American History Revised (64 page)

The Bible says, “He hath ears but he hear not, he hath eyes but he see not.” Consider the strange case of Lyndon Johnson, former antiwar congressman. In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles arranged a private meeting with eight key congressional leaders to inform them that President Eisenhower wanted congressional approval to send military support to the French, who were about to lose Indochina. The congressmen, anxious to avoid another Korea, asked a spate of questions about whether this would mean another war, and how much it would cost. One congressman, the leader of the group, was particularly adamant and argued that America should not go it alone if no other allies would join America in supporting the French. Upon his urging, the group of eight congressmen turned down the president’s request. They would not go to war.

Ten years later this man who kept us out of Vietnam would become president and plunge America into full-scale hostilities.
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Such are the surprises of history. But equally surprising is the present, the new global world the United States now lives in. Consider how the rest of the world disagrees with Americans in rating our greatest presidents. In the United States, Lincoln consistently ranks number one. But travel abroad, and one sees that it is Washington the doer, the man who overthrew a colonial power, who is revered. There is no statue of Abraham Lincoln in cities outside the United States (except in London). But go to London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Budapest, and Tokyo, and you will find statues of the founder of our country. His achievement is the one the world celebrates.

1787
The members of the Constitutional Convention had a problem: the elderly Benjamin Franklin, who had the unfortunate habit of speaking his mind whenever he felt like it. Whereas Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were always reasonably circumspect in their words, here they had a loose cannon.

Jefferson, in a moment of reflection, had gone on record that a new constitutional convention might be necessary every twenty years or so. His fellow constitutional delegates, struggling in the heat of a long Philadelphia summer to produce a lasting document, were less than thrilled. Cool it, they told Jefferson, and so Jefferson never said a further word about what would have been the most interesting
insight of the entire summer (our loss, certainly). But worse was still to come. From Benjamin Franklin they heard that “our people would drift into so deep a corruption that only despots could rule them.”

Horrors! Standing high in the name of righteousness, the Convention members ordered that Franklin be followed at all times, and be accompanied by a chaper-one to “make sure he held his tongue.”

So much for free speech in the founding of America. Political correctness was the byword even then.

1860
The weeks after Lincoln’s election found the nation adrift. In the intolerable five-month interregnum between Lincoln’s election and taking of office the following March—that’s how long it was in those days—radicals were pounding the war drums. South Carolina, followed by Kentucky and Alabama, were making loud noises to secede. The victorious Republicans, committed to the moral evil of slavery, failed to take the secession threat seriously. As James G. Blaine noted, it was as if the Republicans, having gained the object of their efforts, were surprised and aghast at the reaction their success had produced. “We all dealt in a fool’s Paradise,” lamented Charles Francis Adams, a leading Republican. All people, he said, were “of average blindness….We knew nothing of the South, and had no realizing sense of the intensity of feeling which there prevailed; we fully believed it would all end in gasconade”—i.e., bluster and hot air.

Even Lincoln, sitting home in Illinois and out of touch with the mood of the South, viewed secession as the talk of a few hotheads. When South Carolina seceded on December 20, he dismissed the news as “loud threats and muttering.”

Into the foray stepped the most senior member of the Senate, John Crittenden of Kentucky. First elected to the Senate back in 1825, Crittenden had served as governor, U.S. attorney general under three presidents, and four-term senator. If peace had its chance, it had found its man.

Like everyone else, Crittenden knew slavery was a dying institution. Its demise was inevitable. What the South needed was time: more time for the inefficiencies of slavery to work their way through the economy. “The peaceful laws of trade may do the work which agitation has attempted in vain,” he observed. Because the North was much wealthier than the South, the obvious solution was for the North to buy out the slaves. Indeed, such a “buyout” was the solution proposed by Henry Clay in 1850. Clay’s proposal got nowhere, but remained on the table for Northerners to consider as a last resort.

Under the Crittenden Compromise, slavery would be preserved south of the 1820 Missouri Compromise line of 36°30’
latitude while cooler heads prevailed and tried to work out appropriate compensation for the slaves. The idea was that the longer the talks dragged on, the more isolated the Deep South states would become. But such a compromise would have included the new state of New Mexico (though everyone knew the arid land of New Mexico would never support a cotton plantation). The president-elect—in the most momentous decision of his presidency—rejected it out of hand. “Have none of it, stand firm,” he said. So out the window went the best chance for peace, though in the meantime hundreds of petitions supporting Crittenden’s plan had descended on Congress. Observed Horace Greeley, “If a popular vote could have been had on the Crittenden Compromise, it would have prevailed by an overwhelming majority.” All the Southern states agreed to Crittenden’s proposal, but the victorious Lincoln Republicans—acting as if they had a mandate when they most assuredly did not—refused to support it and filibustered it to death. Even William Seward, the number-two Republican and the leader of the moderates, went apoplectic: “Not one word said to disarm prejudice and passion … mad men North and mad men South, are working together to produce a dissolution of the Union by civil war.” In the Senate, one day before Lincoln’s inauguration, Crittenden’s proposal lost to the mad men by one one vote, nineteen to twenty.

In his inaugural address, believing there would be no civil war, Lincoln gave the seceding states an ultimatum: rejoin the Union, or fight. He miscalculated. When he sent relief supplies to Fort Sumter, the South took this as a provocation and launched shells at the fort. No lives were lost. But Lincoln treated it as a declaration of war and called up 75,000 soldiers for ninety days, and so the fighting started. The four Upper South states, led by Virginia and North Carolina, refusing the president’s order to invade the Deep South, made the fateful choice to secede.

The result was the loss of 558,000 lives and a hundred years of hostility between North and South. Was it worth it? At 2 million slaves at four hundred dollars apiece, the $9-billion Civil War cost more than eleven times what it would have cost for the U.S. government of the North to simply indemnify the Southern plantation owners for their slaves and give each Afro-American family “40 acres and a mule.”

Ironically enough, Lincoln himself eventually came around to the idea of a buyout. In 1862, with the war dragging out a lot longer than the expected ninety days, he offered a buyout for Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Washington DC at the rate of four hundred dollars per slave for 432,622 slaves. Lincoln calculated that the $173,048,800—compared with the war’s daily cost of $2 million—was a bargain “nearly equal to the estimated $174 million needed to wage war for eighty-seven days.” But by then, with the war in full fury and the
South having won most of the battles, it was too late. Still, Lincoln did not give up. A month later he succeeded in signing a law outlawing slavery in the District of Columbia and paying slave owners three hundred dollars per slave. Washington DC was the only place in the United States where compensated emancipation took place. Then, in early 1865, as the war was winding down, Lincoln considered using compensated emancipation as a means of shortening the war. Calculating that the war was costing $4 million a day, he drafted a proposal to Congress to pay the South $400 million as compensation for the economic loss of their slaves, in return for immediate cessation of hostilities. Lincoln shared his draft with his Cabinet members, but they all objected, so Lincoln dropped the idea.

Might the rebellion have been avoided?

Today, buyouts are a common practice in helping institutions rearrange their workforce to cope with new economic and political realities. Might not hard cash, given cooler heads in the 1860 Republican Party, have avoided a bloodbath?

1863
The war was of no direct interest to the vast majority of the population: why go fight and get shot at? Especially when wealthier young men could get an exemption and stay home to pursue professions considered vital to the national interest. People complained bitterly about how it was becoming “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” As the number of casualties escalated to more than a quarter million, the war became so unpopular that many citizens considered revolting against the government and leaving the country.

In the year of an upcoming presidential election that would serve as a referendum on whether the war should be continued, further hostilities were opposed by as much as 80 percent of the population. The U.S. president up for reelection faced daunting prospects, and had to contend with peace demonstrations and draft riots in the streets.

By 1864, alienation from the Confederate government and its zeal to preserve slavery had reached overwhelming proportions. Whites made up only 60 percent of the South’s population, and only 5.5 percent of them owned slaves. Slave owners who held more than twenty slaves automatically were exempted from the draft. For the Confederate government of Jefferson Davis to wage a costly, deadly war for the benefit of this rich minority, was not popular. In addition to widespread demonstrations, riots in Richmond, and massive desertions, many Southerners carried out guerrilla operations against the state and offered active military support to the enemy. One state, for practical purposes, went over to the other side (West Virginia). The 40 percent of the population held in slavery posed a continual threat of massive internal insurrection.