Off Topic Tuesday: Lincoln, O'Reilly and the Unneccessary War

Recently Fox News big-shot Bill O’Reilly has been out promoting “his” new book (co-written with a historian friend of his) about Abraham Lincoln who, O’Reilly says, was the greatest American president of all-time. In a real “meeting of the minds” O’Reilly was going on about how great Lincoln was to Glenn Beck, stating, as part of his greatness, how “everyone” hated him. Is that really supposed to be a sign of greatness for the leader of a democratic republic? I find it rather odd that on so many occasions the people who promote the idea of majority approval as the best way of choosing a head of state also applaud those presidents who most ignore public opinion and the will of the majority. Yet, such is the case. I also find it extremely odd that Lincoln, the man upheld as the “great unifier” and one of the most exemplary statesmen in American history, is the same man who had to resort to the armed force of the largest army in the world and a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people in order to achieve that “unity”.

If Lincoln was such a wise and gifted statesman, shouldn’t he have been able to hold the country together and reach a political solution without resorting to butchering hundreds of thousands of men, starving women and children and burning cities? Preserving the Union was, of course, only part of it. The other issue, and majority opinion says the dominant issue, was slavery. Again though, no other major power had to kill hundreds of thousands of people in order to abolish slavery. The British did it peacefully, the Dutch did it peacefully, Mexico did it peacefully and all long before the United States ever even got serious about the issue. There has also been a lot of confusion (I don’t know why) about the Confederate position on slavery. The Confederate Constitution is not hard to find. Importing slaves was forbidden but slavery was legal. The Confederate government could never abolish slavery but state governments could. There seems to be some confusion about this, again I am not sure why, as there was really no restrictions the government could put on the states for or against slavery since the backbone of the Confederacy was the right to secede and any state could at any point secede over any issue they wished. After some heated debate it was decided that “free” states could join the Confederacy if any would choose to at some point. But, slavery was certainly accepted -no doubt about it.

However, most who find Lincoln objectionable do not do so because of his opposition to slavery. As with any politician, he at times tried to play both sides of the issue and it was the preservation of the Union that was always his paramount issue. That does not mean, of course, that slavery did not matter to him. Although “Honest Abe” was not always honest about it, there should be no doubt that he was against slavery and wanted to see it wiped from the American continent. It is also true that, even as an anti-slavery sympathizer, he certainly did not possess modern attitudes on the subject of race. He did not think races were equal nor did he think that the “Black” and “White” races could live together peacefully. However, by the standards of his time he was certainly not a “racist” and most of those who were against slavery would have held similar views to the President on the subject of race. It would take many years for attitudes to change in the direction of seeing no races at all. Even today, it seems, that point has not been reached by any racial group.

I know of no one who dislikes Lincoln today because he was against slavery. I do know some people who dislike him because of how he went about saving the Union and doing away with slavery -brutal military force. I tend to think that there would not have been such a long and ugly struggle for civil rights and so much turmoil over the issue of race if slavery had been abolished peacefully, even if it took a step-by-step process that took a little longer than the abolitionists would like. I say that because the war Lincoln fought against the south did not make southerners realize that slavery was wrong. If anything, it made many hate the former slaves all the more as the north identified the slaves as the cause of the whole horrific war and all of the suffering the south endured during and after the war. The south did not give up slavery because they realized it was immoral, they did it because someone was holding a gun to their head.

There is also the age old question of whether two wrongs make a right. Was getting rid of the evil of slavery without going through legal means worth the evil of a war that devastated a country, killed 620,000 soldiers and killed 50,000 southern civilians? Lincoln said he opposed the right of secession yet he supported the secession of the pro-union counties of Virginia to create the state of West Virginia which gave his party more support in Congress. When (hopeless) amendments were introduced to abolish slavery when Lincoln was a congressman, Lincoln voted against them. In his inaugural address he supported enshrining slavery in the U.S. Constitution if that would prevent southern states from seceding. In light of other private words of his, I have no doubt about his opposition to slavery yet he was certainly not being honest and purely principled in that regard. He arrested civilians, even elected officials, who opposed his war or who criticized his government or who simply advocated making peace with the south. He condemned the southerners as traitors and yet the U.S. Constitution defined treason as making war against “the states” which is exactly what Lincoln himself was doing. He suspended basic civil liberties, had civilians tried by military courts and his military forces purposely targeted innocent civilians in the south.

Another area which receives scant attention is the decision of the Lincoln administration to suspend the prisoner exchange cartel during the war. I have studied this area in some depth and there is no one on earth, regardless of all circumstances, who could not be horrified by the sickening conditions that prevailed in the overcrowded, notorious prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Originally built to hold 8,000 men at the height of the war it had to contain some 33,000 U.S. prisoners at a time when the southerners themselves were starving due to the ravages of the northern armies and the northern blockade of the coast. At the worst period some 100 men died at Andersonville every day from disease and malnutrition. Yet, the Lincoln administration suspended all prisoner exchanges, condemning tens of thousands of their own soldiers to a slow, lingering, excruciating death from starvation, scurvy, dysentery or some other combination of diseases. Apologists then and now say this was done in protest to the Confederates not exchanging Black Union soldiers. Other evidence, however, suggests that this was done because the north knew southern prisoners were breaking their paroles and rejoining the war and that if prisoner exchanges were halted this would weaken the southern war effort whereas northern prisoners could be written off since the population was so much greater in the north, their losses could always be replaced. In short, their men in Andersonville were deemed expendable.

This always struck me as one of the most horrific but often overlooked “crimes” of the Lincoln administration. And, even if it were done on principle, it still seems despicable to me to refuse to at least save those they could. If the White soldiers had refused to be exchanged without their Black comrades that would have been an immensely admirable sacrifice to make but it should have been up to them and not left to the government to simply ‘write off’ tens of thousands of their own soldiers who were left to die in the most slow and excruciating way possible. And yet, this was the same government that took no action against Major General Benjamin “the Beast” Butler who authorized his troops to rape southern women when he was military governor of New Orleans because they were insulting the Union occupation forces. This was the same government that took no action, indeed even encouraged, the pillaging of cities, the burning of private homes and the killing of civilians.

What Lincoln had in his heart is known only to him and God. Ordinarily one might include his spiritual counsel in that but Lincoln was the first (and so far only) U.S. President that was never a member of any church. Based on his actions I have no doubt that he was absolutely opposed to slavery and he may be commended for that. But his record of that being the priority for his prosecution of the war is sketchy to say the least. He dismissed and court-martialed General John C. Fremont in the first year of the war for abolishing slavery in Missouri (Lincoln later pardoned him). And, as many now know, when he issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation it applied only to those areas “in rebellion” against the United States, in other words it applied only to those parts of the country he could not control but not to those slave-holding states he did control. Very few were actually freed by the decree with real emancipation not coming until the passage of the XIII Amendment. Lincoln would have given all sorts of political, military and diplomatic reasons for why this was his decision, but is that really a representation of “the greatest” President of all time?

It also makes me chuckle to see Lincoln being applauded by modern-day “conservatives” and “traditionalists” (Bill O’Reilly doesn’t like to say ‘conservative’ but calls himself a ‘traditionalist’) when you look at Lincoln in a world context. There was no revolution or revolutionary in Europe that the Unionists (especially abolitionists, Freemasons, Protestants and liberal democrats) of the north who supported Lincoln did not celebrate at every opportunity. They cheered the anti-Hapsburg revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, they celebrated the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi who even offered to join the war but refused when Lincoln only offered him the rank of major general rather than total command of all Union forces. “Republican Clubs” were formed in almost every major city, with the full endorsement of Lincoln, to raise money in support of the anti-clerical Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez. Lincoln gave protection and even high military rank to a number of Irish revolutionaries a number of whom (after Lincoln’s death) led the so-called Fenian Raids into Canada in the absurd hope of holding the dominion hostage in return for Irish independence. The list goes on and on and it is no wonder that someone like Pope Pius IX would write sympathetically to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, certainly not because of any support for slavery (which his papal predecessor had strongly condemned) but because he viewed him as a fellow victim of the liberal nationalist wave that was sweeping the western world.

At the end of the day, everyone is entitled to their own opinion on Lincoln of course. The book O’Reilly wrote focuses mostly on his assassination and I would fully agree that the assassination of Lincoln was a horrible and tragic crime and as much a disaster for the south as it was for the north. As harsh as he had been at war Lincoln had advocated reconciliation rather than retribution once it was over. However, I cannot go along with anyone claiming he was “the greatest President in American history”. The man killed more Americans than the Kaiser, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Kim Il-Sung, Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein combined. The greatest American President would have found a way to hold the Union together and abolish slavery without resorting to brute force that left hundreds of thousands of his fellow Americans dead and half the country in ruins (you know, like the British, Dutch, Russian, Brazilian etc monarchs were all able to do). A man hailed as “the Great Unifier” would not have presided over the secession of half the country in the first place and then restored unity only by devastation, starvation and a million bayonets. In his heart he may have been a good man with good intentions, but the “gold standard of leadership” as O’Reilly calls him, he certainly was not.