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 By
SPENGLER
February 12 is the birthday of a grim-handed killer who inflicted more
casualties on his foes than anything the Russians did in Chechnya. Of course I
refer to Abraham Lincoln, whom the Americans have reinvented as a kindly
national paterfamilias. War ranks among the strangest forms of willful
self-destruction, and America's Civil War of 1861-65 in turn ranks among the
strangest of wars. Three-quarters of Southern military age men served in the
Confederate ranks, and of these almost 40 percent fell. What prompted these men
to cast away their lives with such abandon, and what motivated their enemies to
slaughter them?
Amid a great extinction of nations, in an era where whole peoples seem to hold
their lives cheap, what can we learn from these events? The United States again
confronts an enemy with boundless capacity for suicidal sacrifice, but ignores
the lessons of its own sanguineous past. "Americans fail to grasp decisive
strategic issues not only because they misunderstand other cultures, but
because they avert their gaze from the painful episodes of their own history,"
I wrote last year (Why
radical Islam might defeat the West, July 8). Bloody Abe's upcoming
holiday provides a good occasion to return to this theme. In fact, the North
and South of the US have agreed to perpetuate two sets of self-consoling lies
about each other:
1) Southerners were simple patriots fighting for love of their home states.
2) Kindly Abe Lincoln went to war only when the rebel Confederacy left him no
choice.
The first lie addresses a glaring question: If the South fought the war to
preserve chattel slavery, what possessed the 80-90 percent of southerners who
owned no slaves to die for a practice from which they drew no immediate
benefit? Professor Gary W Gallagher (The Confederate War, Cambridge
1997) represents the scholarly side of this myth, while popular fiction and
films such as Gods and Generals dish it out to the broad public. That
does not wash; one does not register 40 percent casualty rates for sentimental
reasons. Catastrophic casualties pile up when a conqueror rallies greedy men to
his banner. Ask the half-million men who marched to Moscow in 1812 under
Napoleon Bonaparte's banner why they fought for an emperor, although they had
no empire of their own. Napoleon said it best: Every soldier carried a field
marshal's baton in his rucksack. The same apples to Alexander of Macedonia,
Mohammed and his successors, the Thirty Years' War General Albrecht von
Wallenstein (1583-1634), Francisco Villa during the Mexican civil war of
1910-18, the Germans during World War II, and so forth.
The unpleasant fact is that Southerners who had no slaves hoped eventually to
get some, and fought for the Confederacy for the same reason that Napoleon's
freebooters fought for the emperor. In fact, Southerners had been fighting for
the right to bring slaves to new territories for a generation prior to the
outbreak of war, in Kansas and elsewhere. Cotton, their principal cash crop,
exhausted the soil in a decade's planting, and the planter took his slaves and
moved on. Slavery and the Southern economic system would choke to death without
expansion. Had the South formed an independent state, it would have embarked on
a campaign of conquest and imposed slavery on the whole southern half of the
Western Hemisphere.
Professor Robert E May demonstrated this in The Southern Dream of a Caribbean
Empire (1973). Of hundreds of newspaper citations in May's book, here
is one: "The Memphis Daily Appeal, December 30, 1860, wrote that a slave
'empire' would arise 'from San Diego, on the Pacific Ocean, thence southward,
along the shore line of Mexico and Central America, at low tide, to the Isthmus
of Panama; thence South - still South! - along the western shore line of New
Granada and Ecuador, to where the southern boundary of the latter strikes the
ocean; thence east over the Andes to the head springs of the Amazon; thence
down the mightiest of inland seas, through the teeming bosom of the broadest
and richest delta in the world, to the Atlantic Ocean'."
No pipe dream was this plan. That is what Southerners read day in and day out
during the 10 years that preceded the Civil War. The slaveholding interest had
engaged in land grabs for a generation prior to the outbreak of Civil War,
including a brief takeover of Nicaragua by American adventurers. A Southern
empire meant a revived African slave trade and land for any man enterprising
enough to take it. So much for the first self-consoling lie.
Today's American Southerners rather would wallow in sentimental memories of
Southern gallantry than to admit that their ancestors died for sordid
imperialistic ambitions. Yet that is what they sang as off to war they marched:
"We are a band of brothers/native to the soil/fighting for the property we
gained by honest toil." When brave men are convinced that conquering others is
the best way to make their fortune, it may be necessary to keep on killing
until not enough are left to fight. Even after the Southern armies had bled
almost to death, their commander, Robert E Lee, persuaded his reluctant staff
to surrender only with difficulty (More
killing, please!, June 12, 2003).
As for the second self-consoling lie, it suffices to observe that Lincoln
easily could have averted the war by agreeing to let the South acquire slave
territories outside of the continental United States. His 1860 election victory
(by a minority of votes in a four-way race) provoked a crisis. Future
Confederate president Jefferson Davis supported a compromise that would have
allowed the South to acquire slave territories to the south. Georgia senator
Robert Toombs, along with Davis, the South's main spokesman, pleaded for the
compromise that would have given the North "the whole continent to the North
Pole" and the South "the whole continent to the South Pole", as Professor May
reports.
It was Lincoln, not the Southerners, who shot down the compromise. "A year will
not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will
stay in the Union ... There is in my judgment, but one compromise which would
really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against
acquiring any more territory," he wrote (cited in Robert May). Republicans
preferred to fight. Said congressman Ortis Ferry of Connecticut: "Let but the
ties which bind the states to the federal government be broken and the leaders
of the rebellion see glittering before them the prizes of a slaveholding empire
which, grasping Cuba with one hand, and Mexico with the other, shall distribute
titles, fame and fortune to the foremost in the strife. Such, in my opinion, is
the real origin of the present revolt, and such are the motives which inspire
its leaders."
For those who do not know the Americans well, it is much easier to understand
why the Southerners should have taken up arms in the pursuit of wealth and
status than to understand why the North should have expended so much blood and
treasure to stop them. What was the fate of an African slave in Cuba to a farm
boy from Wisconsin? Yet Lincoln's Republicans found the prospect of a slave
empire to the south sufficiently repugnant as to merit a terrible war.
A cloud of myth protects Americans from the truth about bloody Abe Lincoln. His
statue sits in a mock-Greek temple like the statue of Zeus at Olympus. Chiseled
into the marble are Lincoln's words to the nation weeks before the war's end,
an abiding source of horror for European tourists: "Fondly do we hope -
fervently do we pray - that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the
bond-man's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of
blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as
was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord
are true and righteous altogether."
It sounds like a sort of religious fanaticism that would make the mild
Methodist George W Bush hide under the bed-covers. Yet that is how the
Northerners sang as off to war they marched: "He has sounded forth the trumpet
that shall never call retreat/He is sifting out the souls of men before his
judgment seat/O be swift my soul to answer Him, be jubilant my feet!"
A noteworthy conclusion is that America fought the bloodiest war in its history
(and a bloodier war than any in Western Europe since 1648) in order to prevent
an imperialist war, that is, out of fanatical religious principle. Americans
find it too painful to think about; should they by some means re-establish the
frame of mind of 1860, may God help their enemies.
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