Abraham Lincoln has been raised to status of diety in the eyes of many. Any attempt to state that perhaps the South had reason to resist the North are met with cries of derision and mockery. Yet there is much that must be refuted to proclaim the Union's stance as one purely holy and glorious. Consider the following statement from a coalition of Northern governors to Lincoln to persuade him to not falter in the march to war:
Seward [Lincoln's Secretary of State who was urging peace] cries perpetually that we must not do this, and that, for fear war should result. Seward is shortsighted. War is precisely the thing we should desire. Our party interests have everything to lose by a peaceable settlement of this trouble, and everything to gain by collision. For a generation we have been “the outs”; now at last we are “the ins.” While in opposition, it was very well to prate of the Constitution, and of rights; but now we are the government, and mean to continue so; and our interest is to have a strong and centralized government. It is high time now that the government were revolutionized and consolidated, and these irksome “States’ rights” wiped out. We need a strong government to dispense much wealth and power to its adherents; we want permanently high tariffs, to make the South tributary to the North; and now these Southern fellows are giving us precisely the opportunity we want to do all this, and shall Seward sing his silly song of the necessity of avoiding war? War is the very thing we should hail! The Southern men are rash, and now profoundly irritated. Our plan should be, by some artifice, to provoke them to seem to strike the first blow. Then we shall have a pretext with which to unite the now divided North, and make them fly to arms. The Southerners are a braggart, but a cowardly and effeminate set of bullies; we shall easily whip them in three months. But this short war will be, if we are wise, our sufficient occasion. We will use it to destroy slavery, and thus permanently cripple the South. And that is the stronghold of all these ideas of “limited government” and “rights of the people.” Crush the South, by abolishing slavery, and we shall have all we want—a consolidated government, an indefinite party ascendancy, and ability to lay on such tariffs and taxes as we please, and aggrandize ourselves and our section!
Behold, the party of Lincoln. And the government that we now have. Perhaps we should worship him, as our true founding father. Following his reign of blood and horror this is exactly what we have gotten. The Constitution was dealt a fatal blow many years ago, and we have been slowly dying ever since.
Robert L. Dabney, “Memoir of a Narrative Received of Colonel John B. Baldwin of Staunton, Touching the Origin of the War,” Discussions (Harrisonburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1994), pp. 87–110.
