The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

The new Confederacy took the Constitution of the United States, so modified as to make it read plainly as Jefferson had expounded it in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Other changes were slight. The presidential term was extended to six years and the President was not to be re-eligible. The slave trade was prohibited and Congress was authorized to forbid the introduction of slaves from the old Union.

Abraham Lincoln became President, with a fixed resolve to preserve the Union but with no intent to abolish slavery. Had the war for the Union been as successful as he hoped it would be, slavery would not have been abolished by any act of his. It is clear that, when inaugurated, he had not changed his opinions expressed at Springfield, nor those others, which, at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, he had stated thus: "When our Southern brethren tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will surely not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, their native land."

This, he said, it was impracticable to do, at least suddenly, and then proceeded: "To free them all and keep them among us as underlings—is it quite certain that this would better their condition?... What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?" This question he answered in the negative, and continued: "It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted, but for their tardiness I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South."

In these extracts from his speeches we find a central thread that runs through the history of his whole administration. We see it again when, pressed by extremists, Mr. Lincoln said in an open letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."

Indeed, Congress had, in 1861, by joint resolution declared that the sole purpose of the war was the preservation of the Union. In no other way, and for no other purpose, could the North at that time have been induced to wage war against the South.

Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, were both Kentuckians by birth, both Americans. In the purity of their lives, public and private, in patriotic devotion to the preservation of American institutions as understood by each of them, they were alike; but they represented different phases of American thought, and each was the creature more or less of his environment. Both were men of commanding ability, but the destiny of each was shaped by agencies that now seem to have been directed by the hand of Fate. Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius, was carried to Illinois when a child, reared in the North-west among those to whom, with the Mississippi River as their only outlet to the markets of the world, disunion, with its loss of their highway to the sea, was unthinkable. Lincoln became a Whig, with the Union of the States the passion of his life, and finally, by forces he had not himself put in motion, he was placed at the head of the Federal Government at a time when sectionalism had decided that the question of the permanence of the Union was to be tried out, once and forever.

Mr. Davis went from Kentucky further South. He was a Democrat, and environment also moulded his opinions. During the long sectional controversy between the North and the South, "State-rights" became the passion of his life, and when the clash between the sections came, he found himself, without his seeking, at the head of the Confederacy. He had been prominent among the Southerners at Washington, who had hoped that the South, by threats of secession, might obtain its rights in the Union, as had been done in Jefferson's days by New England. In the movement (1860-61) that resulted in secession, the people at home had been ahead of their congressmen. William L. Yancey, then in Alabama, not Jefferson Davis at Washington, was the actual leader of the secessionists. Mr. Davis feared a long and bloody war and, unlike Yancey, he had doubts as to its result.[84]

Mr. Lincoln, standing for the Union, succeeded in the war, but just as he was on the threshold of his great work of Reconstruction he fell, the victim of a crazy assassin. Martyrdom to his cause has naturally added some cubits to the just measure of his wonderful reputation.

Jefferson Davis and his cause failed; and the triumphant forces that swept the Confederacy out of existence have long (and quite naturally) sought to bury the cause of the South and its chosen leader in ignominy. But the days of hate and passion are past; reason is reasserting her sway; and history will do justice to both the Confederacy and its great leader, whose ability, patriotism, and courage were conspicuous to the end.

Mr. Davis was also a martyr—his long imprisonment, the manacles he wore, the sentinel gazing on him in the bright light that day and night disturbed his rest; the heroism with which he endured all this, and the quiet dignity of his after life—these have doubly endeared his memory to those for whose cause he suffered.