Abraham Lincoln And The Road to Emancipation, 1861-1865.(Review)

Abraham Lincoln And The Road to Emancipation, 1861-1865 By William K. Klingaman Viking, 344 pages, $25.95

Despite the claims of some Southern partisans, the legitimacy of Southern secession in 1860 cannot be separated from the question of slavery. If secession was a revolutionary act, it was not, like the American Revolution, premised on defending individual liberty against tyranny. Rather, it was (like the Soviet Revolution) premised on subjecting individual rights to the "sovereignty of the state." Today, many still believe secession can be separated from slavery, and that though Lincoln may have detested human bondage, he had no right to prevent "Southern independence."

But Lincoln understood that slavery was at the heart of the war ten years before that war came. His debates with Stephen Douglas demonstrated that the notion of "popular sovereignty" (i.e., the "right" of the majority to enslave the minority) was self-contradictory, especially after Dred Scott. But the South was quite successful in disguising its fight for slavery as a fight for freedom, a ruse so clever that many still fall for it. H.L. Mencken, for instance, said Lincoln was "actually fighting against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of the people to govern themselves."

But self-determination can only be based on the principle of equality, and its corollary, government by consent. Anything else is not self-determination, but the enslavement of some by others. Communist nations that insist "national self determination" requires silent acquiescence to tyranny, are attempting precisely the same ruse. As Lincoln put it, this view of self-determination means that if one man wishes to enslave another, no third man may be allowed to object. The "consent" of slave owners could no more legitimize the Confederacy's secession than the mutual consent among criminal conspirators can insulate them from prosecution. Klingaman is therefore wrong to say Lincoln overcame "the eighteenth-century notion that government was based on popular consent." In fact, the defeat of the South reaffirmed that principle. In Lincoln's words, "No man is good enough to govern another without that man's consent."

If Lincoln saw the inseparable connection between slavery and the war, why did he often insist he was fighting only for union? Because, as Klingaman shows, it would have been impossible for Lincoln to claim otherwise. For one thing, more troops would desert a crusade against slavery than a crusade for union. And Lincoln took seriously the fact that he had no Constitutional power to end slavery in the states where it already existed. He only ...