Trump and the Civil War

President Trump has taken quite a bit of criticism for his comments about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War, but one of his observations was not as entirely off-the-wall as it appears.  It is historically wrong, of course, but not unprecedented even among the well-educated.  Consider the following:

People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

The first part of the statement – that people do not ask about the war’s causes – is indeed ridiculous, given that historians have been asking precisely that question for well over 100 years. There may be no subject among American historians more fully discussed than the events that led to the Civil War.

The second part of the statement, however, is more nuanced (though still ultimately wrong):

Why could that one not have been worked out? 

Most commentators have seen Trump’s question as a reflection of his self-image as a master deal-maker, in which he regards deadly inter-sectional tensions of the nineteenth century as just another problem in negotiation.  Perhaps that is right, but the notion that the Civil War could have been avoided through political maneuvering is far from unique to Trump.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, for example, Evan Osnos says the following about the failings of Pres. Franklin Pierce:

Just before Franklin Pierce took office, in 1853, his son died in a train accident, and Pierce’s Presidency was marked by the “dead weight of hopeless sorrow,” according to his biographer Roy Franklin Nichols. Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved unable to defuse the tensions that precipitated the Civil War.

A highly accomplished journalist and a winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, Osnos implicitly argues that a more effective negotiator than Pierce – or Pierce himself, if not drunk and despondent – could have successfully defused the tensions that led to the war.  In other words, that the problems could have been “worked out” by the president.

The same is also often said of Pierce’s successor James Buchanan, who is frequently ranked last among all American presidents, typically because of his failure to head off southern secession.

Thus, Trump is in good company in thinking that there might have been a negotiated solution to the Civil War, even though he took credit for a question that many others have asked.

The answer, however, is that the Civil War could not have been “worked out” by Pierce, Buchanan, or any other president, including Andrew Jackson.  The reason is that the southerners (and eventual Confederates) were committed to maintaining slavery at all cost, and the inevitable result of their determination was secession from the Union.

Abraham Lincoln recognized the impossibility of working out the inherent tensions between free and slave labor in his historic “House Divided” speech of 1858:  Quoting the New Testament, he explained that "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.

Massachusetts Senator William Seward said the same thing that year in his “Irrepressible Conflict” speech:

Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefor ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts of legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York becomes once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromises between the slave and free States, and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.

Lincoln and Seward were right.  The conflict between free and slave labor could not be resolved on a state-by-state basis.  Compromise, or working it out, would at a minimum have involved condemning 4,000,000 Americans to additional generations of slavery.

There was no antebellum compromise that would have freed the slaves.  Even in February of 1865, when the Confederacy was staring defeat in the face, Southern leaders refused Lincoln’s offer, made at the Hampton Roads conference, of compensated emancipation as a means of ending the war.  As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens put it a few weeks before firing on Fort Sumter, slavery was the “Cornerstone” of secessionism. And that is why the Civil War could not have been “worked out.”

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Today is the 217th anniversary of the birth of John Brown.

Comments

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

My best bud Trump is sorta kinda right in a sixth grade sense. The two Missouri Compromises and the Comprise of 1850 involving Stephen Douglas, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, et. al. did work things out at the negotiating table. It was the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scot v. Sanford that upended the tenuous status quo. By the way, while I am on topic, every historian, scholar and civil rights tourist should visit Ft. Snelling in Minneapolis and see the actual cabin Dred Scot lived in. While visiting Minneapolis, I literally "stumbled" upon it. It was like seeing Constitution Hall.

[Al Brophy]

Steve, one other point, which I haven't seen mentioned is that if southerners could have foreseen the enormous cost of the war, which they disproportionately bore, they might have agreed to end slavery without war. But as you so aptly point out, they couldn't see that. They were so convinced they were right (the Supreme Court had told them they had a right to property in humans, for instance) and that history and contemporary economics both confirmed what they "knew" to be true about slavery as the foundation of Southern society. The arrogance led to violence; the violence they brought on fell on them the hardest. I don't think that's at all what Trump was thinking, but it's a lesson we all need to think about before resorting to violence.

The costs of violence are enormous. Sometimes those costs are necessary.

[anon]

Again, muddled post.

Q. "Why could that one not have been worked out?"

A. "There was no antebellum compromise [possible] that would have freed the slaves."

Right or wrong, that is a question and an answer.

But, our tribune of tribalism, Lubet, can't let it rest at that. No, sneaking in the snide attack, Lubet states:

"It is historically wrong, of course, ..."; " is indeed ridiculous"; "second part of the statement, however, is more nuanced (though still ultimately wrong" ...

A question is not wrong. Lubet creating a straw person to continue his perpetual attack is wrong.

What I still wonder is: Why does Lubet choose such trivial matters? There are great issues facing this country, but he dwells on a word here, a misused title there, a random comment that was not intended as anything more than a call to think about a question. This is the style of MSNBC (aside from their McCarthyism) ...

The entire tenor of the new left seems to be a never ending attack. They seem to have run out of new ideas, and stand for nothing other than baiting and hating and opposing the very notion that others who do not agree with everything they say exist, and they are doing this is truly juvenile ways.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

anon,

There you go again, personally attacking Professor Lubet.

Rush Limbaugh stated, "He hoped Obama fails."

Representative Michelle Bachman stated, "Were hoping he doesn't succeed." (Obama)

John Boehner stated, "So be it" to job losses. He would rather have Obama fail.

Yes, the Left is attacking policy. See we know that Trump was once a fairly reasonable, left leaning guy. He even wrote a letter to Obama requesting "bold action on climate change." We are just standing up for women, Muslims, Mexicans, Hatians, Immigrants, Indians, the environment, National Monuments, clean water and on and on....Guilty as charged to attacking.

[anon]

Steve Lubet

Well, at least you have one learned, respected voice of reason here in the FL supporting your posts.

Carry on!

[Steve L.]

Al Brophy: That is an excellent point. The Southerners' judgment was overwhelmed by their commitment to slavery. The Confederacy consistently rejected proposals to free slaves who were willing to join their army, and they declined the Hampton Roads proposal for compensated emancipation when they were only eight weeks from total defeat.

Given that level of devotion to human bondage, there was no way to "work out" the problem short of Civil War. It would have been different, of course, if the Southerners had been willing to free their slaves. The North had made a series of compromises with slavery in 1820, 1850, and 1854, and secession could have been averted only by more concessions to slavery in 1860 and beyond.

[anon]

Interesting to hear Joan Baez, after her speech about moral superiority, sing the classic "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Prof. Brophy, of all those who post on the FL, I would suspect that you understand that the reason that the "South" did not agree to end slavery had something to do with the notion that the Southerners believed themselves to be more sophisticated than the North, more correct about the Constitution, more learned about the law and generally, just better than the Northerners. In other words, Democrats.

Of course, today, their views of the themselves seems absurd. TOday, the North (and the nation) sees the deep south as a bastion of fat, ignorant, racist rednecks, addicted to opiates, chewing on straw voting for Republicans and oppressing their black neighbors.

But, at the time of the CIvil War, not so much.

What folks like Lubet forget is the mentality of a man like Lincoln, who wanted to compensate the Southerners to placate their Fifth Amendment claims, and his sincere hope that, after the war, the nation would bind up its wounds, and act with "malice toward none." Lincoln was in favor of repatriation to Liberia, and never really supported the equality that we take for granted today. In other words, he didn't demonize the South; in fact, he felt himself to be a part of a people, ALL of the people, who had sinned and failed in the institution of slavery, but with whom he shared kinship and loyalty.

That notion, reading stuff like Lubet posts, also seems absurd today.

[[M][a][c][K]]

An interesting aspect of could it have been worked out is that many prominent southerners and slaveowners (Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Washington, Lee), including many of the Founding Fathers, seemed to take the Augustinian view: "“Lord, make me chaste – but not yet” towards slavery. That is to say that they considered it probably morally wrong, and not ultimately healthy for the south, but did not want to abolish it because so much of their wealth and status was tied up min the institution. So instead, they "kicked the can down the road" to the next generation.

Only a few of the slaveowners actually took steps to bring slavery to an end - John Jay for example. Most seemed to be of the view that it ought to be abolished, but at some point in the future.