Abraham Lincoln and His Conflicting Thoughts About War

In David Herbert Donald's biography of Abraham Lincoln, Donald says that Lincoln's outspokenness against the Mexican-American War and President James Polk "led him to advocate policies that would later come back to haunt him" (128). Essential to his argument in 1847 and 1848 was Polk's claim that Mexico began the altercation by invading American soil, a point Lincoln found to be a total falsity and a masquerade for far more damning motives. The war, Lincoln contended, was unnecessary and unconstitutional: more America flexing her muscles than America respectfully defending herself. Also, Polk was overstepping his bounds when he ordered troops to the Rio Grande: The war-making power was given to Congress by the Constitution so that "no one man" could unload the tyranny permanently pinned to war upon the public by himself, Lincoln wrote in a February 1848 letter to William H. Herndon (Selected 68).

Fast-forward thirteen years to 1861. We find Lincoln, incited by the secession of eleven states from the Union and the strike on Northern-held Fort Sumter by this new Confederacy, on the verge of his own conflict: the American Civil War. Didn't these eleven states have, as Lincoln so put it in his "Speech on the War with Mexico" in 1848, "the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better" (Selected 61)? What differentiated Lincoln from other kings who "had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object" (68)? The lips of Lincoln critics raised these questions, among others, as the President's 75,000-man-strong volunteer army marched off to defend the Union.

Donald has no misgivings in stating that much of what Lincoln spoke as a newly elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives would simply become "words he would have to eat" at the outbreak of the Civil War, just another example of the normal human faculty of reexamination often brought upon by new circumstances (128). However, in some of his early-Civil War speeches and writings, Lincoln formulates subtle distinctions between his actions and decisions as doer and those he rallied against as observer. The results of his explanations are of varying accomplishment, but the ultimate objective of this essay is not to conclude with a settled verdict as to whether Lincoln's policies are hypocritical or just misconstrued. Rather, the goal is to understand how both Lincoln could believe the situations were vastly different and his enemies, the opposite, at the same time; and to illuminate a shared theme between the two wars of Lincoln's "loyalty to a shared history, conviction and truth" among the American people.

This tie that binds each separate state together, the Union, was part of Lincoln's focus in his "Message to Congress in Special Session" on July 4, 1861:
"The States have their status IN the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law, and by revolution...By conquest, or purchase, the Union gave each of them, whatever of independence, and liberty, it has." (Selected 310)

Lincoln's purpose in detailing the reliance of the State upon the Federal Union is to communicate the ridiculousness of the concept of a lawful "secession," what he thought of as a "sugar-coated" substitute for destructive rebellion. Secession, Lincoln argued was not only illegitimate but mistakenly successful in that it set a precedent for even smaller sects within the new Confederacy to separate and establish their own governments. This Russian stacking doll arrangement Lincoln imagined was "the essence of anarchy" (Selected 289). Lincoln's seemingly contemptuous explanation of secession doesn't mesh with the spirit of the remarks he made over a decade earlier, when, in his 1848 "Speech on the War with Mexico," Lincoln championed the right of any portion of people to "revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit" (Selected 61-62). It would be insulting to as level-headed a President as Lincoln was to claim this switch was an emotional response to the Confederacy's unfair assumption of future injustices handed down by his White House. His reaction was emotional, yes, but was grounded in something far less self-interested than personal slight: His passion was based in the preservation of the Union.

There is a distinction to be made between attempting to reform the Federal government through Constitutional amendment or revolution and attempting to dissolve it through secession. Lincoln would have respected a Southern effort to overthrow his administration; American citizens would decide the outcome-after all, "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people"-and live with their decision, Confederacy or Union, slave or non-slave, the Union still intact (Selected 291). In his "First Inaugural Address," Lincoln toys with the relationship between a majority and a minority, the division in which all of our "constitutional controversies" reside. His logic is black-and-white and he provides "no other alternative" of outcome: "If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease" (Selected 289).

It is entirely plausible to contend that Lincoln, although rigid in his opinion of the illegality of secession, was not remanding the South's right of revolution by declaring war, but instead taking advantage of another entitlement he outlined in 1848: "More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement." By placing the "momentous issue of civil war" in the hands of the Confederacy, his message was clear: Do what you have to, and I will do what I have to. In this understanding of Lincoln's purpose we see a President countering the right of the American people with a responsibility of his own, a "most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend'" the Union (Selected 292-293).

Lincoln takes a slight glance at morality's role in this matter as well. Douglas L. Wilson, author of Lincoln's Sword, highlights what I first considered to be a throwaway line from "Message to Congress in Special Session," which he says has the effect of virtually ignoring the right to revolution: "The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice" (93). Donald offers a somewhat conflicting take on Lincoln's view of the integrity of revolution:

But he had always carefully qualified his support of the right of revolution by insisting that it was a moral, rather than a legal, right that must be "exercised for a morally justifiable cause." "Without such a cause," he thought "revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power." (Donald 268-269)

Works Cited

Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln.
Lincoln, Abraham. Selected Speeches and Writings.
Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln's Sword.