Admiration for Lincoln

Of all 44 U.S. presidents, Abraham Lincoln is one that I admire most.
I am fascinated with his person, and devote much of my study of the American Civil War to his biography. I have a genealogical connection to the Lincolns, too, and that makes my fascination with the Sixteenth President of the United States even more personal.
But it is the enigma of the man that has drawn me closer to him over the years.
Abraham Lincoln personally opposed slavery, but he ultimately opposed federal efforts to end it. He wanted to give Southern states their chance to end it themselves.
In fact, as a frontier lawyer in Illinois, Lincoln had been known to represent the interests of Missouri slave owners, who were pursuing escaped slaves north. He sided with the Fugitive Slave Law, and ended up defending the rights of slave owners more than he did any intrinsic rights of slaves.
That isn't to say that Lincoln was pro-slavery; he was not. But, as an attornery, he was pro-law. And he tended to be a moderate, a compromiser, on the contentious issue of slavery.
Neither the secessionists nor the abolitionists liked or supported Abraham Lincoln as a candidate for president. Both polarized sides had their own candidates in mind representing their views exclusively.
For Northern abolitionists, Lincoln wasn't staunch enough against slavery. After all, he favored keeping slavery where it already existed and simply opposed its expansion into Western territories. He wasn't willing to go far enough to stop it.
And for the Southern secessionists, well, Lincoln was just altogether the wrong man, because he campaigned on the notion of preserving the Union at all costs. They also resented the fact that Lincoln favored limiting slavery to where it already existed in the South and keeping it out of the new territories. This wasn't good enough, either.
The funny thing was that Abraham Lincoln could not appease either of the two sides, and yet, he won an electoral college landslide over a split Democratic ticket in the general election. Although he failed to win a majority of the popular vote in any state, he received enough popular votes to claim a majority of state electoral votes. Across the country, Lincoln proved to be the most reasonable candidate in a period of extreme, irrational contentiousness; and enough of the most reasonable people of the time turned out to vote for him.
But as we know from history, the reasonable people, including Lincoln, did not ultimately win. The extremists on both sides did. They got their way and plunged America into a bloody Civil War that left socio-economic scars still visible today.
The secessionists hastily voted to secede shortly after Lincoln's election victory in November 1860, just as they promised they would. And the abolitionists edged them on.
While the Southern firebrands were building their garrisons around federal property in the South, the Northern firebrands raised their voices in a call to arms to put down the insurrection.
Both extremes wanted war in the worst way, so they could make the other side pay for its years of defiance and opposition to them.
President Lincoln, like much of the rest of the country, was caught in the middle, trying to deal with fires on either side of him. It was a futile position to be in, and a losing effort.
Lincoln staved off the warhawks as long as he could; until duty compelled him on April 12, 1861 with the Confederate artillery assault on Fort Sumter.
As commander-in-chief, whose sworn duty it is to preserve and protect the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln had no choice but to declare war.
He suffered through three years of embarrassing military defeats and a narrow reelection bid before events began to turn in his favor.
If Abaham Lincoln had one character flaw, one weakness, it was using poor judgment in selecting his army commanders.
Between 1861 and 1864, the U.S. Army of the Potomac, charged with protecting official Washington, D.C., from rebel assaults, was commanded by seven different generals-in-chief. Only at No. 7 did Lincoln finally get it right.
The appointment of Ulysses S. Grant to general-in-chief of the entire United States Army turned out to be the edge that the Union needed to outlast the Confederacy and eek out a victory.
But this came after two disappointing stints with George B. McClellan, who actually ended up challenging Lincoln in the 1864 general election, and a string of failures in between.
As a result of the Union Army's incompetence in the Eastern Theater, the United States very nearly lost the war. Commanders prior to Grant were either more interested in stroking their own egos or building their political resumes than winning a war that desperately needed an end to it.
By the time Grant took over, the Union Army hadn't made any progress in the one hundred miles that lay between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia. In effect, it had succeeded only in chasing its own tail and running around in circles.
President Lincoln was at the end of his emotional rope when he chose Grant to be his Gen. Lee.
And if there was one thing President Lincoln was good at it was performing under pressure. His timely decision to place Grant in charge helped to breathe new life into the Union war effort and lifted the spirits of the troops, many of whom were well aware of U.S. Grant's exploits out west.
After the Wilderness campaign, the Union Army had taken its last backward step. Instead of retreating as many of his predecessors had grown accustomed to doing, Grant pressed forward, further South, and maintained pressure on Confederate commander Robert E. Lee to defend the Confederate capital. Within a year of Grant's appointment, the Union had the Confederacy up against the ropes, on its heels, and desperate to end the conflict.
Unfortunately, Abraham Lincoln did not live to do the work he proposed at war's end: to heal the wounds of the nation with malice toward none and charity for all.
I sincerely believe that Reconstruction was when Lincoln was needed most.
No other man could have facilitated or orchestrated the kind of transition only he could have envisioned. His compassion toward the South could have saved her from the Northern carpetbaggers who ended up devouring her the way hyenas attack a carcass.
His Christian charity might have helped the country move forward, instead of stepping backward in savagery and brutality.
As it is, though, Lincoln died before his dream of a reunified nation could be fulfilled. In fact, reunification took nearly a decade to accomplish under the Johnson and Grant Administrations, whereas Lincoln in his final three years might have been able to bring the Southern states back into the fold in less time due to his desire to rebuild, rather than to punish the South for the war.
Lincoln understood that both sides shared the blame, and thus, shared the costs of the war. He refused to regard the South as an enemy. But others in the North had plans to make the South bleed even more. All they needed was an excuse.
And that came in the form of an assassin's bullet on April 14, 1865 at Ford's Theater in Washington. President Abraham Lincoln died early the next morning and a nation fell into shock and mourning.
I doubt Lincoln would have approved of the retributionists turning him into a martyr, but that is exactly what was done.
Because of the reckless audacity of John Wilkes Boothe, the South was about to feel the full wrath of the North. Largely because of Lincoln's assassination, Reconstruction was more about retribution than reunification and healing.
Had Lincoln survived the bullet wound and lived, the extremists in the North may not have gotten their way to exact revenge on the South.
But, unfortunately, even in death, Lincoln had a profound effect on the outcome of the war.
In the 220 years that our nation has elected a president, none faced the daunting task that Lincoln did. From the time he was elected up to his assassination, either the war, the threat of it, or its aftermath consumed the man. He scarcely saw any peace time between his first inauguration and his assassination, save for the month between his first day in office and the firing on Ft. Sumter.
And yet, somehow, he kept the nation going and intact; the Southern states notwithstanding, of course.
In the end, Abraham Lincoln helped to preserve a nation determined to destroy itself. And he helped preserve not only a country, but its ideals, values and principles as well.
No other president faced the kind of challenges that Lincoln did.
While Franklin D. Roosevelt helped to hold the country together in a time of great depression and world war, and even as Reagan was instrumental in bringing down the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union, none had the same daunting task to preserve a crumbling nation and save it from utter ruin as Lincoln was charged with.
Where George Washington is considered the father of our country, Abraham Lincoln may well be its Sentinel. Without his steadfast determination to preserve the Union, and ultimately his example in leading the nation toward living up to its principles--namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all men created equal--there is no telling what America would be like today, if even at all.

Choosing sides

When discussing the American Civil War, the one question that inevitably gets asked is, "What side would you choose?"
I was asked a similar question recently by a spectator at a Civil War reenactment. The young woman was writing a graduate paper for her master's degree and she was interviewing reenactors to get some of her information.
I was dressed in my Confederate chaplain's uniform when she approached me and began asking questions. Near the end of the interview, she asked, "Why did you choose the Confederate side? Is it because they were the underdog?"
I considered my answer for a long moment.
Frankly, it is a question I have pondered and asked of myself many times before while studying the Civil War, and the most honest answer I could come up with was just plain, old "I don't know."
I explained to the woman that my decision to portray a Southern soldier had much to do with my ancestry. Much of my kin from that time period resided in Texas, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina.
I also have gained an appreciation over the years for the points of view of and the causes fought for by the common, average Southerner of the time.
For the majority of Confederate soldiers, the war was not about defending or preserving the vile and debauched institution that is slavery; although that was a collective purpose of the Confederate government and its army.
For a few wealthy aristocrats and plantation owners, the war certainly was about keeping what belonged to them, including and especially their slaves. But not for the common foot soldier, who more often than not was a simple, poor farmer afraid of losing his land--often the only thing of value he had, not to mention his family's livelihood--either to an army of invading Yankees or a mob horde of free-roaming slaves on the rampage.
Sure, there were propagandists in the South spreading lies, rumors and exaggerations about the average Yankee, as well as fear about inevitable slave uprisings, but the same could be said about the North, and the influence of the abolitionist movement on popular opinion.
A noteworthy example is the cover-up of John Brown's Kansas raid in the spring of 1856. Many antislavery societies covered up the truth about the Pottowatomie Massacre that occurred May 24-25, 1856. Violent abolitionist John Brown went on an overnight murderous spree through Franklin County, Kansas, killing in cold blood five unarmed pro-Southern settlers in supposed retribution for a pro-slavery sack of the abolitionist community of Lawrence, Kansas, just days earlier. But abolitionist propaganda back east reported that Brown had acted in self-defense, and that his killing of the pro-slavery men was, therefore, a just, righteous and defensible act. This was nowhere near the truth, of course, but it is an example of the kind of propaganda that Northerners were subjected to by antislavery hardliners.
Long before the firing of Fort Sumter, the secession of South Carolina, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and even Harper's Ferry, there was a prevailing Northern opinion of Southerners that they typically resembled slave master Simon Legree from "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
To the educated and uneducated alike in the North, the wealthy plantation owner personified the South; and as far as many Northerners were concerned, the South was filled with them.
The truth is that only about three or four percent of the white population in the South at the time owned even a single slave. And less than five percent of those who did own slaves owned more than one.
So, of all the tens of thousands of African slaves residing in the Antebellum South, a mere fraction of the white population owned them. The rest of the South was made up predominantly of poor white farmers, who unfortunately bought into the propaganda of secessionist firebrands that the North was meaning to come down and lead a slave revolt, and then seize the land. They believed their small tracts of dirt were threatened to be bought out from under them or taken over by force by zealous, money-grubbing Yankees. They also feared a large, angry slave uprising that threatened their lives, as well as a vast, blue army marching through the South, across their fields, and burning everything in sight; all in an effort to subjugate the South and force it to do the North's will.
Thusly, why so many poor white farmers turned out in droves to serve their state militias and the Confederate Army.
And the fact is, a great many Northern soldiers turned out in service to their state militias, too. Service to one's state at the time was a greater calling than service to one's country. Most people never ventured beyond the county of their birth, so their communities were literally filled with family and friends. The state in which they lived meant more to them than just political borders and boundaries; a state represented a person's home, one which contained everything important to that person.
So, a large part of my decision to join the Confederate ranks had to do with understanding the point of view of my Southern ancestors.
I'm also sympathetic to the states' rights argument, because the period banner really referred to individual rights more than state government rights. This is evidenced by the language of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The people, in other words, were commensurate with the states.
Former U.S. Senator and statesman John C. Calhoun of South Carolina insisted that the federal government recognize southerners' rights to private property, which is guaranteed in both the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. He and others rallying around the states' rights banner insisted that federal efforts to ban slavery in the new territories west of the Mississippi River were unconstitutional, because they were deliberate attempts to prevent southern slaveowners from expanding and settling in the new west with their property. Such federal restrictions, then, violated the constitutional rights of southern slaveholders and, ultimately, discriminated against the South, in general.
But, where things went sour for the South, in my opinion, was basing a states' rights argument on protecting the morally depraved institution of slavery.
And that is where I part ways with the South, too.
I can confidently serve as a Confederate, knowing that I fight for my home, my piece of ground, my loved ones, pride in my state, and for my Constitutional property rights, because that is what most Confederate soldiers fought for.
They weren't fighting individually to preserve slavery. In fact, most commoners were either indifferent to the institution or else resented it.
Having said all of this, I cannot say with certainty that I would have fought for the South had I lived back in the time of the Civil War.
In all likelihood, I would have; but I also have ancestors who traveled with the Lincolns from Kentucky to Illinois. And some of them wore blue.
I think if I had been alive during the 1850s or 60s and living in Illinois, I would have most assuredly sided with the Union. Why? Mostly because my state was part of the Union, and my family lived there.
I would have been fighting for much the same reasons that the common, average Southerner was fighting for; just on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.
When I think about the question of "which side," I honestly have to give two different answers. The first, what side would I choose now, with 20/20 hindsight? And the second, what side would I have chosen had I lived back then?
Well, I've already answered the latter, which would have depended on where I was born and raised at the time.
As far as the former, my honest answer is both.
Had slavery been the reason why individual Southerners chose to take up arms against other American brethren, then I could not in good conscience side with the Confederacy today. I am an abolitionist at heart; but not necessarily a Yankee.
Knowing what I do about the Civil War, I am as proud to call myself a Confederate as I am to call myself a Unionist.