such execrable deeds. Gone was any hope of an armistice or a negotiated peace as long as the Lincoln administration was in power. The alternatives were reduced starkly to southern independence on the one hand or unconditional surrender of the South on the other.” 

The South saw the confiscation of Confederate property through emancipation as tyranny. It drastically changed both the economic make-up of Southern states and the trajectory of the war, transforming it into both an ideological and a military battle. The war could no longer be resolved by peace; it had to end in Southern surrender or Southern success. Southerners’ hatred for Lincoln’s policies against slavery ultimately caused Lincoln’s assassination, which shows just how deeply this choice ran against their values.

“Lincoln had only a year or so of formal schooling in the typical rote-learning ‘blab schools’ of the day, schooling that he obtained, as he later put it, ‘by littles’—a month here, a couple of months there, spread out over a period of a few years. Lincoln was basically a self-taught man. […] Instead of spending years inside the four walls of a classroom […] Lincoln grew up close to the rhythms of nature, of wild beasts and farm animals, of forests and running water, of seasons and crops and of people who got their meager living from the land.” 

Lincoln was both a self-taught and a self-made man, one all Americans can look up to for the great successes of his wisdom, common sense, and good morals during the direst moment in the nation’s history. Along with his skill with metaphors and his ability to use these turns of phrase to communicate effectively with common people, Lincoln’s primary education as a common person allowed him to access the complex problems of political and military strategy through basic, familiar frameworks.

“One of the first things that strikes a student of Lincoln’s speeches and writings is his frequent use of images and figurative language. His speeches and letters abound with metaphors. Many of them are extraordinarily well chosen and apt; they have the persuasive power of concreteness and clarity […] Lincoln knew that these ‘lies,’ these fables about animals, provided an excellent way to communicate with a people who were still close to their rural roots and understood the idioms of the forest and the barnyard.” 

Lincoln’s success over other orators and leaders of his day, including Jefferson Davis, the well-educated president of the Confederacy, stemmed from his ability to communicate his point in ways people could understand. Lincoln employed this skill deftly, even rejecting advice to shift his rhetoric away from such metaphors in important speeches. Thanks to his country education, Lincoln understood that accessing the minds of common people, and gathering their support, required speaking in their language.

“The South professed to have seceded and gone to war in defense of its rights and liberties. The chief liberty that southerners believed to be threatened by the election of Lincoln was their right to own slaves. In a public speech in 1864 in Baltimore, in a border state where the factions and abrasions of war had by then just about ground up slavery, Lincoln illustrated the paradox of conflicting definitions of liberty with an Aesopian fable. ‘The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.’” 

Twice quoted in the text, this fable perfectly illustrates Lincoln’s opinions on slavery as a hypocrisy of the concept of liberty. It also evidences Lincoln’s ability to express complex ideas in legible metaphors, and indeed this metaphor remains apt today as an expression of the dual meanings of negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty, defined by what is not taken away, is the wolf’s liberty to eat the sheep because it wants to, or the South’s liberty to own slaves. Positive liberty, defined as the liberty to choose and have self-dominion, is the sheep’s liberty to live, even though someone else (the shepherd/Lincoln) must insert themselves into the problem to establish this liberty.

“[Jefferson Davis] does not attempt to deceive us […] He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue that can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.”

While many around Lincoln called for peace, concession, negotiation, and reparation, specifically during the winter 1861 and again when the war seemed impossible to win for Republican forces in summer 1864, Lincoln remained steadfast. He believed that the war must be won for the sake of the Union and that peace talks would bring about the dissolution of the Union forever. Here he characterizes that thought through the opposition between Davis, the Confederate leader, and his own party.

“Greeley was willing to drop emancipation as a condition [of Confederate surrender]. Though the pressure on Lincoln from even staunch Republicans to do the same became so intense that the president almost caved in, he ultimately stood fast. He denied that he was ‘now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation level as I have done.’”

Lincoln’s contemporaries, even members of his own cabinet, did not appreciate the deep interconnectedness of emancipation and the Union’s continuity as Lincoln did. While the emancipation and enlisting of slaves crippled Confederate and bolstered Union forces, the promise of complete and permanent emancipation also maintained the ideals of a Union founded on liberty and sanctified Republican control of the nation.

“Lincoln insisted that the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ applied to black people as well as to whites. This powered his conviction that the founders had looked toward the ultimate extinction of slavery. That is why they did not mention the words ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ in the Constitution. ‘Thus the thing is hid away, in the Constitution,’ said Lincoln in 1854.”

Many modern and historical interpretants of the Constitution, finding no mention of slaves, understand it as a racist document or one that abets the rights of white people to own black people as a given. Lincoln, however, read the Constitution’s statement that all men are created equal as a direct statement on slavery, believing that the founding fathers supported emancipation but knew it was impossible to enforce in their own time. It is difficult to prove Lincoln’s understanding of the text, but his conviction does gesture to how Lincoln was able to yoke all his political goals to the nation’s primary texts and use his political career to enact these principles as he saw them.

“The American Civil War, according to Lincoln, was a contest to defend ordered liberty against a lawless effort by rebels to ‘break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth.’ […] ‘Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?’ Lincoln answered his rhetorical question in the negative. ‘No choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government; and so to resist force, employed for its destruction, by force, for its preservation.’ Unprecedented power had become necessary to defend liberty against unprecedented peril.”

Here Lincoln describes his exact justification for the federal government’s military action during the Civil War. He also argues for his right to take certain legal action that limited civil liberties, such as the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln always viewed the Confederate states as an illegitimate rebel group, and therefore he had complete power to defend the nation against these rebels. Casting his own offense as a defense of the nation is a rhetorical trick, as in reality the Union army took great effort to destroy Confederate resources, not just defend against their attacks.

“Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven dramatically expanded those powers at the expense of stages and individuals.” 

The Civil War forced a change in the American conception of liberty from a negative liberty to a positive one. This was centered around the emancipation of slaves as well as the government’s liberty to militarily intercede within free territories should it see fit. The 13th to 18th Amendments, which expanded the civil liberties of slaves and also state power in defining these liberties, exemplify this conceptual shift within US politics.