Anticipating the renewed discussion of the Civil War that will be precipitated by the coming 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne takes great pains to emphasize today what no reasonable historian denies: that without slavery there would have been no civil war. He doesn’t want any claptrap about “states’ rights” to interfere with the one true history lesson he wants The War to teach: that “there is to this day too much evasion of how integral race, racism and racial conflict are to our national story.”
Dionne thus joins a long line of waving the bloody shirt. “For those of you who are too young remember,” I wrote here, “for more than a generation after the Civil War ‘waving the bloody shirt‘ was a popular Republican tactic used to remind voters of the Democrats’ sympathy with the South.” I quoted a good example here from Robert Ingersoll, a Union officer and post-war orator of some note:
Every man that denied Union prisoners even the worm-eaten crust of famine, and when some poor emaciated Union patriot, driven to insanity by famine, saw in an insane dream the face of his mother, and she beckoned him and he followed, hoping to press her lips once again against his fevered face, and when he stepped one step beyond the dead line the wretch that put the bullet through his loving, throbbing heart was and is a Democrat.
“Never mind,” I noted in that same post, that
according to War Department figures, 13% of the Confederate prisoners in Union prisons died, compared to 8% of the Union prisoners in Confederate prisons. “Waving the bloody shirt” was effective, and it continues to this day from time to time, with only the names of the parties changed.
As is usual with superficial accounts, Dionne conflates two quite separate questions — 1) What caused secession? 2) What caused The War? — and actually leaves out half of each. It is true that there would have been no secession if slavery had never existed, but it is also true that there would have been no secession if there had been no opposition to slavery. The fact that slavery was evil and opposition to it was moral does not mean that slavery alone caused secession. Similarly, secession alone did not cause The War. The North, had it been less nationalistic and intent on preserving the Union as it was, could have let the “erring sisters” go in peace. (For a still intriguing if not altogether persuasive argument that avoiding war would have been better, see “Toward A New Civil War Revisionism,” The American Scholar 38 (Spring 1969), 250-59; reprinted in Gerald N. Grob and George Athan Bilias, eds., Interpretations of American History, Vol. I. New York: The Free Press, 1972, pp. 459-479. That article was criticized in “The American Civil War: Triumph Through Tragedy,” Civil War History 20 (Sept. 1974), 239-250; and the criticism was demolished by the original author in “The American Civil War and the Problem of ‘Presentism,’” Civil War History 21 (Sept. 1975), 242-253.)
None of which is to say Dionne is wrong about “how integral race, racism and racial conflict are to our national story,” but that story is not as one-dimensional as it is here and in most moralistic history lessons. Although slavery, for example, was certainly a leading cause of The War, abolishing slavery was much more its effect than its purpose. Dionne’s story has no room for the fact that Lincoln had been willing in 1861 to support a Constitutional amendment that would have protected slavery forever where it already existed or for the war aims that he expressed so clearly in a letter to Horace Greeley, editor of the influential New York Tribune, on August 22, 1862, over a year into the war:
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. 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. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. 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. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.
True to his word, the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln issued several months later, on January 1, 1863, purported to free only those slaves held “within the rebellious states,” not in states and areas in the Union or under the control of Union armies. Thus, as I noted in The Civil War … Then And Now:
It is certainly true that many Southerners were motivated by a desire to preserve slavery, and even those not primarily so motivated knew that a Southern victory would serve to protect slavery. With the exception of a relatively small scattering of abolitionists and abolitionist sympathizers, however, the overriding war aim of the North, and the purpose that impelled the vast majority of volunteers into the blue ranks, was not at all concern about the welfare of blacks, slave or free, but a desire to preserve the Union.
Much of the determination in what is now the midwest to prevent slavery spreading there was rooted in a racist determination to keep blacks, slave or free, from moving in. Similarly, after The War much of the motive for a sweeping Reconstruction in the South was to make the region habitable for the former slaves … so they would stay there. When, late in The War, emancipation was gradually added as a war aim, the motivation was much more military than moral, i.e., the recognition that the most effective way to attack a slave power is to attack slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation did not even free slaves in territory controlled by Union forces but only in areas still in rebellion.
In short, I agree with Dionne that The War — and, I would add and emphasize, its aftermath — have much to teach us, but I believe those most in need of learning its lessons are not Southern states righters but Dionne’s Democrats and liberal fellow travelers who have turned their backs on their abolitionist and Radical Republican ancestors. As I have argued too many times to cite, such as in Equal Protection And Original Intent:
…. In the fight over the form the 14th Amendment would take, the Radical Republicans [and former abolitionists] such as Wendell Philips [Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, etc.] who wanted a clear requirement of colorblindness were defeated by the “moderates’ who wanted to protect the states’ ability to engage in discrimination, such as segregating schools, that they thought reasonable. How ironic that the heirs of those dead “moderates” are today’s preferentialists…
And here:
It is one of the many ironies in the strange career of racial equality that in order to defend racial preferences liberals today rely on purposefully ambiguous language resulting from the desire of the framers of the 14th Amendment to preserve segregation and states rights, while the critics of racial preferences, who are usually viewed as conservatives, echo the radicals who wanted to proscribe all racial distinctions. Today … these “conservatives” are much more likely than liberals to honor Justice John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent assertion in his Plessy v. Ferguson dissent that “our Constitution is colorblind.”
And here:
the legal theory underlying the Plessy decision is that equal protection does not require colorblindness and hence that racial discrimination can in many circumstances be reasonable and hence constitutional. The preferentialist argument today is an unwitting echo of Plessy.
But then I suppose there’s no surprise here, since modern liberalism has abandoned (whether or not “unwittingly”) a number of its former foundational principles (such as a First Amendment that would not tolerate campus speech codes or restrictions of political speech via “campaign finance reform”; a belief in strict neutrality not only between the races but also between church and state; and a Constitution whose commerce and necessary and proper clauses recognized at least some limits on federal power; etc.).
