Was the Civil War necessary?

Was America's bloody Civil War really necessary? Should John Brown, who forced the issue, be pardoned? Or did the South force the issue by firing the first shot on Fort Sumter?

Those are three of the "Eight questions about the Civil War" posed in BSR this week by John Dowlin. They're intriguing questions, all right— and in this case, I would argue, they're interconnected.

As Dowlin correctly points out, most Western countries— the British Empire, Canada, Mexico, even Cuba— managed to abolish slavery in the 19th Century without violence. No doubt American slavery would have expired eventually as well, of its own economic obsolescence— just as, say, indentured servitude disappeared once trades people figured out that it was cheaper and more efficient to hire day laborers than to feed, shelter and clothe their servants.

To be sure, such a patient posture toward slavery would have condemned 4 million black men and women to bondage for perhaps another generation. But the alternative was hardly better. The Civil War condemned 600,000 Americans to death. That death toll wiped out 2% of America's total population, 4% of its male population, and nearly 10% of its adult male population, not including the half-million more who were wounded physically or psychologically, in many cases for life.

The "'peace Democrats'

Dread of such carnage was the motivating force behind the so-called "peace Democrats" of the late 1850s— politicians like Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who believed slavery was morally wrong but shrank from the wholesale slaughter that they feared would be necessary to eliminate it.

"Suppose the South, so run mad, that they would not be wooed and won back to the Union— what then?" asked one such "peace Democrat," Benjamin Bond of Illinois, in 1860. "Why… in God's name, let them go in peace, until they shall have learned from sad experience and a stern necessity, that they cannot keep house without us."

So what tipped the scales, for better or worse, in favor of a violent solution to the slavery crisis? Two words: John Brown.

Murdered for their sympathies

In 1855 Brown followed five of his sons to Kansas, then the scene of violent conflict over whether that territory would enter the union as a free or slave state. Brooding over the killing of five free-soilers, Brown concluded that he had a divine right to take vengeance and organized a guerrilla band for that purpose. On the night of May 24, 1856, he led four of his sons and three other men to the cabins of suspected pro-slavery settlers, dragged five of them out and hacked them to death— not because they had killed anyone or even owned any slaves, but simply because they sympathized with the pro-slavery cause.

More than three years later, Brown and 16 followers turned up in Virginia, where they attacked the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in a futile attempt to foment a slave revolt. After decades in which most Americans had tried to avoid confronting the slavery issue, Brown's violent raids left no question that the issue would be settled in blood, and soon.

For his righteous courage, many Americans venerated Brown, including Emerson (who compared Brown to Jesus) and Thoreau (who compared him to the freedom fighters of the American Revolution). Some Americans today, including Brown's biographer David Reynolds, want Brown to be pardoned. But Abraham Lincoln, for all his opposition to slavery, felt otherwise.

Lincoln in Kansas

On the day Brown was executed in Virginia— December 2, 1859— Lincoln was coincidentally speaking in Atchison, Kansas, gearing up for his presidential run with a speaking tour of Brown's old stomping grounds.

Alluding to Southern threats to secede from the Union, Lincoln declared that any attempt at secession would be treason. "If they attempt to put their threats into execution," he added, "we will hang them as they have hanged old John Brown today."

When someone in the crowd asked, "What about old John Brown?" Lincoln replied that Brown had been hung "and he ought to have been hung." Brown, Lincoln said, had shown "great courage, rare unselfishness," but had gone too far:

"Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against the state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason." Even in the midst of a national crisis, Lincoln saw through the clutter to the central relevant point: Violence was unlawful, and so was secession.

"'The Union is unbroken'

Similarly, 15 months later, at his inauguration in March of 1861, Lincoln sought to reassure the eight slave states still remaining in the Union by reaffirming what he had said several times before: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Yet to the seven Confederate states— as well as to the growing sentiment in the North for "letting the erring sisters depart in peace"— Lincoln was intransigent: "The union of these states is perpetual," he insisted, and "It is safe to assert that no government ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination…. no state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union." Therefore, Lincoln said, he would consider that "the Union is unbroken," and as president he would take care "that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the states."

Although Lincoln made no mention of war, I think he understood very well that John Brown had already settled that issue.

If the South hadn't fired first

But suppose, as John Dowlin speculates, that the South— notwithstanding the violent anger unleashed by John Brown— had refused to fire the first shot, at Fort Sumter or anywhere else? And suppose Lincoln had allowed the "errant sisters" to depart from the Union in peace, enabling slavery to survive in the South until it inevitably expired of old age?

Let me put it this way: If in 1861 the U.S. had fragmented into two or three small countries (North, South and most likely a third confederation along the Pacific), would America's fragile democratic experiment have inspired other nations to embrace democracy, as they subsequently did? Would America have inspired immigrants like my ancestors to risk a transatlantic crossing to seek a new life in a strange land? And without the fresh blood, optimism and sheer numbers provided by those immigrants, could such a splintered country have mustered the strength to stand up to Hitler and Hirohito and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century?

To ponder such questions is to remind ourselves, if reminding is necessary, how fortunate we Americans are that Abraham Lincoln came along precisely when he did.♦


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