Abraham
Lincoln, the Mormons, and the Civil War:
An LDS
Perspective on America’s
Sixteenth President
Fourth Edition
Revised and Expanded on 24 September 2007
Michael T. Griffith
2007
@All Rights Reserved
Let
us begin by looking at Abraham Lincoln’s attitude and actions toward the
Church. As a Latter-day Saint, naturally
I am interested in how Lincoln
viewed and treated the Church. Four
years before he became president, Lincoln
supported the condemnation of Mormon plural marriage as a “relic of
barbarism.” Lincoln
rejected the Church’s position that the Saints had the constitutional right to
practice plural marriage in the Territory
of Utah. He also rejected the Church’s view that the
people of a territory had the right to make their own laws and to appoint their
own officials (compare Lincoln’s “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” June 26,
1857, with Orson Pratt’s General Conference address, “Celebration of American
Independence,” July 4, 1860, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 8, pp. 111-113,
and with Brigham Young’s General Conference address, “Constitutional
Powers of the Congress of the United States,” March 9, 1862, Journal of
Discourses, Vol. 10, pp. 38-41). In
addition, Lincoln opposed statehood for Utah unless the Church
renounced polygamy. In his 1857 speech
on the Dred Scott case, Lincoln
said it was “probable” the Mormons were in “open rebellion” against the federal
government. He then stated that
therefore he was open to the idea of abolishing Utah as a territory and said
the Saints should be “somehow coerced to obedience” (“Speech on the Dred Scott
Decision at Springfield, Illinois,” in Don E. Fehrenbacher, editor, Abraham
Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858, New York: Rutgers University Press, 1989, p.
390).
Brigham
Young complained that Lincoln said nothing when
the Saints were being persecuted in Illinois
and elsewhere. President Young said “Lincoln was no friend to
Christ, particularly, he had never raised his voice in our favor when he was aware
that we were being persecuted” (Brigham Young Office Journal, March 15,
1861). Commenting on this point a few
months later, President Young expressed the view that Lincoln acted like “he
would rather the Kingdom of God was out of the way,” and that Lincoln “was not
the man to raise his voice in favor of Joseph Smith when his enemies were
persecuting him” (Brigham Young Office Journal, August 13-21, 1861). In fact, President Young believed that Lincoln had approved of
the persecutions, stating that “he with many others had assented to the deaths
of innocent men, and through that he is subject to the influence of a wicked
spirit” (Ibid.).
As
president, Lincoln
signed the Anti-Polygamy Act of 1862.
The bill not only outlawed plural marriage, but it limited the Church’s
ownership of property to $50,000 and permitted the federal government to seize
all Church property held contrary to the provisions of the act. The Church justifiably protested that the
bill was unconstitutional and oppressive.
It’s true that Lincoln
did not enforce the bill. However, he
probably declined to enforce it because he was preoccupied with the Civil War
and didn’t want to risk sparking a major confrontation with the Mormons. It’s also likely that Lincoln
realized it would be difficult to obtain indictments against Utah polygamists anyway, since Latter-day
Saints exercised great influence on the judicial system in the territory. In late April 1861, after Lincoln had announced his intention to invade
the South, John Taylor expressed the view that the war was the reason the
Saints weren’t being violently persecuted at that time, saying, “If there is a
cessation of open hostilities against us, it is not for want of a disposition,
but owing to the peculiar situation. . . .” (“Safety
of the Saints At Home‑-Contrast of Their
Position with that of the United
States,” General Conference, April
28, 1861, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 9, p. 233).
Most of the first
territorial officials whom Lincoln appointed for
Utah were
anti-Mormons. The Church had requested
that Utah territorial officials be appointed
from among citizens of the territory, but Lincoln
refused this request. The officials he
appointed persecuted the Saints and falsely accused them of being “disloyal.”
The man whom Lincoln chose as
territorial governor, John Dawson, was a particularly bad choice. Before he had even arrived in the territory
to assume his post, Dawson wrote to the head of the Department of the Interior
that “the Mormons . . . have no
homogeneity in common with other citizens of the United States,” that their
“domestic polity is not in consonance with the Federal government,” and that
although the Mormons professed loyalty to the Constitution they were “inclined
to independence which may approximate rebellion under federal authority”
(Letter from John Dawson to Caleb Smith, Secretary of the Interior, October 26,
1861). After hearing Dawson’s
first address to the territorial legislature, in which Dawson implied doubt about the Saints’
loyalty and patriotism, Brigham Young was critical of both Dawson and
Lincoln. Regarding Dawson’s speech, President Young said the
following in a letter to Elder Wilford Woodruff:
The
Governor quotes my saying about the Constitution. I do now, and always
have, supported the Constitution, but I am not in league with cursed scoundrels
as Abe Lincoln and his minions who have sought our destruction from the
beginning. (Journal History, 1861-1862, December 10, 1861; E. B. Long, The
Saints and the Union: Utah Territory During the Civil War, Champaign,
Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1981, p. 50)
Dawson’s tenure as governor was very short. He left under a cloud of scandal after being
in the territory for only three weeks. Lincoln named Stephen Harding as Dawson’s replacement. Harding was a Radical Republican who soon
attacked the Church and sent false reports about the Saints back to Washington. LDS opposition to Harding and to other
federal territorial officials reached such a point that a special meeting was
held on the matter in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle on March 3, 1861, under the
direction of Brigham Young and other Church leaders. The assembly passed several resolutions. Among other things, the resolutions declared
that Harding’s accusations were “base, wicked, unjust, and false,” and that
Harding was trying to set up a “military despotism” in Utah (Long, The
Saints and the Union, p. 154).
Utah’s provisional senator, William Hooper, reported to Brigham Young
that in his meeting with Lincoln, Lincoln had rejected his complaints about
Harding because Lincoln was “so biased or prejudiced in his mind that nothing I
could have said would have moved him” (Letter from William Hooper to Brigham
Young, March 30, 1863). Later on, Lincoln finally appointed
territorial officials who were somewhat friendly to the Church, and he finally
replaced Governor Harding. However, even
some of his later appointments were anti-Mormons, and he did not replace the
federal army commander in Utah,
General Patrick Connor, who repeatedly accused the Saints of treason,
disloyalty, and rebellion.
Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, doubted the
Saints’ “loyalty to the Union” and therefore ordered army volunteers from Nevada and California to
stop in Utah
to make sure the Saints didn’t turn against the federal government. Federal troops behaved rudely and
threateningly toward the Church when they arrived in Utah.
They arrived with loaded rifles and canons and with fixed bayonets, even
though the Saints had shown no signs of resistance. When the troops set up their artillery, they
aimed the muzzles at Brigham Young’s home.
President Young was so outraged by the conduct of federal troops and
federal officials that he said he wouldn’t blame a single young man for not
volunteering for the Union army as long as federal troops were occupying Salt
Lake City (“The Persecution of the Saints—Their Loyalty to the Constitution,”
March 8, 1863, Journal of Discourses, Volume 10, p. 107; cf. Russell R.
Rich, Ensign to the Nations: A History of the LDS Church from 1846 to 1972,
Provo: Brigham Young University Publications, 1972, pp. 294-297). He added that even though Mormon troops had
protected the overland trails in 1862, long after the war had begun, “all this
does not prove any loyalty to political tyrants” (Ibid.). On an earlier occasion, in late 1861,
President Young said “he had no disposition to respond to the calls of a
government that had so lately shown their bitter hostilities against us”
(Brigham Young Office Journal, October 22, 1861).
It is ironic that so many
conservatives praise and cite Abraham Lincoln when in fact Lincoln was an advocate of big government,
higher taxes, wasteful federal public works projects, corporate welfare, and a
very loose reading of the Constitution.
Many Christians, including many Latter-day Saints, view Lincoln
as a fellow believer, but Lincoln
was at best a deist who rejected Christ’s divinity and the Bible’s divine
inspiration. I realize that many people
have been led to believe that Lincoln
was a conservative statesman and a faithful Christian, but the facts prove
otherwise.
Before I present some of
these facts, I’d like to say that I take no pleasure in discussing the sad
truth about Lincoln. Until relatively recently, I shared the
belief that Lincoln
was a conservative president and a good Christian. I am saddened that he was neither.
When Lincoln entered politics, he said he was
doing so in order to help enact the Whig Party agenda of higher tariffs,
unabashed protectionism for certain Northern industries, federal financing of
railroad and canal construction projects (most of which ended in bankruptcy or
in large-scale waste and fraud), a central bank, and a federal monopolization
of the nation's money supply. In the
years leading up to the war, Lincoln
joined the new Republican Party, which embraced the Whig agenda of higher taxes
and bigger government. As president, Lincoln raised taxes,
increased federal spending, destroyed our free banking system, and introduced
corporate welfare on an unprecedented scale.
He expanded the size and power of the federal government far beyond what
the Constitution permitted (and far beyond what was required to prosecute the
war). Lincoln destroyed key aspects of the
constitutional republic that our founding fathers gave us. In a very real sense, Lincoln
started America
down the road of abusive big government, higher taxes, and a disregard for a
faithful reading of the Constitution.
Conservative scholar Robert Ekelund of Auburn
University has said the following about
Lincoln’s
presidency:
The ambitious
economic agenda of the Republican Party had its roots in the economic platforms
of Federalist icon Alexander Hamilton and Whig leader Henry Clay. They advocated
protective tariffs for industry, a national bank, and plenty of public works
and patronage. The flurry of new laws, regulations, and bureaucracies created
by Lincoln and the Republican Party during the early 1860s foreshadowed
Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" for the volume, scope and
questionable constitutionality of its legislative output.
In fact, the term
"New Deal" was actually coined in March of 1865 by a newspaper editor
in Raleigh, North Carolina,
to characterize Lincoln
and the Republican Party platform. Lincoln’s
massive expansion of the federal government into the economy led Daniel Elazar
to claim, " . . . one could easily call Lincoln's
presidency the ‘New Deal’ of the 1860s." Republicans established a much
larger, more powerful, and more destructive federal government in the 1860s. . . .. (“The Awful Truth About
Republicans,” Ludwig Von Mises Institute, March 25, 2004,
http://www.mises.org/story/1476)
With
regard to Lincoln’s
religious views, he was widely known for
being an “infidel,” i.e., a non-believer.
As a
young man, Lincoln
read the writings of Thomas Paine, a well-known critic of Christianity. It was common knowledge among Lincoln’s
friends and neighbors that he agreed with Paine. One of Lincoln’s
close friends said Lincoln
accepted Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
John Stuart, one of Lincoln’s law partners, said Lincoln “went further
against Christian belief and doctrines and principles than any man I ever
heard; he shocked me” (William Herndon with Jesse Weik, Life of Lincoln, New York: Fawcett
Publications, 1961, reprint of 1888 edition, p. 349; Tripp, The Intimate
World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 184). Years before he entered the
political arena, Lincoln
wrote a manuscript that argued against Christ’s divinity and rejected the
inspiration of the Bible. Perhaps it’s revealing that when Lincoln ran for president in 1860, twenty of
the twenty-three ministers in his hometown opposed his candidacy.
Lincoln’s defenders point to his presidential speeches in
which he mentioned God and expressed gratitude for God’s blessings. But Bill Clinton did the same thing. Clinton regularly attended
church, talked about reading the Bible, mentioned God in many of his speeches,
and signed the Defense of Marriage Act.
Yet, would anyone argue that therefore Clinton was a Christian president? John F. Kennedy mentioned God in some of his
speeches, was known to read the Bible on occasion, and carefully cultivated the
image of a devoted family man. But would
anyone seriously assert that Kennedy was a Christian president?
Lincoln’s public speeches that expressed belief in God were
intended to satisfy religious people and were usually written by his Secretary
of State, William Seward. When Judge
James M. Nelson asked Lincoln about his overtly
religious (and now famous) Thanksgiving Message, Lincoln replied, “Oh, that is some of
Seward's nonsense, and it pleases the fools.”
Judge Nelson later said the following about Lincoln’s religious views in a letter to the Louisville
Times in 1887:
In religion, Mr. Lincoln was about of the same
opinion as Bob Ingersoll [an agnostic and ardent critic of the Bible], and
there is no account of his ever having changed. He went to church a few times
with his family while he was President, but so far as I have been able to find
out, he remained an unbeliever. Mr. Lincoln in his younger days wrote a book,
in which he endeavored to prove the fallacy of the plan of salvation and the
divinity of Christ. (In Franklin Steiner,
The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995, reprint, p. 137)
Lincoln’s original drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation
and the Gettysburg Address contained no references to God. The references to deity that now appear in
those documents were inserted at the suggestion of others in order to make them
more politically appealing. It should
also be noted that Lincoln
never so much as mentioned Jesus in any of his speeches or writings.
Lincoln’s defenders also note that Lincoln was known for reading the Bible. But Lincoln
rejected the Bible’s divine inspiration and viewed it only as a book of
practical advice. Lincoln read Aesop’s Fables just as
much as he read the Bible. William
Herndon, Lincoln’s long-time friend and law
partner, said Lincoln
rejected the Bible as a revelation from God:
As to Mr. Lincoln’s
religious views. . . . He was, in short, an
infidel . . . a theist. He did not
believe that Jesus was God, nor the Son of God.
He was a fatalist and denied the freedom of the will. Mr. Lincoln told me a thousand times, that he
did not believe the Bible was the revelation of God, as the Christian world
contends. (William Herndon, Life of Lincoln, p. 28)
C. A. Tripp commented on Lincoln’s Bible reading as
follows:
On
the other hand, later as president he was known to read the Bible (rather more
than before) and would not infrequently quote words and phrases from it. Both these images--is Bible reading and
borrowings from it--caused a few casual observers to believe he had become a
convert, or at least that he came to lean more than he ever had before toward
conventional beliefs. Far
from it. Consistently through
life . . . Lincoln
was greatly disinclined toward prayers or praying or preachers; least of all we
he ever prone to believe in, or to petition help from, any personal God. (The
Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 189)
Orville Browning, who
socialized often with the Lincolns
at the White House, said,
I
have seen him reading the Bible but never knew of his engaging in any other act
of devotion. He did not invoke a
blessing at table, nor did he have family prayers. . . . (In Tripp, The
Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 185)
Browning noted that even
when Lincoln’s favorite son, Willie, was dying a
slow, painful death, and another son, Tad, was seriously ill, not once did he
see Lincoln
pray or express any hope for divine intervention. This is not surprising, given the fact that
when asked specifically if he believed in an afterlife, Lincoln said, “when
we die, that is the last of us” (in Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 80).
In a letter responding to
claims that Lincoln
had converted to the Christian faith, Herndon said,
Not one of Lincoln's
old acquaintances in this city [Lincoln’s
hometown of Springfield, Illinois] ever heard of his conversion to
Christianity by Dr. Smith or anyone else. It was never suggested nor thought of
here until after his death. . . . I
never saw him read a second of time in Dr. Smith's book on Infidelity. He threw
it down upon our table--spit upon it as it were--and never opened it to my
knowledge. (In Steiner, The Religious
Beliefs of Our Presidents, p. 134)
Jesse
Fell, an early Lincoln biographer who
interviewed Lincoln at length, characterized Lincoln’s religious views in the following terms in 1870,
five years after Lincoln’s
death:
On the . . . character and office of the great Head
of the Church, the atonement, the infallibility of the written revelation, the
performance of miracles, the nature and design of present and future rewards
(as they are popularly called), and many other subjects, he [Lincoln] held
opinions utterly at variance with what are usually taught in the Church. I should say that his expressed views on
these and kindred topics were such as, in the estimation of most believers,
would place him outside the Christian pale. (In Herndon, Life of Lincoln,
p. 351)
In
1892 the Chicago Herald summarized Lincoln's
religious beliefs as follows:
He was without faith
in the Bible or its teachings. On this point the testimony is so overwhelming
that there is no basis for doubt. In his early life Lincoln exhibited a powerful tendency to
aggressive infidelity. But when he grew to be a politician he became secretive
and non-committal in his religious belief. . . . It must be accepted as final
by every reasonable mind that in religion Mr. Lincoln was a skeptic.
Only toward the very end of
his life may Lincoln
have begun to take religion seriously, and even then there is doubt about the
depth and genuineness of his alleged conversion. Lincoln’s
own wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, told Herndon that “Mr. Lincoln had no faith and no
hope in the usual acceptation of those words” (Herndon, Life of Lincoln,
p. 352). She added that Lincoln “was never a
technical Christian” (Herndon, Life of Lincoln, p. 352).
There is evidence that Lincoln experimented with
the occult. There are numerous reports
that Lincoln
associated with what were known as “spiritualists,” i.e., people who claimed to
be mediums or who consulted mediums, and who participated in séances. Apparently Lincoln attended at least one séance,
according to the Mary Todd Lincoln Research Site (http://members.aol.com/RVSNorton/Lincoln44.html). Some spiritualists claimed to have seen Lincoln in attendance at several séances, most of which
they said were held in nearby Georgetown
(Merrill Daniel Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, Oxford University
Press, 1995, pp. 229-230). Two
spiritualists said they attended a séance with Lincoln in the White House Red Room
(Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, p. 229). The Lincoln Institute acknowledges that some
séances were held at the White House (http://mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=71&subjectID=3). For decades after the war, spiritualists
claimed Lincoln
as one of their own. No one disputes the
fact that Mrs. Lincoln frequently consulted mediums and attended and hosted
séances. (Mrs. Lincoln claimed she
frequently saw her dead children. She
said her dead son Willie visited her every night.)
Given Lincoln’s views on religion and the Bible,
perhaps it’s not surprising that his moral values left much to be desired. For starters, Lincoln
was known for telling dirty jokes, even as president (see, for example, Douglas
Wilson, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of
Abraham Lincoln, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, pp. 110-129).
Ward Lamon, another close friend of Lincoln’s, said Lincoln’s humor “was
not of a delicate quality” but that “it was chiefly exercised in telling and
hearing stories of the grossest sort,” and that his “habit of relating vulgar
yarns--not one of which will bear printing--was restrained by no presence and
no occasion” (Life of Abraham Lincoln, Boston: James R. Osgood and
Company, 1872, p. 480). Even pro-Lincoln
biographers like William Klingaman, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and David Donald have
discussed Lincoln’s
habit of telling dirty jokes. In his younger years, Lincoln wrote an obscene
poem about gay marriage. As a bachelor, Lincoln
visited at least one prostitute and confided to a friend that he feared he had
contracted syphilis (Wilson, Honor’s Voice, pp. 126-129). There is even evidence that suggests Lincoln may have been
bisexual. For example, in recent years
it has come to light that for a period of several months a young Army captain named
David Derickson frequently slept with Lincoln
in his bed at the White House when Mrs. Lincoln went out of town (C. A. Tripp, The
Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Free Press, 2005, pp.
1-21). Derickson’s commanding officer,
Lt. Col. Thomas Chamberlain, confirmed this in his book on Derickson's
unit. Lincoln’s defenders argue that it
was not unusual for men to sleep together in those days, but those who were
aware of Derickson’s sleeping with Lincoln certainly didn’t view it as
ordinary. Derickson’s frequent sleeping
with Lincoln was a hot subject of conversation
in some elite Washington
social circles at the time. For
instance, Virginia Fox, the wife of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy
Gustavus Fox, was shocked when she heard about it from Letita McKean, the
daughter of Admiral William McKean. Both
women thought it was scandalous; neither viewed it as innocent or routine.
Lincoln held decidedly racist views about blacks and other
minorities, and he was frequently heard to use the N word. To be fair, Lincoln's
racist views were, sad to say, very common in that era, in all parts of the
country, but there were some Americans even at that time who
did not hold the kinds of racist views that Lincoln held.
Lincoln repeatedly said he did not believe in the social or
political equality of the races, that he believed in white supremacy, that he
opposed interracial marriage, that he opposed allowing blacks to vote, and that
he opposed allowing blacks to serve on juries.
Lincoln supported the Illinois "Black Code," which
prohibited the immigration of blacks into the state. Lincoln
was a staunch defender of the fugitive slave law and once defended in court a
slaveholder seeking to retrieve his runaway slaves. He supported a proposed constitutional
amendment that would have made it permanently impossible for the federal government
to abolish slavery. He was a lifelong
advocate of colonization, which was a program that would have sent most or all
American blacks to Africa, Haiti,
or Central America. During the war, Lincoln strongly opposed giving black Union
troops equal pay. Additionally, Lincoln allowed the
largest mass hanging of American Indians in our history. He also authorized the hanging of a black
Union soldier who had protested the unequal treatment that he and other black
troops were receiving in the Union army.
As far as freeing the
slaves, Lincoln
doesn't deserve much credit for this. Lincoln
only issued the Emancipation Proclamation under intense pressure from the
Radical Republicans (as they were commonly known back then). The Radicals were
threatening to cut off funding for the army if Lincoln didn't issue some kind of
emancipation statement. Radical
Republicans expressly hoped the Emancipation Proclamation would lead to slave
revolts that would kill thousands of Southern citizens. Even after Lincoln issued the proclamation,
he immediately sought to undo it, as African-American scholar Lerone Bennett
documents in detail in his book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White
Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000). Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation
did not free any slaves in the four Union slave states; nor did it free any
slaves in those areas of the South that were under federal control. The proclamation was a war measure that only
applied to slaves in Confederate-held territory. Without question, it was unconstitutional,
although of course one can applaud the fact that some Southern slaves were
freed during the war because of it. The
proclamation was partially a public relations maneuver that was designed to
keep Britain and France from
siding with the Confederacy. Slavery
wasn’t abolished until several months after the war, with the passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
What I find especially
disturbing about Lincoln
is his conduct of the war. Lincoln
authorized a disgraceful form of "total war" against the South that
resulted in the deaths of some 50,000 Southern civilians. On several occasions,
Lincoln
promoted officers who had committed war crimes, at least one of whom had been
convicted in a military court martial for those crimes. A few Union generals resigned because they
believed Lincoln's
war policy was immoral and cruel. Even the infamous Union general William
Tecumseh Sherman admitted, after the war, that the form of warfare that he had
waged against the South violated the rules of war that had been taught at West Point. Lincoln's war policy also
violated the rules of civilized warfare that had long been accepted by European
nations.
Many Northern citizens
condemned Lincoln’s
refusal to allow medicines to be sold to the South, which resulted in the
needless deaths of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers and of several
thousand Southern citizens. Lincoln
wouldn't even sell medicines to the South when the Confederate government
wanted to buy them for wounded Union soldiers in Southern prison camps--in
spite of the fact that the Confederacy was willing to allow Union doctors to
accompany the medicines to ensure they were used only for Union prisoners.
Lincoln's conduct leading up to the war wasn't praiseworthy
either. Regardless of how one feels about secession, the Southern states
withdrew from the Union in a peaceful,
democratic manner--in fact they did so in a manner that closely resembled the
process by which the U.S. Constitution was ratified. And, once formed, the Confederacy sought
peaceful relations with the federal government. Indeed, the Confederacy offered
to pay the South's share of the national debt, offered to pay compensation for
all federal installations in the South, sought to make trade agreements with
the federal government, and offered Northern ships free navigation of the
Mississippi River. The Confederacy sent peace commissioners to Washington in an attempt to establish peaceful relations,
but Lincoln
wouldn't meet with them, not even informally. Even after the Fort Sumter
incident, which Lincoln
later admitted he provoked, the Confederacy expressed its desire for peace.
Instead of accepting the
South's offer for peaceful relations, Lincoln
called up 75,000 troops and ordered a blockade of Southern ports--without
Congressional authorization. This was an unprecedented usurpation of power.
Even during the Nullification Crisis between the federal government and South Carolina in 1832, none other than the great
nationalist Daniel Webster said the president did not have the authority to
blockade South Carolina's
ports without Congressional authorization. Also, in his final message to
Congress, Lincoln's
predecessor, President James Buchanan, said the federal government did not have
the authority to use force against the seceded states. Buchanan correctly noted that the founding
fathers had specifically rejected the idea that the federal government could
use violence to compel the obedience of a state. Lincoln's unlawful demand for 75,000 troops
to invade the seceded states led four more Southern states to join the
Confederacy. It's worth pausing to note that those four states--North Carolina, Virginia,
Tennessee, and Arkansas--didn't
secede over slavery but because they believed it was unjust and
unconstitutional to maintain the Union by
force. Perhaps these were some of the
reasons that Brigham Young said “the greatest share” of the brethren in the
Church were “for the South” (Letter from Brigham Young to W. C. Haines,
February 25, 1862, Brigham Young Letter Books, Church Archives; Long, The
Saints and the Union, p. 65).
Lincoln violated the Constitution in other ways. He
illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and allowed the military to arrest,
try, and imprison Northern civilians, even in areas that were far removed from
combat and where civilian courts were still in operation. One year after the
war, the Supreme Court finally, and belatedly, declared this policy
unconstitutional (in Ex Parte Milligan). Under Lincoln's direction, over 10,000 Northern
civilians were jailed without due process of law, in many cases for merely
voicing opposition to the war or the draft or for expressing the view that the
South should be allowed to go in peace. When former President Franklin Pierce
voiced objections to Lincoln's conduct of the
war and to his violations of civil rights, Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward,
took steps to have Pierce arrested. Under Lincoln,
over 100 newspapers were shut down for printing what Lincoln and his Union
generals viewed as "unpatriotic" articles about the war, and dozens
of newspaper editors were jailed for the same reason.
In one noteworthy instance, Lincoln ignored a circuit
court's writ of habeas corpus for the release of a Northern citizen who had
been jailed by the military. The writ was issued by the chief justice of the
Supreme Court in his capacity as judge of the judicial circuit that included
the area where the citizen was being held. The man had been jailed without an
indictment and without a trial. When the chief justice heard about this, he
issued a writ of habeas corpus for the man's release. Lincoln refused to comply. Instead, Lincoln illegally ordered
the military to ignore the writ, and then he ordered the arrest of the chief
justice himself (luckily this order wasn't carried out). Lincoln
erroneously claimed that he had the power to suspend habeas corpus protection
without Congressional authorization. The
chief justice wrote a compelling refutation of Lincoln’s claim in Ex Parte Merryman.
Lincoln sought to justify these abuses with the argument
that they were necessary in order to suppress "rebellion,” “insurrection,”
and “treason.” But the Southern states
weren't trying to overthrow the federal government. They merely wanted to be
independent. They had no desire to
overthrow the federal government. The
real reason Lincoln had to suppress civil rights was that there were so many
Northern citizens who either opposed the war, opposed the draft, or who didn't
understand why the South couldn't be allowed to go in peace.
Finally, I think I should
say a word about the issue of slavery in relation to the Civil War. It goes without saying that slavery needed to
be abolished. However, I don't agree
that we had no choice but to fight a bloody war before we could do so. Slavery was starting to die out anyway. In
addition, when slavery was abolished after the war, no compensation was paid to
Southern slaveowners, even though Lincoln had said this should be done. After
all, when Northern states abolished slavery, they did so very gradually,
provided various forms of compensation for the slaveholders, and allowed some
of the slaves to be sold to buyers in other parts of the country. Many people don’t realize that at the start
of the war, there were four Union slave states, and two of those states
continued to allow slavery until several months after the war ended. As a matter of fact, at the moment when Lincoln ordered the sending of an armed naval convoy to Fort Sumter,
there were more slave states in the Union than
there were states in the Confederacy.
Throughout the war, the
major point of contention between the North and the South was the South’s
desire for independence, not slavery. Lincoln stated over and
over again that the war was not being fought to end slavery. Indeed, as mentioned above, Lincoln supported a proposed constitutional
amendment that would have permanently prohibited the federal government from
abolishing slavery (he even mentioned his support for this amendment in his
first inaugural speech). The
Republicans’ main reason for invading the South was to force the South back
into the Union, and a good case can be made
that they did so in order to avoid losing tariff revenue from the South and to
protect Northern business interests.
However, halfway through the war, the Radical Republicans made the
violent, uncompensated abolition of Southern slavery the second major objective
of the war, over the objections of Lincoln himself. Many of these same Republicans were known to
hate the South and to hold racist views themselves. Many of them didn't really
care about the slaves, but they used slavery as their justification for
ravaging and subjugating the South.
Nearly every other nation on earth where slavery existed managed to
abolish the institution peacefully. It's interesting to note that some of the
more responsible Northern abolitionists said the South should be allowed to go
in peace because they felt this would hasten the demise of slavery. Historians J. G. Randall and David Donald,
after noting the support of key Confederate leaders for granting freedom to
slaves and their families for faithful military service, acknowledged that the
Confederacy may very well have abolished slavery even if it had survived the
war:
On November 7, 1864, President [Jefferson] Davis went
so far as to approve the employment of slave-soldiers as preferable to
subjugation, and on February 11, 1865, the Confederate House of Representatives
voted that if the President
should not be able to raise sufficient troops otherwise, he was
authorized to call for additional levies “from such classes . . . irrespective
of color . . . as the . . . authorities . . . may determine”. . . . There was no mistaking the meaning of this
action. The fundamental social concept
of slavery was slipping; an opening wedge for emancipation had been
inserted. Lee’s opinion agreed with that
of the President and Congress. On
January 11, 1865, he wrote advising the enlistment of slaves as soldiers and
the granting of “immediate freedom to all who enlist, and freedom at the end of
the war to the families of those who discharge their duties faithfully. . .
.” This fact, together with other
indications, suggests that, even if the Confederacy had survived the war, there
was a strong possibility that slavery would be voluntarily abandoned in the
South. (The Civil War and Reconstruction, Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Company, 1969, p. 522)
If a true statesman had been
president in 1861, I believe war could have been avoided. I'm reminded of the
fact that Lincoln derailed a popular compromise
plan in Congress that would have avoided war, banned slavery from 80 percent of
the territories, and kept the Union together.
In fact, on orders from Lincoln,
Republicans in Congress blocked the compromise plan and even blocked a proposal
that would have allowed the people to vote on the plan in a national
referendum.
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Michael T. Griffith holds a Master’s degree
in Theology from The Catholic Distance University, a Bachelor’s degree in
Liberal Arts from Excelsior College, two Associate in Applied Science degrees
from the Community College of the Air Force, and an Advanced Certificate of
Civil War Studies and a Certificate of Civil War Studies from Carroll College.
He is a two-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey,
California, in Arabic and Hebrew, and of the
U.S. Air Force Technical Training School in San Angelo, Texas.
He is the author of four books on Mormonism and ancient texts, and of one book
on the John F. Kennedy assassination. He has completed advanced Hebrew programs
at Haifa University
in Israel and at the Spiro
Institute in London, England.
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