The Great Divide
Most historians now agree that the slave states seceded to protect slavery. Gone are the days when the so-called revisionist historians argued that the South left the Union in defense of states’ rights or because of high protective tariffs that favored Northern industry over Southern agriculture. These days scholarly disagreement arises over what motivated the North, or, more specifically, the Northern Republicans and their standard bearer, Abraham Lincoln, to choose war over disunion. One group of scholars argues that antislavery politics were weak and relatively inconsequential among 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 for these scholars—call them “neorevisionists”—secession in response to Lincoln’s election was a hysterical overreaction to a nonexistent threat.
By contrast, “fundamentalists,” as we are sometimes labeled, argue that Northerners who had grown up in societies that had long ago abolished slavery were determined to defend the principles and practices of their free labor society, just as Southerners who had grown up with slavery were equally determined to defend their way of life. Hostility to slavery was so deeply rooted in the North that it had become inseparable from Unionism.
Most importantly, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans were committed to a number of federal antislavery policies that they believed would lead to what Lincoln called the “ultimate extinction” of slavery.For Civil War fundamentalists, secessionists understood clearly what Lincoln stood for and concluded, not unreasonably, that his election—along with the growing number of Republicans in Congress—represented a genuine menace to slavery’s long-term survival. Southerners made this very clear in their statements justifying secession. Withdrawing from the Union turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation, but it was not an overreaction. The three books under review offer a useful, if partial, introduction to this scholarly divide.
After a lifetime devoted to the study of proslavery radicalism, William Freehling, arguably the nation’s leading neorevisionist, has produced a characteristically audacious study of Abraham Lincoln. In his telling, Lincoln’s life is a series of ups and downs, promising starts, crushing failures, and impressive recoveries. This premise serves as the background for what Freehling sees as the most astonishing shift of all, from the instinctively cautious antislavery conservative of Lincoln’s pre-presidential years to the Great Emancipator of the later war years.
In one sense this is a familiar account of Lincoln’s evolution. It is a commonplace among historians that Lincoln grew over time, that in his early career he was something of a Whig Party hack. He was opposed to slavery but, like most Northern Whigs, he was chiefly concerned with using state power to promote economic development, a national bank, and public schools. In 1854, stunned by the repeal of the ban on slavery in the Nebraska Territory, Lincoln reemerged as a dedicated antislavery politician. He was more mature, his speeches were eloquent and sober, his antislavery convictions more resolute. Similarly, few historians would dispute that Lincoln was radicalized by the war itself and that he took an increasingly aggressive approach to slavery until, by the end, he was actively lobbying for the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States.
But Freehling doesn’t see much growth in the pre-presidential years. He argues that Lincoln’s antislavery convictions were wafer-thin, amounting to nothing more than vague calls for slaveholders to emancipate their slaves voluntarily—a position that hardly justified the swift secession of seven slave states. Becoming Lincoln is thus designed to seal Freehling’s case for the irrationality of Southern disunionists. He argues that Lincoln’s political genius lay in his ability to articulate an antislavery position so anodyne that it could appeal broadly to a Northern electorate that had no meaningful antislavery convictions. Up to the moment he took the oath of office as president, Lincoln revealed his deep-seated conservatism by stressing the lawlessness of secession rather than any profound concern over slavery.
Throughout the book, Freehling rehearses the familiar neorevisionist contention that a vast ideological gulf separated Lincoln from the abolitionists and radical Republicans. By “abolitionists,” Freehling seems to mean William Lloyd Garrison, whose antislavery rhetoric was more militant than Lincoln’s, but who eventually concluded that the Constitution was so thoroughly proslavery as to rule out the possibility of any meaningful antislavery politics.
In any case, Freehling is not all that clear about which policies the abolitionist Radical Republicans endorsed but Lincoln opposed. At one point he says that Lincoln never called for Northern troops to invade the South and free the slaves, but before the war not even the most radical Radical Republican would have called for such an invasion, nor for that matter did Garrison.Only once does Freehling come close to saying what policies the radicals endorsed that Lincoln did not: “The most conservative antislavery agitators, including Lincoln, would do no more than” restore the restriction on slavery south of the Missouri Compromise line. “More radical antislavery moralists,” he adds, would ban slavery from all the western territories:
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They would bar slave states from admission into the Union. They would abolish slavery and/or the slave trade in Washington, DC. They would democratize and/or scotch the Fugitive Slave Law. At the climax of their radicalizing campaigns, they would perfect a strangling cordon around US slave states and choke the “curse” toward “ultimate extinction.”
Aside from the awkward prose, what makes this passage so remarkable is that Lincoln endorsed every one of the policies Freehling attributes to the radicals.
As a congressman in the late 1840s, Lincoln had voted repeatedly for the Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery from all the territories acquired from Mexico, and barring slavery from all territories was the platform on which he ran for president in 1860. While in Congress, Lincoln drafted legislation to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., and reaffirmed his support for it at Peoria in 1854. In 1856 he endorsed antislavery platforms drawn up in Quincy and Decatur, which clearly implied that Congress should admit no new slave states. And he repeatedly called for a revision of the Fugitive Slave Law that would guarantee due process rights to accused fugitive slaves. These were all standard antislavery positions, and they scarcely distinguished the mainstream from Radical Republicans. It is no wonder that historians of antislavery politics—from Don Fehrenbacher and Kenneth Stampp, to Eric Foner and Richard Sewell, to Michael McManus and Corey Brooks—have long stressed the continuity from the abolitionist Liberty Party to the Republican Party, and the strong overlap between abolitionism and antislavery politics.
The “strangling cordon” leading to slavery’s “ultimate extinction” was not a distinct policy endorsed only by radicals; it was the effect of the various policies Lincoln and most antislavery politicians endorsed. But Freehling argues that the apex of radical antislavery politics lay in the rhetoric of the cordon rather than the policies to which it referred. Lincoln himself reportedly invoked the cordon in his so-called Lost Speech at Bloomington, Illinois, in 1855, which Freehling cites twice. In the version first published in 1896, Lincoln urged his listeners to “draw a cordon, so to speak, around the slave States, and the hateful institution, like a reptile poisoning itself, will perish by its own infamy.”
Whether this report of the Lost Speech is accurate hardly matters, because the cordon was a metaphor, not a policy. At Bloomington and elsewhere Lincoln continued to endorse a crippled fugitive slave law, a ban on slavery in the territories, and the suppression of slavery on the high seas—policies that would surround the South with free states, free territories, and free oceans.Lincoln believed that the pressure created by those policies would gradually lead the South to abolish slavery one state at a time. Allowing slavery to expand, he said, would “KEEP men in slavery who would otherwise be free.” Antislavery politicians and abolitionists alike assumed that the steady abolition of slavery would begin in the Border South, then spread east and south. It’s odd that Freehling would miss this, since he has done more than any other historian to highlight the significance of slavery’s relative decline in the Border States—a process that was as disturbing to proslavery politicians in the Deep South as it was encouraging to antislavery politicians in the North.
Lincoln also believed that a majority of the voters in Washington would have supported his abolition proposal. No doubt the slaveholders in the district would have objected, and this is another crucial element of antislavery politics that Freehling misses. He confuses abolition imposed by electoral or legislative majorities with “voluntary emancipation” by the slaveholders themselves. Until 1864, nearly everybody agreed that abolition was something states did. The goal of federal antislavery policy was to nudge the states toward that end. Lincoln and even radicals like Horace Mann were willing to add incentives like federal compensation to soften the opposition, but the goal was to get the slave states to abolish slavery on their own. (Lincoln pursued this policy aggressively during the war.)
But state abolition was nonetheless coercive. In the Northern states, the slaveholders had fought tirelessly against the abolition statutes passed by their own legislatures after the War of Independence. In Indiana and Illinois, slaveholders tried desperately to legalize slavery in their states and, having failed, engaged in all manner of subterfuge to avoid emancipating their slaves. As far as the slaveholders were concerned, state abolition was anything but voluntary.
Freehling notes that, in an effort to expand the Republican Party’s electoral base, Lincoln, the lifelong Whig, temporarily shelved his long-standing support for federal economic development projects, which could still arouse opposition among some Northern voters. But he does not see that for the new Republican Party to succeed, it had to reach beyond its base of core supporters committed to the full panoply of antislavery policies. That meant attracting the votes of Democrats and conservative Whigs who were willing to prevent slavery’s expansion but nothing more. Lincoln’s approach was simple: focus on the one antislavery policy with the broadest appeal to Northern voters—restricting slavery’s expansion into the West. It worked. But that did not mean Lincoln had abandoned the Republican base and no longer supported protective tariffs, railroads, due process rights for accused fugitives, or abolition in the District of Columbia.
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Freehling’s Lincoln would have been familiar to the most prominent Civil War “revisionists” of the first half of the twentieth century. Like J.G. Randall, Freehling posits a Lincoln whose political genius lay in his conservatism, a Lincoln despised by abolitionists and Radical Republicans, a skillful politician who revered the rule of law more than he hated slavery and who adopted emancipation slowly, reluctantly, and only under the tremendous pressure of the Civil War. What distinguishes Freehling from earlier revisionists is his clear-eyed recognition of the horrors of slavery. In his account, slaveholding “paternalism” was a cruel delusion that the slaves resented and resisted—so much so that masters lived in constant fear of rebellion. No revisionist ever cast such an unflinching eye on the horrors of slavery. In half a dozen important books and thousands of pages of deeply researched scholarship, Freehling has traced the rise of an arrogant slaveholding aristocracy whose destruction was necessary for the preservation of American democracy.
Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Republicans felt the same way, but their concern for the fate of democracy was but one part of their broader condemnation of what Lincoln called the “moral, social, and political” evil of slavery. By isolating the political from the moral and social denunciations of slavery, and by underestimating the scope of Lincoln’s antislavery commitments, Freehling makes it hard to appreciate why his victory in 1860 represented an existential threat to slavery itself.
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