Oakes on Civil War Scholarship

Book review from The New York Review of Books May 23, 2019 by James Oakes

Most historians agree that the slave states seceded to protect slavery.  Gone are the days of states rights and tariff excuses.  Scholarship today focuses on what led Lincoln and Northerners to choose war over disunion.  One group of scholars argues that antislavery politics was weak and rather inconsequential amongst mainstream Republicans like Lincoln.  They were elected to preserve the Union and reserve the Western territories for free white labor, not to undermine slavery in the south.  Hence, these scholars who could be called "neo-revisionists"  secession was a hysterical overreaction to a nonexistent threat.

(How can Oakes say this?  Secession was a fact as Lincoln took office.  How could Lincoln be said to be overreacting?  Is he saying that dismembering the Union was a nonexistent threat?)

By contrast, "fundamentalists," of which Oakes is one, were bound and determined to end slavery in favor of free labor.  Hostility to slavery in the North was as deep as slavery was in the slave states.  Lincoln was committed to antislavery policies which would eventually lead to the extinction of slavery.  For fundamentalists secessionists understood correctly what Lincoln stood for and understood correctly how his election threatened the long-term survivability of slavery.  The south miscalculated, but did not overreact.

(I stand with the former group and against Oakes.  This scholarly divide as given by Oakes will not be resolved.  The nature of historical reconstruction is never so easy).

William Freehling is one our leading neo-revisionists (using Oakes term which I disagree with).  The gist of it is that until the war began was conservative on the slavery issue and only changed when the immediate extinction of slavery became necessary as a war measure.  I agree with this point of view.

The Freehlings of the scholarly world talk about Lincoln's evolution from being theoretically anti-slavery to by necessity as a war President to being zealously anti-slavery. Everyone agrees that Lincoln "grew" to greater sensitivity on slavery.  Freehling sees little growth in the pre-presidential years.   Makes sense to me.

Does this division of scholars make any difference?  It seems all a matter of how you wish to view Abraham Lincoln.

Oakes says that Freehling argues that Lincoln's anti-slavery views were wafer thin to appeal to conservative Republicans to get the nomination so that when elected he revealed his deep-seated conservatism by stressing the lawlessness of secession rather than any profound concern over slavery.  Makes sense to me!

He says that Freehling stresses an ideological gulf between Lincoln and the radical Republicans and the abolitionists.  The fact is that the abolitionists wanted immediate abolition as I understand it whereas Lincoln for sure wanted gradual emancipation.  In 1858 he was willing to wait 100 years to finish the job!

Oakes tries mightily to make Lincoln into the equivalent of an abolitionist by saying his beliefs did not vary much from those of the abolitionists.  I don't buy it.

Oakes refers to a "lost speech" where Lincoln refers to a "cordon" around the slave states.  I don't see that this makes any difference.

Oakes tries to tie Freehlings views to the older revisionists led by J.G. Randall although he acknowledges the crucial difference that Freehling recognizes the moral issue and horror of chattel slavery.   Lincoln focused on the non-extension of slavery.  This was a conservative approach indeed. According to Freehling, it served Lincoln and the country well.

Why did the South consider Lincoln's election such a strong threat?  I am not quite clear on this.

It seems to me that Lincoln's focus after being elected was to maintain the Union first with a view that slavery would eventually go away.  As he told Horace Greely, he would preserve the Union at the expense of leaving slavery alone for the time being.  The war hastened the end of slavery by military necessity.  In his inaugural he supported the original 13th Amendment which would have made slavery directly legal in the Constitution.  Consider Frederick Douglass's speech in 1876 calling Lincoln first and foremost the white man's President.  Freehling is right and Oakes is wrong.