Lincoln’s Imperialistic Reconstruction of the South

The North did not abandon the battle for Reconstruction. The goal of Reconstruction was to reunify the South to the federal government and to deny the political rights of all Southern men (since the right to vote for all women was already denied), who had fought against them during the War of Northern Aggression. Once their goals were met, they promptly left the South to pursue their Republican Party agenda of imperialism.

On April 12, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The War for Southern Independence was officially over. The ragged and exhausted Confederate soldiers would start their long journeys back to their war-torn homes and starving families. The war was over and it was time for the victors to claim their prize, rewrite history, and to commence with the Reconstruction.

First and foremost, Abraham Lincoln’s goal in fighting the war was clarified to Horace Greely when he said, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.”¹ In order to “save the Union” to the extent that Lincoln desired, he choose to destroy slavery. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”² Reconstruction was just an extension of his ultimate goal, “to preserve the Union.”

To be readmitted to the Union, each Southern State, which had legally seceded from the federal government in 1861, needed “10 percent of the number of [their] state’s citizens eligible to vote in 1860 [to swear] an oath of allegiance to the Union.”³ This was known as Lincoln’s 10 Percent Plan. Since all women, white or black, were ineligible to vote and the Northern government would restrict all Confederate men who had fought against the Union and central government not to vote, the North freed hundreds of thousands of previously unregistered voters—the slaves. If Lincoln’s “10 Percent Plan” was going to work, he had no choice but to free the slaves.

Good to his word, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party did what they needed to “preserve the Union,” by freeing all the slaves with the 13th Amendment. Part of the readmission requirements for the Confederate States was to ratify the amendment. Now with the black males free from their chains of slavery, the North set out to quickly register them for the Republican vote. These “Union Leagues” registering the ex-slaves would take tax payer’s money from the citizens of all political parties to only register only Republican voters.⁴ In true political fashion, these federal agents promised the ex-slaves many things, “including the property of white Southerners;” but the ex-slaves would be forced to register only for the Republican Party, and no other.⁵ Clearly, during the Reconstruction period, a vote opposing the Republican Party would only lead to punishment for both the white or black man.  

The federal agents in the war-torn South would focus their energies most on voter registration, over the other necessities of life. There would be others who came to the South to help the ex-slaves integrate into society, like missionaries, abolitionists, and other freedmen; however, “the primary concern of the Party of Lincoln was to get these ex-slaves registered to vote Republican, not to educate them, feed them, or help them find employment.”⁶ The purpose of Reconstruction was intended to strengthen the central government and its power, not civil rights.

If the war was for civil rights or social equality, then the North should have extended the right to vote to everyone, to include women white or black, but they did not. “Voters in Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Kansas refused to extend the right to vote to blacks in 1867 and 1868.”⁷ It would not be until 1920 that women would be given the right to vote in America. The North simply wanted 10 percent of the population to vote their Southern State back into the Union as quickly as possible, so that they could push forward with their imperialistic agenda. The Republican Party was not in the South to help race relations, but did more to create a divide between the white and black races.

The educational programs provided by the federal government and the teaching of the Northerner’s view (or revisionist history) created the hostile racial tensions in the South. One Yankee myth was that the war was fought due to Southern reluctance to free their slaves; and that this reluctance motivated the North to invade the South for humanitarian reasons. The educated Southerner knew that slavery was dying gradually and would soon end in the South as it had in other nations before the War Between the States. Jefferson Davis commented on this fallacy by saying:

War was not necessary to the abolition of slavery. Years before the agitation began at the North and the menacing acts to the institution, there was a growing feeling all over the South for its abolition. But the abolitionists of the North, both by publications and speech, cemented the South and crushed the feeling in favor of emancipation. Slavery could have been blotted out without the sacrifice of brave men and without the strain which revolution always makes upon established forms of government. I see it stated that I uttered the sentiment, or indorsed it, that “slavery is the corner stone of the Confederacy.” That is not my utterance.”⁸

The North had to justify their war of imperialism and invasion into the sovereign Southern States. If Southerners were not indoctrinated to believe that they were at fault and sinners of an immoral act, they might attempt to stop the North from committing their political plundering of their States. Not only had the North won the war to preserve the Union, after the war they had a wonderful opportunity to mold Southern state Constitution’s through their rule of puppet military governments. The seeds of modern day waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds and resources can be traced back to the Republican operations in the South during this period. Their first plundering came in the form of expanded budgets of the state and local governments.⁹ These acts would steal money right out of the tax payer’s pockets.

The expenses of the governments were largely increased; offices were multiplied in all departments; salaries were made more worthy of the now regenerated and progressive commonwealths; costly enterprises were undertaken….The result of all this was promptly seen in an expansion of state debts and an increase of taxation that to the property-owning class were appalling and ruinous.¹⁰

One example of their destructive programs of consumption can be seen in the Louisiana legislature. While the limited government-minded Jeffersonians were running the state legislature before the war, it would only cost the tax payers about $100,000 a year to run; however, after the war, the Republicans managed to raise the costs over $1 million, “because of lavish spending on lunches, alcohol, women’s apparel, and even coffins.”¹¹

 

 

At this time, no taxpayer was safe from Northern plunder, especially the taxes on property rights. Property taxes were increased to incredible amounts, so that the taxman could confiscate Southern landowner’s property for “unpaid taxes” with ease.¹² This would make it easy for the government to secure properties to push forward with their internal improvement projects to build roads, canals, and railroads.

The Republican Party would institute government subsidies that would benefit the corporations and lead to the same “internal improvement” projects that were outlawed by Southern state Constitutions before the war. Ruinous mismanagement of government funds for internal improvement projects like those that had failed in the 1830s throughout the nation, would indebt the South further. Railroad subsides alone would generate tremendous debt for the ex-Confederate states in the sum of $132 million.¹³ Naturally, these projects would be mismanaged and would be subject to waste, fraud, and abuse of tax payer’s money.

To further perpetuate misinformation and the Yankee myths that they were right in their actions during the Reconstruction period, they would destroy freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment. Just as the Adams Administration destroyed the people’s rights to free speech with the Sedition Act of 1798, the Republican Party would resurrect a similar measure designed to prohibit “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the federal government”¹⁴ or its operations in South. The Republicans would subsidize newspapers to promote their corrupt system and censor the truth from the public.¹⁵ Republican newspaper monopolies would surface in many towns throughout the South, which would in effect be an extension “Lincoln’s policy of censoring or shutting down opposition newspapers in the North during the war.”¹⁶  

With no Confederate army or white voters available to oppose the corporate welfare programs, government expansions, increased budgets, and tyrannical rule of the federal government in the South, these programs and laws would be easily enforced. By the 1870s, the North had molded the Southern States into their own image by removing their laws against corporate welfare programs and to abolish slavery (to free up the vote). The South had been forced back into the Union; and through propaganda and brain washing, the falsehood that a state had no right to secede from the Union had been solidified into the minds of rising generation of Southerners. They had been indoctrinated to believe that the war was their fault; and that the war would not have occurred, if it was not for their immoral acts of slavery. Southerners were enslaved to the federal government through massive debt. The deteriorating race relations were a result of Republican policies to preserve the Union; thus, once their mission to reunify the nation was complete, the Reconstruction ended and they left the South. There was no abandonment of the Reconstruction policies or programs, the mission was simply over.

The modern student of American history, who reads the Republican Party’s propaganda from the Reconstruction period justifying their actions for the war and subsequent clean up in the South, will easily mistake the Republican Party’s departure from the South without ensuring racial equality as an abandonment of the Reconstruction. The North did not care about the ex-slave, but simply used them as pawns to guarantee their votes, in order to reconstruct the South in their own image. The North had to suppress the vote of the white ex-Confederates to be successful. The federal government has maintained this façade through control of the national education program and the media. The corruption and plundering that befell the South after the war, which was aided by the ex-slave’s votes and their manipulation, would be the factor that generated Southern hostility towards the black race.¹⁷ “Had the Republican Party not been so determined to recruit the ex-slaves as political pawns in its crusade to loot the taxpayers of the South, the Ku Klux Klan might never even have come into existence.”¹⁸

Notes

1.       Crocker III, H. W. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War." 6-7. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008.

2.       Ibid.

3.       Texas Politics, Reconstruction and the Civil War Amendments: Readmission Requirements. n.d. http://www.laits.utexas.edu/txp_media/html/cons/features/0206_01/slide2.html (accessed November 19, 2013).

4.       DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 209. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

5.       Ibid.

6.       Ibid.

7.       Ibid, p. 210.

8.       Kennedy, James Ronald and Kennedy, Walter Donald. "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" 141. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1998.

9.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 211.

10.   Ibid, p. 212.

11.   Ibid, pg. 215-216.

12.   Ibid, p. 216.

13.   Ibid, p. 213.

14.   Maxfield, M. Richard. "The Real Thomas Jefferson." 198. Washington D.C.: National Center for Constitutional Studies, 1983.

15.   DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 217.

16.   Ibid.

17.   Ibid, p. 218.

18.   Ibid.

Was Lincoln a Racist?

Abraham Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves for humanitarian reasons; only once slavery became dangerous to his agenda, did he free them. He and the Republican Party did not consider the slaves or free black men equals with the white race. Lincoln freed the slaves to support central government—to preserve the Union—and to protect “white rights.”

If Lincoln’s real goal for the War Between the States was to simply free the slaves because “all men were created equal,” he sure did not make that clear before or during his presidency. On March 4, 1861, during his First Inaugural Address he said, “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.”¹

It is true that the president of the Executive Branch of the federal government had no right to make any such law to abolish slavery. The right to alter or change the laws of slavery would lie in the hands of Congress. The important thing to take away from his First Inaugural Address is that he had “no inclination to do so.”

Lincoln went further to demonstrate this point when he wrote a letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, on August 22, 1862, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”²

Saving the Union was his utmost goal of the Republican Party with the invasion of the South. If the strong central government was to survive, the South could not be allowed to leave the growing Hamiltonian empire. Their revenues would go with them when they departed the Union. In order for the “American System” to grow (a mercantilism system designed to build up the central government through corporate welfare supported by special interest groups), Lincoln and his supporters could not allow this to happen.

Political ideals on the form of government would divide the nation, not whether or not the slaves should be free or if the black race should be equals with the white race. The land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War would escalate this division between men who supported central government over those who supported limited government. On October 16, 1854, Lincoln said, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [new] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.”³

The new territories were to be for “free white people,” not a land for “free people” of any race or gender. The opposition toward the expansion of slavery was motivated by racism as well. United States Senator from Illinois, Lyman Trumball, also echoed the racial motivations to protect the new territories for the white laborer when he said, “we, the Republican Party, are the white man’s party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when Negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.”⁴ Lincoln was very clear on his sentiments of racial equality or inequality during his debates with Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858 in Ottawa, Illinois:

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.⁵

Except for the abolitionists—a minority group that made up about two percent of the American population—many agreed with Lincoln in that they were not “in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.”⁶ Northern attitudes towards the black race in the antebellum period were shameful. The treatment of free blacks in the Northern states sounds very much like that of African American treatment in the South just prior to the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth century.  

In virtually every phase of existence [in the North], Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites. They were either excluded from railway cars, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats or assigned to special “Jim Crow” sections; they sat, when permitted, in secluded and remote corners of theaters and lecture halls; they could not enter most hotels, restaurants, and resorts, except as servants; they prayed din “Negro pews” in the white churches, and if partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, they waited until the whites had been served the bread and wine. Moreover they were often educated in segregated schools, punished in segregated prisons, nursed in segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries…racial prejudice haunts its victim wherever he goes.⁷

Lincoln and the Republican Party did not believe that the African race were “created equal” like the Declaration of Independence stated. Lerone Bennett, Jr., editor of Ebony magazine would agree when he wrote, “On at least fourteen occasions between 1854 and 1860, Lincoln said unambiguously that he believed the Negro race was inferior to the White race. In Galesburg, he referred to ‘the inferior races.’ Who were ‘the inferior races’? African Americans, he said, Mexicans, who he called ‘mongrells,’ and probably all colored people.”⁸

The same man who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation would also say on the topic of emancipation, “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this….We cannot, then, make them equals.”⁹ Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure to assure victory over the South and to force them back into his empire. With Northern reconstruction in the South after the war, they would bring with them the same oppressive and segregated policies that the North had been practicing before the conflict. The slaves were now free to enjoy Northern segregation and the indentured servitude of crop sharing.

Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party had saved the “Union” or empire, by freeing all the slaves. The South was returned with all her tax payers, which would bring balance back to the central government’s might and would support their American System once again.   

Notes

1.       Lincoln, Abraham. The Avalon Project: Documents in Lay, Histoy and Diplomacy. First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln. 2008. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp (accessed November 12, 2013).

2.       Crocker III, H. W. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War." 6-7. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008.

3.       DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 11. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

4.       Crocker III, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, p. 10.

5.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 11.

6.       Ibid, p. 24.

7.       Ibid, p. 25.

8.       Jr., Lerone Bennett. "Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream." 132. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000.

9.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p.12.

What is the Sum of Good Government?

A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson (1801)

The War Between the States was an inevitable outcome. For over seventy years, the principles of central and limited government were argued between the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians. Abraham Lincoln would carry forth the Hamilton agenda with his election to the presidency. The South, who supported limited government and Jeffersonian principles, had no choice but to leave the Union, if they hoped to keep their republican form of government. Lincoln could not allow these wealthy cotton producing states to leave the Union; he needed their taxes to fund his “internal improvements” and promote what was being called the “American System” of government. Hamilton’s disciple needed an excuse to justify to the world his right for invading the South; he was just waiting for the South to “throw the first punch” in a fight that his political party had already started in the congressional halls of Washington.

When the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, it was motivated for economic reasons. The British economic system of mercantilism led to tyrannical taxation of the colonists and their enterprises in the New World. Oppressed Americans would criticize, ignore, and rebel against the various laws passed by Parliament. Taxation without representation, their war cry, would lead to the Revolutionary War. The colonies would form their own independent States—or countries—and would become united under the Articles of Confederation.

Not long after the final shots of the War of Independence, financial war debts and concerns over national defense of the States from foreign powers would lead some politicians to push for centralized government. A new constitution would be suggested as an economic solution to these problems, but many feared that this resolution was being devised by men who would be interested in reestablishing the British economic system of mercantilism.

Alexander Hamilton would be the champion of this economic system that would later be relabeled as the American System.¹ The American System or mercantilism would be defined by economist Murray Rothbard as “a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state.”² Intelligent men who had fought against Britain and this economic system would protest the centralization of governmental powers for this exact reason. Thomas Jefferson would be recognized by the people and the press as Hamilton’s greatest opponent to this plan.

Jefferson and many like-minded citizens were leery of the suggested Constitution and the proposed direction of the Federal government. The States would not ratify the Constitution without a guarantee that individual liberties would be protected through a series of amendments, which would come to be known as the Bill of Rights.³ Even with the inclusion of these amendments, the Constitution was ratified by a slim majority in many of the states; Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island would also declare “in their ordinances of ratification that, being sovereign states, they reserved the right to secede from the Union.”⁴ The Constitution was supposed to define federal powers and limit what the national government could do, but many States knew that power corrupts and declared that they would leave the Union if this would happen.

In Charles A. Beard’s book, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, he writes that it is highly doubtful that there was a majority at all among the people in the states that ratified the Constitution; “and that everywhere the voters of the states were sharply divided into two well-marked political parties.”⁵ The two political parties were debating more than just abstract political ideals, like central government or state’s rights, “but over concrete economic issues.”⁶ The Hamiltonian’s were supported by “financiers, public creditors, traders, commercial men, [and] manufacturers.”⁷ The Jeffersonians were the farmers and the debtors, who would be pitted against them. The seeds of opposition that would lead to war had already been planted. Men like Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln would water them and help them grow.

Henry Clay would follow in Alexander Hamilton’s footsteps when he entered politics in 1811. As a member of the Whig Party, he would support government subsidies for corporations (“internal improvements”), protectionist tariffs, central banking, and a strong central government. His unconstitutional bills to support corporate subsidies would be vetoed by both President Madison and Monroe. President Jackson would bring down Clay’s national bank during his term in office. Clay’s American System and agenda could be defined thusly:

Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises….He was the beloved son [figuratively speaking] of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platforms to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.⁸

Those who followed Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy felt that the government should be a frugal and simple organization. Public money was not meant to be used as a means to increase the size of government or to inflate the national debt; it was supposed to pay it off. The Federal government was meant to be a liaison between the states and the foreign nations of the world, “except as to commerce.”⁹ Jefferson wrote that American merchants would “manage…better the more they [were] left free to manage for themselves.”¹⁰ By keeping the government small and limited in their powers, it would remain simple, inexpensive, and could be run by a few public servants.

These drastic differences in political opinions created a quasi-cold war during the antebellum period. With Lincoln’s election to the presidency of the United States, this cold war between these two political parties would heat up. No longer was there a president in office, who favored Jeffersonian principles. Now there was Hamiltonian running the Federal government, who would stop at nothing to destroy the Bill of Rights, ignore the Constitution and re-establish mercantilism in America. Lincoln would take upon him the mantel of Henry Clay. “During my whole political life I have loved and revered [Henry Clay] as a teacher and leader,” Lincoln would say.¹¹

Southerners knew that with the election of Lincoln to the highest office in the Federal government, it would lead to monarchist rule; a man who would destroy the constitutional republic that had been established by the founding generation. These Jeffersonians remembered what Hamilton had said about the British constitution and government: “As it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government that ever existed.”¹² Hamilton’s disciple would push his agenda forward. This is why the South had to secede and why they called Lincoln’s invasion of the South, the “Second War of American Independence.”

Due to high protectionist tariffs, “the keystone of the Republican Party platform of 1860,”¹³ the South knew that they would become “slaves” to the American System of government. The Republican Party would use the economic recession of 1857 to their advantage to gain the highest office in the land. As unemployment and financial uncertainty threatened the American people, the Republicans promised them a “cure” to their sudden hardships, protectionism. With acts like the Morrill Tariff, the North would raise prices that would restrict trade in America to “alleviate” the economic pains felt by the common citizen. The Morrill Tariff (signed into law in 1861 by President James Buchanan) would raise the tax on specific goods, products particularly purchased by Southerners, by two hundred and fifty percent. Before the war, the South would generate and be responsible for ninety-five percent of the federal revenue through high protectionist tariffs, which were meant to further the American System.¹⁵ This new trade law would more than double the tariff duties, a tax that the South could not bear.

Not all Northerners were oblivious to the economic situation being forced upon the Southern States. On December 10, 1860, the Daily Chicago Times published an article that would expose the true motives of the Morrill Tariff:

The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole…we have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually.¹⁶

The “gullible and largely economically illiterate Northern public apparently fell for”¹⁴ the Republican Party promises to fix the financial crisis by raising prices and restricting trade, but the South did not. Rather than be enslaved by an emerging imperialistic empire created by the Republican Party, the South opted to leave the Union. The South did not start the war; they did not seek to overthrow the Federal government, which was now being controlled by Hamiltonian policies. The South’s desire was summed up by President Jefferson Davis, in his first message to the Confederate Congress: “All we ask is to be let alone.”¹⁷  

Just like King George III, Lincoln could not afford to let his wealthy cotton producing “colonies” to leave the empire. In Lincoln’s first inaugural address he said: “The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts.”¹⁸ By musket and bayonet, President Lincoln would force the South back into the “Union” to maintain his empire and collect his taxes from his subjects. However, the North could not just invade the South without just cause; Lincoln had to wait for the South to throw the first punch to be justified in his actions.

As each state in the South seceded, it was expected that Federal agents would abandon their posts and turn over their property back to their rightful owner, the sovereign States. “In exchange, the South offered not only to pay for the properties, but to pay the South’s portion of the federal debt of the United States.”¹⁹ Soon the last two remaining holdouts of the Federal military in Southern lands were Fort Pickens at Pensacola, Florida, and Fort Sumter at Charlestown, South Carolina. The citizens of Charlestown were becoming uneasy with federal actions in Fort Sumter. Governor Pickens of South Carolina wrote President Buchanan on December 17, 1860 about his countrymen’s concerns: “I am authentically informed that the forts in Charleston harbor are now being thoroughly prepared to turn, with effect, their guns upon the interior and the city. Jurisdiction was ceded by this State expressly for the purpose of external defense from foreign invasion, and not with any view that they should be turned upon the State.”²⁰ Pickens would go on to ask the president to relinquish the Fort Sumter back over to the State.

Union Major Robert Anderson had abandoned his post at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island and took his command of eighty-two men to the unfinished Fort Sumter in December 1860. Without support from the Federal government, his men would not be able to maintain their control of the Southern fort for long. Not long after Anderson had slipped into the fort with his men, Buchanan had already attempted to resupply the trespassers when he sent the Star of the West with 250 men and supplies. On January 9, 1861, when the Star of the West entered Charleston harbor, it was fired upon by Citadel cadets located at Morris Island.²¹ After sustaining three hits out of seven shots, with no support from Major Anderson’s guns at Fort Sumter, the Star of the West, turned and left the harbor without reinforcing the Union forces. As a result of this event, Charleston armed its forts and harbor with guns pointed at Sumter and the approach from the sea. Anderson would no longer be able to purchase food and supplies from the city. As Buchanan left office, this would become Lincoln’s problem.

Just one day after Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, he would receive word from Anderson that “he had not food enough to last six weeks.”²² Lincoln would ask: “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt it?”²³ Secretary of State William H. Seward, Lincoln’s top military advisors, and most of his cabinet would warn Lincoln that if he attempted to resupply Fort Sumter, it would lead to open war with the South. His cabinet members would vote five-to-one to abandon the fort altogether.²⁴ Seward particularly wanted to find a peaceful resolution to their current crisis. Many thought that even if the South was to leave the Union, they would eventually rejoin it.  

Lincoln on the other hand, had the answer he was looking for, a way to force the South’s hand to start the war. He promised South Carolina that he would not be sending more troops, arms or ammunition to support Major Anderson at Fort Sumter; he promised it would be just provisions. He lied.

The South was already suspicious of Northern actions regarding the fort after the Star of the West incident. The historian Bruce Catton explains how Lincoln forced the South’s hand to start the war:

Lincoln had been plainly warned by [his military advisers] that a ship taking provisions to Fort Sumter would be fired on. Now he was sending the ship, with advance notice to the men who had the guns. He was sending war ships and soldiers as well….If there was going to be a war it would begin over a boat load of salt pork and crackers….Not for nothing did Captain Fox remark afterward that it seemed very important to Lincoln that South Carolina “should stand before the civilized world as having fired upon bread.”²⁵

Northern newspapers criticized the Lincoln administration for their aggressive behavior and saw through their actions that started the War Between the States. On April 13, 1861, the Providence Daily Post wrote: “For three weeks the administration newspapers have been assuring us that Fort Sumter would be abandoned…but Mr Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.”²⁶ The Jersey City American Standard would chime in with similar sentiments, when they wrote that “this unarmed vessel…is a mere decoy to draw the first fire from the people of the South, which act by the pre-determination of the government is to be the pretext for letting loose the horrors of war.”²⁷

Despite the truth of Lincoln’s agenda being published in some Northern newspapers, many men in the North were awakened to a patriotic zeal after the firing on Fort Sumter, much like that among American citizens after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. This “Star-Spangled Fever” would be felt throughout the North from the halls of urban colleges to the rural farms.²⁸ Northern patriots unaware of the true motivations behind the war, joined the ranks simply because, “they fired on us.” On the contrary, many of the Southern men would join the ranks because, “they are down here.”

 

The Hamiltonian president, Abraham Lincoln—bent of pushing forward the American System of government—secured his war upon the South and all Jeffersonians, who attempted to maintain a limited government based on republican principles. The Cold War had been building for over seventy years and was inevitable. When the Federal government was strong enough to force their will and settle the argument between the two parties, they invaded the South. The Hamiltonians were willing to sacrifice over 800,000 men, women, and children for the American System of government. They would prove that their system was abusive and destructive to the pursuits of industry and improvement. Their ideals of government would take from the mouth of labor its bread. Their principles would prove to be the sum of bad government.  

Notes

1.       Baxter, Maurice G. "Henry Clay and the American System." 27. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

2.       DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 56. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

3.       Schmidt, Steffen W. "American Government and Politics Today." 50. Mason: Cengage Learning, 2013.

4.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 91.

5.       Beard, Charles A. "Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy." 2. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915.

6.       Ibid, p. 3.

7.       Ibid.

8.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, pg. 58-59.

9.       Maxfield, M. Richard. "The Real Thomas Jefferson." 71. Washington D.C.: National Center for Constitutional Studies, 1983.

10.   Ibid, p. 432.

11.   DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 14.

12.   Kennedy, James Ronald. "The South Was Right!" 222. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1994.

13.   DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "Lincoln Unmasked." 123. New York: Crown Forum, 2006.

14.   DiLorenzo, Lincoln Unmasked, p. 122.

15.   Crocker III, H. W. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War." 31. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008.

16.   DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 242.

17.   Crocker, p. 29.

18.   Lincoln, Abraham. The Avalon Project: Documents in Lay, Histoy and Diplomacy. First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln. 2008. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp (accessed November 12, 2013).

19.   Crocker, p. 31.

20.   "The Record of Fort Sumter from its Occupation by Major Anderson, to its Reduction by South Carolina Troops During the Administration of Governor Pickens." By W. A. Harris, 7. Columbia: South Carolinian Steam Job Printing Office, 1862.

21.   Bostick, Douglas W. "The Union is Dissolved!: Charleston and Fort Sumter in the Civil War." 63. Charleston: The History Press, 2009.

22.   Foote, Shelby. "The Civil War, A Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville." 44. New York: Random House, 1958.

23.   Ibid, p. 45.

24.   Ibid.

25.   DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 119.

26.   Ibid, p. 120.

27.   Ibid.

28.   Wiley, Bill Irvin. "The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union." 18-19. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952.