President Lincoln and the South

 By the time Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4^th, 1860, the Confederacy had already been born, giving visible evidence to the many threats of secession resulting from the 1860 election. Lincoln, however, in deference to the sitting President James Buchanan, never revealed any policies toward the South other than to repeat that he was not in favor of war and that “there need be no bloodshed…there is no necessity for it.” (Philadelphia, February 22, 1861)

 

Constitutional Differences between North and South

 

Lincoln’s supporters attempted to persuade the South that the newly elected Republican President would not tamper with slavery in the South. Harper’s Weekly of December 1, 1860, quotes Illinois Senator Trumbull from a speech delivered in Springfield stating that, “When inaugurated he [Lincoln] will be the President of the whole country…” and would protect and defend the laws of the nation.

 

Lincoln had written Stephen Douglas shortly after the election, asking Douglas to assure the South that the Republicans had no intention to “interfere with the slaves, or with them [the South], about their slaves.” Douglas replied that the Union could never be preserved without force and conveyed to Lincoln the moral arguments held by the South regarding slavery, something historian Page Smith refers to as the “religion” of the South.

 

Southern views, however, held that the Union was a confederation, in which the individual states were sovereign and exercised rights not encumbered by the notion of federalism. This idea can be traced back to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions and the decades-long debates over nullification.

 

In defending the Union and denying the Southern position, Lincoln studied the early Supreme Court opinions of John Marshall, notably such cases as McColloch v. Maryland that stressed national supremacy. Justifying his use of war powers to the July 1861 Congress, Lincoln stated that, “no choice was left but to call out the war power…and so to resist force employed for its destruction, by force for its preservation.”

 

Preparing for the Coming War

 

In December 1860, many Southern state legislatures authorized the formation of militias and other military units in anticipation of the conflict that would surely result from eventual secession. On December 1^st, North Carolina’s governor recommended the “enrollment of all men between eighteen and forty-five years” to comprise a corps of ten thousand men.

 

In the North it was NY Senator William Henry Seward and General Winfield Scott who began to implement war plans, Scott moving his headquarters from New York City to Washington in December and beginning the process of building a volunteer militia, numbering 3,500 by inauguration day. Lincoln, however, remained silent on such matters. His first military order would be the night of the inauguration: a message to Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter reassuring support.

 

Lincoln’s Position as President-Elect

 

It is wrong to suggest that Lincoln could have stopped South Carolina from leaving the Union, followed shortly thereafter by other Deep South states. It is also wrong to conclude that Lincoln caused the secession of Southern states. Stephen Douglas, who more than most men saw Lincoln as an implacable adversary, stated in a letter that, “…the mere election of any man to the Presidency…does not of itself furnish any just cause or reasonable ground for dissolving the Federal Union.”

 

Following the formation of the Confederacy and prior to the inauguration, Lincoln, on February 21^st, used the backdrop of Trenton, NJ to compare the patriot’s struggles at that famous battle with the struggles facing the nation in 1861. He never intimated war and even after the surrender of Fort Sumter called the action “insurrection,” ironically, the same term used by the South for slave rebellions.

 

Sources:

 

David Detzer, Dissonance: the Turbulent Days Between Fort Sumter and Bull Run (Harcourt, Inc, 2006)

Harper’s Weekly, Vol. IV, No. 205, December 1, 1860, p.759.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “War and the Constitution: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt,” Lincoln the War President (Oxford University Press, 1992)

Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age: A People’s History of the Ante-Bellum Years (McGraw Hill Book Company, 1981)

Published first April 30, 2009 in Suite101 by M.Streich. copyright