Abraham Lincoln and the Idea of Union

[I wrote this essay in 1991. I am posting it because (1) I think its well-written, and (2) The States' rights crowd endures (mostly in Lincoln's party, which is sad) and it is useful to have some arguments to rebut them with. I hope these are helpful.]

The Civil War remains our most compelling saga. Its characters, causes, and course loom large in our national memory and discourse. The immediate outcome is, of course, well known. The other results are still debated: was it war or revolution; was the slave-power crushed or merely diverted, did the freedmen fare worse with the yoke of slavery lifted from them? The questions go on, and many are bound up in the person of the saga's protagonist, Abraham Lincoln.

Was he truly the great emancipator, or did he cynically use abolition to climb to the presidency? Did he save the union, or recklessly send 650,000 American soldiers to their graves? And what was his lasting contribution to the United States, once the hagiographers have departed and the myths are set aside?

Interest in the Civil War peaked in the last months of 1990 as PBS broadcast the Ric Burns series, and the United States contemplated a potentially bloody ground war in the Persian Gulf. On that occasion, columnist George Will wrote that the Civil War was the inescapable ingredient of our history, that in that struggle the nation was distilled.

Will, as have many others, noted that in 1860 the United States was a plural noun; in 1865 it was a singular noun. Where before the great tragedy, it was arguable that the United States ”were gathered, at their discretion and pleasure, in a compact as self governing states; when the war was ended the idea that the United States is" an indivisible union, a nation and a people was a marker firmly fixed in the mental landscape of Lincoln's America -- because he put it there.

In the beginning, in the months following 1860 elections, the breaking of the union seemed a certain thing. Secession had the tacit support of two ex-presidents, John Tyler and Franklin Pierce, and was thought unavoidable by the soon to depart incumbent, James Buchanan. Abraham Lincoln had other ideas however.

First a look at the historical arguments preceding Abraham Lincoln's defense of the union.

South Carolina's John C. Calhoun was the architect of States' Rights. In the 1820's and 30's he articulated the idea that the various states joined the union voluntarily, and could depart voluntarily as well. This was the fulcrum of Calhoun's argument that the federal government could impose no law on any state unless the state was agreeable to the law, and that any state could declare any federal law "null and void" within their state. The "right" of the states to withdraw from the union was a check on the federal government's inclination to impose its will on the states. Calhoun was challenged on practical grounds by Andrew Jackson during the secession crisis of 1832. Jackson knew well that a government such as Calhoun envisioned was unworkable. Moreover he knew that if the states were allowed to go their separate ways, a rump United states would be short work for the European Powers. Jackson defused the first threat of secession by mobilizing the army to march on South Carolina, while offering the secessionists an opportunity to save face.

Calhoun was challenged on philosophical grounds by Daniel Webster in the latter's January 1830 speech in reply to Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina. The occasion was a debate on appropriations for the western territories. Hayne was to present the southern case; Benton of Missouri would speak for the west; Webster was expected to speak for the north. Calhoun, as Vice President and presiding over the Senate debate, was officially in the role of observer, and often used Hayne to advance his agenda of states' rights.

Hayne spoke fulsomely of the glorious role South Carolina's patriots played in the revolution, advancing with their blood, the principals that were inherent in states' rights. He reiterated his master's contention that any law thought injurious to South Carolina or other states of the region would be nullified by those states, and that the others must accept it as the rights of the states for which the founders fought. In short, the nation was a league of sovereign states, bound together by a pact, and that bad faith by a tyrannical majority constituted grounds for breaking the pact.

In Webster's reply, delivered on January 27th, 1830, he spoke of the union of people, rather than states, forged by the Declaration of Independence and the revolution. This union, he declared existed before the constitution enumerated the role of states and federal governments, and was inseparable. Speaking, as protocol permitted, to the president of the senate (Calhoun), Webster said, "Is [the government] the creature of the State Legislature, or the creature of the people?... It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people... I hold it to be a popular government, erected by the people; those who administer it responsible to the people; and itself capable of being amended and modified, just as the people may choose it should be... We are here to administer a constitution emanating immediately from the people, and trusted by them to our administration. It is not the creature of the State governments."

In his speech Webster emphasized the homogenization of the Continental Army by the end of the revolution to show that it was ”Americans" who wrested independence from England, not Carolinians,or Virginians, or New Yorkers; and that those Americans were fighting for the ideal expressed in the Declaration of Independence which was the founding document of the American nation.

Webster's Reply to Hayne was the most notable speech of its day. It was copied and distributed throughout the country. Schoolboys memorized and rendered the speech in contests. In Illinois, aspiring politician and future lawyer Abraham Lincoln thought it was the greatest American speech. Lincoln's political views were approaching maturity in 1830, and the Reply to Hayne was a significant ingredient in the mix. In 1858, Lincoln consulted Reply to Hayne as he prepared his House Divided speech. In the First Inaugural, Lincoln made his case for preserving the union by borrowing from Webster: "Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the union itself. The Union is much older than the constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association of 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was 'to form a more perfect union'."

Lincoln and Webster both subscribed to the notion that the Declaration, the ”founding document" of the nation, enunciated a people's desire to exist as a nation. This was the philosophical basis for treating secession as rebellion rather than a revolution, or even counter-revolution, against sectional tyranny. Hearkening back to James Wilson's and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story's views, the Lincoln/Webster view has a more notable pedigree than that of John C. Calhoun.

To Lincoln, secession "was simply a wicked exercise of physical power" -- without legal or moral justification. "It may seem strange," he said of the Confederate leaders, "that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces." The insurrection was prompted by the Republican's victory in the 1860 election, which was accomplished by commanding a majority of electoral votes in an election conducted in accordance with the Constitution. The secessionists lost an election and wanted to leave the country as a result.

Moreover to Abraham Lincoln, the Union represented a still fragile experiment in liberty; that could be all to easily extinguished if the minority exercised, ala Calhoun's theory of States' rights, the prerogative of departing whenever its whims were not granted. To Lincoln, in 1861, the evolution of civilization stood at a junction and could pass on to liberty or tyranny. He expressed the thought at the conclusion of his 2nd annual address to Congress in 1862, "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve, we shall nobly save, or meanly lose the last best hope of earth."

Lincoln's idea of Union was expressed in most of his actions as a war president. His refusal to free slaves, except as a measure of military necessity (under his constitutional power as commander in chief of the Army and Navy) was based on his belief that the act of secession, while it may have made criminals of them, did not deprive the secessionists of their protections under the constitution. Slaves were constitutionally protected property, and Lincoln had taken an oath to protect and preserve the constitution for all Americans, even those that temporarily didn't consider themselves Americans. Similarly, while he privately opposed the Crittenden Amendment (1861), which would have guaranteed the continuation of slavery and its introduction into new territories, Lincoln, as president, promised that he would not interfere with its ratification and would enforce its provisions

Ironically, with Crittenden the South achieved everything it had sought before the 1860 election. Their refusal to accept Lincoln's offer to enforce Crittenden if it were passed and ratified undercut the philosophical and legal basis of their claim to a right to secede from the union, and strengthened the Republican's contention that they were basically sore losers.



Notes on the Gettysburg Address

To fully appreciate the impact of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,it is necessary to examine some aspects of American nationalism.

Nationalism, as I use the term here, should not be confused with that quality which in the 1960's was descriptive of mindless obedience to the state. Rather I use the word in its truer meaning of a desire of people sharing common heritages to exist as a nation.

In the United States of America, our shared heritage is a thing of ideas; rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In the America of 1860, the concept of an American Nation was different than today. Shelby Foote characterized it noting that "before the Civil War, it was customary to say - the United States are ..... After the war, it became - the United States is ......" The difference is profound. In the first instance the U.S. is a collective, plural, entity; in the second it is a single entity, united by common bonds, history, and vision.

It is this latter view that is largely Abraham Lincoln's legacy. It was his personal view that carried him from a young Whig, or National Republican, in the 1830's to the White House in 1860. Lincoln was a pupil of the most important nationalist figure of the mid-century, Henry Clay. He even described Henry Clay as his "beau ideal" in the Congressional races of the 1840's.

Faced with the secession crisis on his inauguration as President, Lincoln's dedication to the principle of an American Nation allowed no compromise to Union. In correspondence Lincoln had described fears that the American experiment in liberty was in jeopardy. In his second address to Congress he referred to America as the "Last best hope of earth". These sentiments were no doubt with him in the hours before he spoke on November 19th, 1863.

Lincoln was also, in my opinion, the most literate of our presidents. His writing was remarkably free of the rococo construction and mellifluous phrases of the day. The Gettysburg Address is, among all his writings, the most poetic, and probably reflects his deepest thoughts on the war, and the horrible price the nation was paying to come into its own - as he saw it.

In short, this speech (invocation seems more appropriate) is one of the seminal passages in our national consciousness. It is one of our defining documents, as is the Declaration. And with the Declaration, it sets forth for all men the clear intent and justification for our (his) actions. "That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

For additional information, the following references are recommended:

James M. MacPherson, ”Abraham Lincoln and the Second AmericanRevolution", 1991, Oxford University Press, New York

Garry Wills, ”Lincoln at Gettysburg", 1992, Simon and Schuster, NewYork

David Donald, ”Lincoln Reconsidered", 5th edition, 1961, VintagePress, New York

William Safire, ”Freedom", 1987, Doubleday, New York