James Oakes
Becoming Lincoln by William W. Freehling
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War by Stephen E. Maizlish
Becoming Lincoln by William W. Freehling. University of Virginia Press, 369 pp., $29.95
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
450 pp., $28.00
A Strife of Tongues:
The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War by Stephen E. Maizlish. University of Virginia Press,
312 pp., $45.00
Most historians now agree that the slave states seceded to protect slavery. Gone are the days when the so-called revisionist historians argued that the South left the Union in defense of states’ rights or because of high protective tariffs that favored Northern industry over Southern agriculture. These days scholarly disagreement arises over what motivated the North, or, more specifically, the Northern Republicans and their standard bearer, Abraham Lincoln, to choose war over disunion. One group of scholars argues that antislavery politics were weak and relatively inconsequential among mainstream Republicans like Lincoln. They were elected to preserve the Union and reserve the western territories for free white labor, not to undermine slavery in the South. Hence for these scholars—call them “neorevisionists”—secession in response to Lincoln’s election was a hysterical overreaction to a nonexistent threat. By contrast, “fundamentalists,” as we are sometimes labeled, argue that Northerners who had grown up in societies that had long ago abolished slavery were determined to defend the principles and practices of their free labor society, just as Southerners who had grown up with slavery were equally determined to defend their way of life. Hostility to slavery was so deeply rooted in the North that it had become inseparable from Unionism.1
1On the merger of antislavery and Northern nationalism, see Graham A. Peck, Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle Over Freedom (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Most importantly, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans were committed to a number of federal antislavery policies that they believed would lead to what Lincoln called the “ultimate extinction” of slavery.
For Civil War fundamentalists, secessionists understood clearly what Lincoln stood for and concluded, not unreasonably, that his election—along with the growing number of Republicans in Congress—represented a genuine menace to slavery’s long-term survival. Southerners made this very clear in their statements justifying secession. Withdrawing from the Union turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation, but it was not an overreaction. The three books under review offer a useful, if partial, introduction to this scholarly divide.
After a lifetime devoted to the study of proslavery radicalism, William Freehling, arguably the nation’s leading neorevisionist, has produced a characteristically audacious study of Abraham Lincoln. In his telling, Lincoln’s life is a series of ups and downs, promising starts, crushing failures, and impressive recoveries. This premise serves as the background for what Freehling sees as the most astonishing shift of all, from the instinctively cautious antislavery conservative of Lincoln’s pre-presidential years to the Great Emancipator of the later war years.
In one sense this is a familiar account of Lincoln’s evolution. It is a commonplace among historians that Lincoln grew over time, that in his early career he was something of a Whig Party hack. He was opposed to slavery but, like most Northern Whigs, he was chiefly concerned with using state power to promote economic development, a national bank, and public schools. In 1854, stunned by the repeal of the ban on slavery in the Nebraska Territory, Lincoln reemerged as a dedicated antislavery politician. He was more mature, his speeches were eloquent and sober, his antislavery convictions more resolute. Similarly, few historians would dispute that Lincoln was radicalized by the war itself and that he took an increasingly aggressive approach to slavery until, by the end, he was actively lobbying for the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States.
But Freehling doesn’t see much growth in the pre-presidential years. He argues that Lincoln’s antislavery convictions were wafer-thin, amounting to nothing more than vague calls for slaveholders to emancipate their slaves voluntarily—a position that hardly justified the swift secession of seven slave states. Becoming Lincoln is thus designed to seal Freehling’s case for the irrationality of Southern disunionists. He argues that Lincoln’s political genius lay in his ability to articulate an antislavery position so anodyne that it could appeal broadly to a Northern electorate that had no meaningful antislavery convictions. Up to the moment he took the oath of office as president, Lincoln revealed his deep-seated conservatism by stressing the lawlessness of secession rather than any profound concern over slavery.
Throughout the book, Freehling rehearses the familiar neorevisionist contention that a vast ideological gulf separated Lincoln from the abolitionists and radical Republicans. By “abolitionists,” Freehling seems to mean William Lloyd Garrison, whose antislavery rhetoric was more militant than Lincoln’s, but who eventually concluded that the Constitution was so thoroughly proslavery as to rule out the possibility of any meaningful antislavery politics.2 In any case, Freehling is not all that clear about which policies the abolitionist Radical Republicans endorsed but Lincoln opposed. At one point he says that Lincoln never called for Northern troops to invade the South and free the
2
No Radical Republican subscribed to the paralyzing constitutional dogma espoused by the Garrisonian faction of the abolitionist movement. Garrison himself ended up advocating the secession of the Northern states. See Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (St. Martin’s, 1998).