14/04/2015
On the 150th anniversary of the end of the end of the American Civil War and of the assassination of Lincoln, the analyst Martín Alonso recalls that the challenge of the South threatened the very existence of the nation and the president, aware of this, went to war to preserve democracy and the Constitution. In this analysis published by FAES he states that giving in to the Confederacy’s blackmail would have entailed, in the long run, the destruction of the country, as the demands of the South would have continued.
"This April marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War and of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (by a twist of fate, on Palm Sunday and Good Friday of that year).
Lincoln, the first president of the Republican Party, created four years earlier to oppose the expansion of slavery, came into office on March 4, 1861, after the secession, a few months before, of seven southern states from the Union. Four more would do the same in the following weeks. Lincoln was a classical liberal who understood that the moral values stated in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty and property) are eternal and inviolable and precede the establishment of governments among men and make them possible, not the other way round. The denial of these rights to slaves in the South was based on a view of the sources of political authority antithetical to Lincoln.
The war broke out on April 12. The proximate cause of the war was that the southern economy and its very civilization depended on the 4.5 million slaves of African origin. During nearly sixty years, the South had been politically dominant in the Presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court, guaranteeing the inviolability of the institution. In this period, however, the North had overtaken the South in population and resources and it was only a matter of time before their weight would also shift to the center of gravity of political power. That moment came with the victory of Lincoln and the Republican Party in November 1860.
The great national crisis had triggered between 1854 and 1860. The commitment of North and South, established in 1820, to confine slavery south of a geographic line coincident with parallel 36°30′ was broken. The position of the South was beginning to take shape in the idea that ownership of slaves, like any other ownership right, brooked no restrictions in the Constitution and, therefore, the slave owners could take their slaves to any Northern state. The position of the anti-slavery movement, which had created the Republican Party, was that to admit that principle would entail the nationalization of slavery. A new agreement was impossible. As Lincoln said on March 4, 1865, in his Second Inaugural Address, ‘These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union (. . .) Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.’
The same advent of war would make backtracking impossible: either the South would separate itself and preserve its slaves; or the Northern victory and devastation of war would put an end to the institution.
The South had rejected Lincoln's victory at the polls, even though the Republican platform and Lincoln himself only proposed a restriction on the territorial expansion of slavery, i.e. a status quo. The states in rebellion, grouped in the Confederate States of America (CSA), were beyond persuasion, having separated before Lincoln arrived in office. By then, the crisis was beyond the destiny of the United States. In the words of Lincoln, delivered in his message to Congress on July 4, 1861, secession, in the circumstances in which it occurred, ‘. . . presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or democracy can or can not maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. (. . .) When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets… Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they can not take by an election neither can they take it by a war. ’
Abraham Lincoln preserved democracy for the rest of the world. In 1861, not even the institutions of the politically and economically most advanced State in Europe, Great Britain, were democratic in the sense we understand today. The end of the American experiment was an aspiration in London, Paris or Madrid which resulted in their willingness to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state which only the destruction of its armies in the battlefield prevented it.
The sacrifice of Lincoln and of hundreds of thousands of Americans saved the Union and granted freedom to nearly five million slaves. Both things were attached to the idea of democracy of Abraham Lincoln. Had the Union broken apart, slaves would have remained being slaves in an independent Confederacy. And the Union would have broken fatally had Lincoln accepted the southern blackmail which would have him disregard the outcome of the elections –from which stemmed the mandate to restrict the expansion of slavery–and amend the Constitution to guarantee perpetual slavery. Should we accept that, he said, ‘A year will not pass till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union,’ in a process that would never end and that would result in the fracture of the nation. But even if something not possible could have been rendered possible, i.e. that the USA remained united on the basis of such a commitment, such a perfect subversion of the idea of democracy would have ended with that nation, the only one historically ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal’.
Its survival is our great heritage and the legacy of the man who gave his life one hundred and fifty years ago."