Themes of the American Civil War

Lincoln and the Union
There area number of strands in the rope which bound Lincoln resolutely to the Union, this favored land as he described it in his First Inaugural
Address.
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These included his profound faith in the nation’s material potential by temperament an “improver,” he watched with pleasure the Union’s galloping economic progress, to which his political career in the sands had been chiefly devoted.
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More commonly, however, Lincoln addressed the moral and political purposes of the Union. Central to his faith were the Revolution’s remarkable legacies, and the republic’s cornerstones the Declaration of Independence, with its philosophical celebration of equality, and the Federal Constitution, the guarantor of freedom. Thanks to the Founding Fathers, the United States enjoyed a unique and unprecedented liberty, whose distinctive features included self-government, or government by the consent of the governed, a Bill of Rights which guaranteed a variety of religious and civil freedoms, and a commitment to meritocracy.
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Lincoln shared in the widespread sense of American exceptionalism,
or uniqueness.“Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men . . .; ours began, by affirming those rights The
American Union had a special role in world history, a duty to act as a beacon of liberty to all. When the South Carolinians turned their guns on Fort
Sumter they pressed an issue which had cosmic, not just local, meaning:
It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. . . . It forces us to ask . . Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
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In his First Inaugural Address and his special message of July, Lincoln played the political philosopher, the historian and the pragmatist to show why the Union had to be perpetual. The political philosopher declared that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination Acquiescence in secession was acquiescence in anarchy,
the acceptance of minority rule, an invitation to repeated secessions that would balkanize North America. Lincoln the historian insisted that the
Union was much older than the Constitution of 1787, having been formed even before the Declaration of 1776. The object of the Federal Constitution had been “to form a more perfect union.” And then there were the practical constraints of geography Physically speaking, we cannot separate. . . A husband and wife maybe divorced, and go . . . beyond the reach of each other but the different parts of our country cannot do this.”
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Ultimately,
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Richard Carwardine

though, Lincoln’s vision of the Union drew lesson a calculation of practicalities than on a romantic, even spiritual, feeling. Alexander H.
Stephens, Lincoln’s Whig associate from Georgia, and the Vice-president of the Confederacy, later reflected that Lincoln’s Unionism assumed the character of religious mysticism.
The prewar Lincoln celebrated the Union as a matchless instrument of liberty even though it simultaneously tightened the shackles and manacles of the slave. As the war progressed he came to see that, to preserve the freedoms honored by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,
he had to embrace emancipation. But he moved cautiously. He made no mention of slavery when he defined the administration’s purpose in his message to Congress early in the conflict. During the first twelvemonths or so of the war he overturned the military emancipations of Generals John C. Frémont and David Hunter he sacked his Secretary of War, Simon
Cameron, for publicly proposing the arming of black soldiers he continued to cherish cautious schemes of compensated emancipation and the colonizing of free blacks in overseas settlements. He was unenthusiastic about the two Confiscation Acts passed by Congress. When Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune published his Prayer of Twenty Million calling on the President to grasp the nettle of emancipation, Lincoln’s reply appeared only to confirm his cautious pragmatism. The Emancipation Proclamation,
when finally issued on New Year’s Day, 1863, freed only those slaves over whom the proclamation could have no immediate influence.
Over the next two years, however, Lincoln followed through the logic of that proclamation, by arming black troops, refusing to renege on the promise to emancipate, invoking anew birth of freedom in the majesty of the
Gettysburg Address, incorporating in the Republican Party’s platform in 1864 the promise to secure a constitutional amendment ending slavery,
and using presidential patronage after his reelection to ensure that Congress voted for that very amendment. On the eve of his death, Lincoln was even proposing that certain categories of freedmen be given the vote. The circumstances of war had allowed Lincoln legitimately to redefine the purpose of the Union so as to give freer rein to his own natural antislavery instincts.
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Lincoln refused to compromise that vision of the Union. For as long as he was President, and while the nation remained sundered, he would continue the fight. The photographic portraits of Lincoln, aged and fatigued,
in the final months of the war area measure of the personal cost of that resolve. There is no clearer statement of his determination than his words in the summer of 1864, as the Union armies under Grant suffered battlefield slaughter on an unprecedented scale. We accepted this war fora worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. . . . It has taken three years it was begun or accepted upon the line of restoring the
Lincoln and the Union
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national authority over the whole national domain. . . . I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more.”
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