1861 to 1963 Tension Over Slavery
In the spring of 1861, decades of simmering
tensions between the northern and southern States over issues including states'
rights versus federal authority, westward expansion and slavery exploded into
the American Civil War (1861-65). The election of the anti-slavery Republican
Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 caused seven southern states to secede
from the Union to form the Confederate States of America; four more joined them
after the first shots of the Civil War were fired. Four years of brutal
conflict were marked by historic battles at Bull Run (Manasas), Antietam,
Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Vicksburg, among others. The War Between the
States, as the Civil War was also known, pitted neighbor against neighbor and
in some cases, brother against brother. By the time it ended in Confederate
surrender in 1865, the Civil War proved to be the costliest war ever fought on
American soil, with some 620,000 of 2.4 million soldiers killed, millions more
injured and the population and territory of the South devastated.
Our
commemoration of the 150 anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War,
re-enactments of battles by people dressed in period costumes and the
principles at the heart of the conflict: union vs. dis union; freedom against
slavery. No single human being embodies so well those clashes as Abraham
Lincoln, a polarizing figure when elected, Lincoln is now venerated but let’s
not canonize him. His short comings make him accessible to us and a more
familiar and less remote figure. Lincoln -might have declared war on slavery in
his first inaugural address. He loathed slavery and, besides, none of his
electoral votes came from the slave states. Frustrated by the lack of success
of his army early in the war, he could have sacked his irresolute army
commander, George McClellan. He might have pushed earlier for conscription for biding
men to purchase “substitutes” to fight in their place. He didn’t abide strictly
abide the Constitution when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
These lapses detract little from Lincoln
and make him all the more a cherished cause. He might yet have turned into a
plaster saint and be made unapproachable. Lincoln’s hatred of slavery had to
take second place to his commitment to save the union, so he temporized on
emancipation until he could justify it by claiming that it denied the
Confederacy the labor of the slaves. On the racial question, Lincoln brought
considerable personal baggage to the presidency.
His reputation as a man free of bigotry has
taken some hard knocks in the past 40 years as historians took account of the
African-American experience and looked critically, even harshly at very thing
from Lincoln’s humor and language to his ill-starred plan to resettle freed
slave-s in Central America.
Visited by a delegation of white
abolitionists who had come to complain about the pay differential between white
and black laborers in the army, Lincoln greeted them by saying, “Well,
gentlemen, you wish the pay of “Cuffie” raise.” The name was a variation on the
common West Africa name “Kofi” and was considered demeaning to blacks. Lincoln
was chided by one of the delegation members who brashly told the president,
“Excuse me Mr. Lincoln. The term “Cuffie” is not in our vernacular. Like a
modern politician caught in an indiscretion, Lincoln replied, “I stand
corrected, young man but you know I am by birth a Southerner and in our section
that term is applied without any idea of an offensive nature.”
Lincoln also addressed the black
abolitionist Sojourner Truth as “Aunty,” a term whites usually applied condescendingly
to household servants. Yet Frederick Douglass the leading black figure of the era
proclaimed Lincoln entirely free from popular prejudice against the colored
race.
There were two reasons for Lincoln’s apparent indecisiveness in
replacing the vain and ineffective McClellan. First the general was enormously
popular with his troops, whose sagging morale he had bolstered. Second, there
wasn’t a simply suitable replacement. After McClellan’s army was defeated by a
much smaller confederate force in the Battle of the Seven Days, Lincoln
replaced him with General John Pope, whose impetuousness was the mirror image
of McClellan’s vacillation, so Lincoln reluctantly turned again to McClellan to
lead the army.
Finding soldiers to wage the fight also posed
an awkward problem. The system of the states supplying volunteers for the army
did not survive the ruinous losses suffered in the battles of Antietam and
Gettysburg. Lincoln had to confront the traditional fear of standing and
conscription, which dated to before the American Revolution, and was so deeply
ingrained that he resorted to the draft as a last desperate measure.
Substitution was a legalized method of draft evasion supported throughout the
war by Congress, which was interested only in the number of bodies and not in
any particular body. So Lincoln left the practice intact.
Lincoln stretched the powers of
the presidency beyond their constitutional limits fearing that the secession of
the slave state of Maryland would leave Washington, D.C. completely encircled
by hostile territory he moved aggressively and arguably unconstitutionally to
deny habeas corpus protection to people accused of committing acts of sabotage.
He was challenged on this by the
chief justice of the United States but defended his action by arguing that if
he scrupulously observed a single provision of the Constitution and the Union
collapsed, he would be violating his oath of office. A clever lawyer’s ruse,
perhaps, but Lincoln was president of a nation on the verge of disintegration.
He could be petulant his humor was often coarse, and he sacrificed principles
to expediency. He hastily fired generals who failed in their first effort to
achieve victory and tolerate others who political influence has blinded him to
their chronic incompetence. Even so, he was also the model of what a president
should be: resolute in defense of his country, a shrewd judge of human nature,
and a man who eloquently expressed his country’s noblest ideals. His own
modesty would not allow him to claim any special genius for steering his nation
through its greatest crisis.
Abolition! It stated all Americans
are created equal. There will be no more slavery regardless of skin color,
race, and origin of ancestors. We are all United States Americans.
It had been one hundred and forty
seven years since the Declaration of Independence was written, as Abraham
Lincoln stated in his famous Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation.
Federal Union now had the authority to:
a. Conscript men into the armed forces, if need be, to
protect its citizens both internally and externally.
b. It could now levy an income tax, and did almost
immediately which definitely maintained its authority.
c. The right for anyone to receive the reward of their
labors. The Government exists to protect all of its States
against any internal
or external to challenge its existence
A hundred years came and
went, and the Negros still weren’t treated equally. Civil-rights activists
challenged segregation in the American South in 1961. Freedom riders bus trips
undertaken jointly by white and black young people in America’s Deep South. At
a time when our nation faced bitter divisions and great economic and social
upheaval. America is still a young country and still an unfolding experiment.
We cannot move forward without looking at how we’ve dealt with challenges in
the past. Despite U.S. Supreme Court decisions that mandated the desegregation
of interstate travel facilities, African-Americans continued to face hostility
and racism while traveling in the south. The bus rides initially were organized
by the national staff of the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil-right organization,
which recruited 13 riders. Small groups greeted the Freedom Riders’ with awful
racists rhetoric and violence that included setting fires and threatening the
rider’s lives, just because black and white people were riding a bus together.
Dr. KARL WALLACE
D.D.S.
To read more Karl Wallace stories go
to:
www.karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com
