Dogmas of the stormy present confuse Civil War debate

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"Which part of the Civil War 'could have been negotiated'? The slavery part? The secession part? Whether Lincoln should have preserved the Union?"
Liz Cheney, X post, 2024

"I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution ... has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. ...[H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."
Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 1861

"If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them . ... If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
Abraham Lincoln, letter to Horace Greeley, 1862

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It is wearingly characteristic of our feverish times that our politicians and pundits have fallen into a brawl about the causes of the Civil War — apparently finding the disputes of the past century and a half insufficient to satisfy their appetite for bickering. And it's still more typical of our era that our Civil War debate is being conducted at a level of sophistication roughly worthy of a precocious fourth-grader.

It was bad enough several weeks back, when Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and presidential hopeful, blundered through an evasive answer about the Civil War's origins, managing somehow to leave out slavery. She then stumbled through an effort to correct herself ("I had Black friends growing up") after a chorus of righteous indignation had proclaimed, as the New York Times' Paul Krugman put it, that "of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn't about states' rights ... ." President Joe Biden has lately echoed this theme.

Last weekend, a second and even more bombastic front opened in our Civil War re-enactment when former President Donald Trump weighed in, rambling on about how the Civil War controversy "could have been negotiated." If only some dealmaker more capable than Lincoln had been available, right?

This in turn inspired that great pontificator Liz Cheney to open fire with what she apparently considers an unanswerable question: Which part of the Civil War could have been negotiated?

Lincoln answered that question clearly, many times, in the statements quoted above and in dozens of other places. It was the "slavery part" — but not the "secession part" — that he and many other northern unionists were prepared to negotiate. It was the South that was convinced — and would in time convince Lincoln — that the two issues could not be separated, and that only by abolishing slavery could the union be saved.

The Krugman/Biden view is simplistic. Certainly slavery had become by far the most important and unsplittable difference between the Northern and Southern states in America's first eight decades of national life; without it, there likely would have been no war. But what everyone knew at the time was that secession, not slavery, was what turned a bitter political and moral conflict into a bloodbath.

And secession was the ultimate states' rights claim. It was the claimed right to "dissolve the political bands" between two peoples, as the Declaration of Independence had put it, and to separate, as America had separated from Britain, as Texas had separated from Mexico and as the U.S. would soon enough help Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and other possessions to separate from Spain.

At his inauguration, Lincoln expressed "no objection" to a constitutional amendment guaranteeing slavery's permanent political survival. After 16 months of war, about a month after writing the famous letter cited above, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and settled for the moment for "freeing some [slaves] and leaving others alone" — freeing those in areas still in rebellion but not those in areas under federal authority.

The issue Lincoln and other Republicans would not compromise about was the expansion of slavery into new territories. Lincoln had said arresting slavery's growth in this way would put the institution where it belonged, "in the course of ultimate extinction." Whether he meant slavery, so limited, would be extinguished by economic or by political forces he didn't say. But the South never forgot what he did say.

Nonetheless, before the year 1862 was out, Lincoln went even further in an effort to negotiate. In his second annual message to Congress, Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment that would have provided compensation to slave owners in any state that abolished the institution any time before 1900 — 37 years later. The proposal went nowhere, but it was in support of it that Lincoln crafted some of his most ringing language: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present," he declared. "As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."

None of this alters the historical fact that Lincoln and millions of other Americans of his day hated slavery. "If slavery is not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong." But they also knew firsthand something that, oddly enough, has been emphasized in the current debate mainly by Trump, not ordinarily Mr. Sensitivity — the fact that the Civil War and its carnage were "horrible" and "vicious."

So was slavery itself. But Civil War era Americans did not suppose, as modern Americans sometimes seem to, that slavery was unusual or new, or unique to America or the white race. They knew it to be a cruel practice as old and widespread as civilization, familiar to every race, continent and culture. Millions nonetheless believed, and rightly so, that it was a shame and a moral disgrace that it had endured in America so long.

But perhaps they can be forgiven for searching in vain for any negotiated solution that might have avoided or shortened the "mighty scourge of war" Lincoln would describe at his second inauguration, in which "every drop of blood drawn with the lash" was "paid by another drawn with the sword."

D.J. Tice is at doug.tice@startribune.com.