William J. Cooper - We Have The War Upon Us

Professor Cooper, who domiciles at LSU, gives us his version of the events from Novemberr, 1860, to April of 1861.  The events leading up to the war have occupied scholars ever since.

The dominant Civil War scholar of the 20's, 30's, and 40's, was James G. Randall of the U of Illinois.  He established the thesis that the country bumbled into war when reason and compromise failed because of fanatics on both sides.  The abolitionists squared off against the Southern "fireaters," who watned secession no matter what.  There was no room in the minds of these two groups for compromise.  Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, but he refused to compromise on the extension of slavery into the territories.  The inevitable results of the failure of compromise was war.  Randall seemed to blame the abolitionists more than the fireaters.

This work falls into this category of understanding the onset of the war.  Cooper's hero is Seward, who, along with others, tried mightily to forge a compromise, willing to compromise on the extension of slavery, but thwarted by Lincoln, the party leader, he finally had to fall in line behind his President.  In this book I learned for the first time that Seward would have bended on the extension of slavery into the territories.

It seems to me from what I've read over various sources that the fireaters would never have compromised; it was secession or nothing.  Mr. Lincoln was right to not compromise.  As he said, "the rub" had to come sooner or later.

It seems to me that Cooper presents a Southern view of the secession crisis as he seems to blame Republicans for being partisan, the root of the matter rather than Southern diehards,  and what he calls the "left" in the Republican party.  I have never heard another scholar refer to abolitionists and those who stood firm on not expanding slavery into the territoriesas the "left."

The bumbler advocates never talk about what would have happened if the war had been avoided by compromise.  Slavery would have continued into the 20th century?  No 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments?  Seems likely.  It seems to me that war was, indeed, inevitable unfortunately.  We are fortunate that it happened with Lincoln as President and we were able to enact those Amendments.  The 14th is the cornerstone of the modern interpretation of the Constitution.