This Day in Civil War History (Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Sums Up Conflict Masterfully)

March 4, 1865—As the fanatic who would kill him a month later stared from the crowd, Abraham Lincoln reached out to the wounded South by resolving in his Second Inaugural Address to “bind up the nation’s wounds”—but also explained, in terms that had to have set John Wilkes Booth’s teeth on edge, what caused the remorseless Civil War in the first place.

Lincoln’s address can be read in several ways: a) as a longtime religious skeptic’s hard-won understanding of theodicy, or the justice of God; b) as a reflection of the compassion of one of America’s most deeply humane Presidents; or c) especially in its “with malice toward none, with charity for all” peroration, as a masterpiece of political prose ranking with Thucydides’ recapping of Pericles’ Funeral Oration.

But there’s another way to look at the speech, one that I don’t think has gained much traction, partly because it is rendered in the kind of deeply analytical, prosaic tone that Lincoln used throughout his Cooper Union address (one that a post of mine discussed earlier this week.)

As in the Gettysburg Address, the President was trying to make Americans understand why a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives had to occur and must be won. Here’s how Lincoln used the Second Inaugural Address to discuss the state of affairs on the brink of the Civil Wart:

“One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.”

What Lincoln was talking about was and is of more than academic interest for both historians and the general public: Was this a war about saving the Union, or eradicating slavery? It mattered also to Lincoln himself, as his own thinking on the subject had evolved in four years. At the beginning of the conflict, he was careful not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, lest he lose the border states as well as the 11 that had already seceded. But as he saw how the South was using slaves to keep their economy afloat and sustain the war effort, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, serving notice that, as the North regained territory, the "peculiar institution" would be in tatters.

One sentence leaps out in the paragraph I just quoted: “All knew that this interest [slaveholding] was somehow the cause of the war.” One word throws the whole thing off kilter, reflecting a situation of greater flux and ambivalence than we recognize today: “somehow.”

Lincoln was recognizing individual choice, of a kind, with that single word. There were, of course, members of the Northern Army who were slaveholders, such as the great general George H. Thomas. On the other side, the Confederate Army included poor whites who did not own slaves, and others up the ranks who abominated “the peculiar institution.”

And yet, there is that loaded phrase, “all knew.” It was perfectly self-evident, Lincoln was saying, that slaveowners were represented disproportionately among those calling for secession. John Wilkes Booth—who, at this time, was only planning to kidnap the President, not murder him—could only fume when Lincoln assigned the primary responsibility for bringing on the war: “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.”

Lincoln was being blunt in a way that those gathered to honor his memory (including son Robert) at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial six decades later could not be. He was being honored by the people “for whom he saved the Union,” the inscription in the memorial read--not for extending freedom to slaves. It would take the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--and the changing historiography that followed--before Lincoln's revolutionary assault on slavery could be understood in all its dimensions.

Among the myths that have grown about Lincoln is that he would have taken a far gentler line toward the beaten South than the Radical Republicans. For nearly a century, this was the argument espoused by those who held that Reconstruction was a hopelessly corrupt process.

To be sure, Lincoln did differ with the Radicals on some points throughout the war, and his “Ten Percent Plan” (i.e., a state could be readmitted to the Union with just 10% swearing allegiance) was easier than the “Ironclad Oath” demanded by the Radicals. But in Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths, biographer Stephen B. Oates takes effective issue with the old Reconstruction historiography. Among the points he makes:

* Lincoln was on good personal terms with several key Radical Republicans;

* Once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he refused to go back on his promise to free the slaves—and in fact, what he had issued as a matter of military necessity, he later decided to make a permanent law of the land through passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

* He disenfranchised former officeholders in the Confederacy.

* He acknowledged that an army might need to be kept in the South for awhile after the war to help freed slaves maintain their freedom.

* By the end of his life, Lincoln was talking, in an admittedly tentative way, about extending legal rights and at least some voting rights, to African-American soldiers.

Oates might also have mentioned these other points that would have prevented Lincoln from throwing in his lot with the racists:

First, while willing to accommodate people, most of his positions were non-negotiable. Thus, before the war, while willing to pass legislation that slavery would not be touched where slavery also existed, he refused to compromise on the Republican ban on extending slavery into the territories.

Second, Lincoln was willing to go to extraordinary lengths—including continuing the conflict at all when it was wildly unpopular—to achieve his policy objectives. I doubt he would let his Reconstruction policy go down in flames after he had waged such unrelenting war.

Finally, though Lincoln had, in his debates seven years before with Stephen A. Douglas, been careful to say he was not for full-fledged equality for blacks, he also noted that when it came to earning what they had worked for, they were the equal of himself or any man. It is inconceivable, then, that he would permit the steady economic deprivation that the South sought to impose on blacks after the war.