Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

Proper decorum be damned. In 1856, Senator Sumner from Massachusetts gave a mocking speech meant to ridicule slave owning Democrats. Democrats would have none of it. They puffed up with sanctimony and called Sumner’s speech “self-righteously insolent.” They believed slavery was a general good, and a Republican had no right to challenge their narrative.  A day or so later, Congressman Preston Brooks waltzed into the Senate chamber and marched up to Senator Sumner and blindsided him with his cane. Southern senators could have stopped him, but instead watched as he beat Sumner on the head with all his might. Sumner suffered incapacitation for nearly five years. Brooks was quoted as saying that it was fortuitous that he caught Sumner in “a helpless attitude” because “Sumner had superior strength and if mindful, he would have needed to shoot him with his revolver.” The entire South applauded and exulted Brooks for his bravery. When Republican Congressman Burlingame chastised Brooks ...

In 1864, an anonymous hardbound pamphlet was published entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” The word "miscegenation" was coined by the authors who claimed it was a scientific theory describing how racial blending enhances humanity. The pamphlet encouraged the interbreeding of people from different racial or ethnic groups through marriage or sexual relations. During the Civil War period, the North was terrified that freed slaves would swarm their states. Racial bigotry was real and serious. Northerners were frightened for good reasons. For seven decades, slaveholders and their sympathizers in the North had exclaimed on the floor of Congress, in newspapers, in churches, and in pubs that emancipation would cause hordes of black men to migrate north to take the White man’s job and daughters. Tribal instincts were fanned until they were burned into the subconscious of most Americans. After their defeats at ...

While researching Maelstrom , a follow-on novel to Tempest at Dawn , I dug into the details of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Democrats pushed the bill through with a slim margin, and it was signed into law by Millard Fillmore. Reaction in free states was swift and bitter. Protests erupted overnight in almost every northern population center, with many openly proclaiming that they would not obey an unconstitutional law. Slaveholders dismissed the protests as “mongrel gatherings.” By itself, the Fugitive Slave Act did not cause the Civil War, but it tilted the slave issue in favor of the slaveholding states, enraged the North, and encouraged the South's overbearing behavior. Here’s what the law required. The federal government took away state authority to find, return, and try escaped slaves. The bill established a body of commissioners to hear cases with no right of appeal to the legal system. Commissioners were paid $5 when they found for the accused and $10 when they ordered th...

  The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won By Edward H. Bonekemper III The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo This post deals with two books on the “Lost Cause.” Thomas J. DiLorenzo presents the case for the Lost Cause in The Real Lincoln : A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, while Edward H. Bonekemper argues against the Lost Cause in The Myth of the Lost Cause : Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won. What is the Lost Cause? The basic tenants are as follows: the War of Northern Aggression had nothing to do with slavery; the South did nothing to provoke war; the Constitution included a right to secede and the South should have been allowed to leave peacefully; antebellum life in the South was prosperous, dignified, and just; slavery was already dying; Robert E. Lee deserved deification, U. S. Grant deserved demonization, t...

    Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War by David Williams  Bitterly Divided by David Williams makes sense. If the political establishment in a bunch of states decided to secede, there would obviously be inhabitants who retained a stronger loyalty to the United States of America. After all, they had been proud U.S. citizens for their entire lives. I bet you saw a but coming. The but is that although Williams presents voluminous evidence of insurgence within the CSA, it is not clear that it materially hampered the Confederacy’s war efforts until the last year or so. The catchphrase, ‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,’ may have been a truism, but Southern men continued to fight until victory became hopeless or they received news from home that their families were starving. Williams contends that slaveholders masterminded the war, but, for the most part, non-slaveholders fought it. Three-fourths of southern whites owned no slaves, so arithmetic alone proves Wi...

  The Radical and the Republican, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery  Several books study the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. I have not read Brian Kilmeade’s The President and the Freedom Fighter , so I cannot compare them. The Radical and the Republican is a balanced view of a pair of critically important men in American history. Since Lincoln and Douglass did not meet until nearly two and a half years into Lincoln’s first administration, the book mostly reports their personal histories and views separately, as if they were on parallel tracks toward the same goals. Except that the tracks were not parallel. The strategy and tactics were so wide apart that Douglass doubted that Lincoln was an ally in his cause. Although you could not prove it by Lincoln’s utterances, their slavery goals were the same. The following two quotes from the book succinctly summarize how Lincoln crafted his strategy. The first is from Lin...