Abraham Lincoln, Again, and Again

[Valin]

The American Spectator:

We cannot overstate his importance to America’s destiny.

Roger Kaplan

February 2013

 

In the summer of 1864 Lincoln and the Republican stalwarts thought they might lose the November election, and with it the war. The two campaigns were inextricably linked. Without a military breakthrough by Grant in Virginia and Sherman before Atlanta, antiwar sentiment was bound to keep rising in a strong but tired North, while in the exhausted South not losing meant winning. Peace feelers were sent out. The Confederates appreciated their value as instruments of psychological warfare; indeed this was their real purpose. For on substance, the two sides were as far apart as they had been when the war began, with Lincoln defending the abolitionist position and Davis adamant on the bedrock Southern ideology, white supremacy.

 

In this sense as in so many others—especially, alas, in the way it inaugurated industrial warfare—the American Civil War represents the leapfrogging of the United States ahead of its Old World progenitors. The French Revolution and its war against the monarchial regimes of Europe had invented ideological conflict, as well as mass mobilizations. Waterloo and the Concert of Europe put a brake on this trend but was unable to consign it to the shelf of bad ideas best forgotten.

 

It may have been, and probably was, a lousy idea, but it could not be forgotten. Too many demons had been let loose. In the American case, a conservative revolution, to secure ancient English rights, was subverted by the institution of slavery and the unwillingness of the revolutionary generation to put an end to it. They outlawed the Atlantic slave trade and hoped, not unreasonably, the expanding continental economy would render the whole wicked thing impractical. Instead, as every schoolboy knows, a man named Eli Whitney invented a machine called the cotton gin and slave labor became economically profitable.

 

 

(Snip)

 

 

More Here Remembering Mr. Lincoln