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Abraham Lincoln`s Contribution To Union Victory In The Civil War

The first few chapters of an essay examining Lincoln`s Presidency

Date : 22/11/2011

Author Information

Thomas

Uploaded by : Thomas
Uploaded on : 22/11/2011
Subject : History

We are used to seeing Abraham Lincoln in marble now. His angular form sits comfortably inside a temple which recalls the buildings dedicated to the mightiest deities of Ancient Greece, opposite the immense obelisk of the Washington Memorial. History, we are told, is written by the victors. The proof of Lincoln's victory is everywhere in the United States. He adorns the humble American cent, first issued with his craggy features on it in 1909, the centenary of his birth. His thin, bearded face gazes in granite from Mount Rushmore, along with such luminaries as Washington, Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt. But most of all, it possible to walk ten minutes from the Lincoln Memorial, across the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac, and to be in Arlington, Virginia, which is so proudly part of the United States. Today's visitor might well be struck by the ubiquity of Old Glory in Arlington, the site as it is of the National Cemetery, but it was not always so. In April 1861, a bare couple of months after Lincoln's arrival in Washington as the 16th President, Virginia seceded from the Union. Arlington became enemy territory. Confederate artillery batteries were emplaced upon its heights, making Washington nakedly vulnerable. As it turned out, Union soldiers captured Alexandria and Arlington Heights with ease in the last week of May 1861, and removed the most immediate threat to Washington. However, this little spat at the beginning of the Civil War might well serve as a telling vignette for the whole of that terrible conflict. The victory of the North was far from assured, and before the muzzle-blackened cannon finally fell silent in 1865, the ideals of the United States would many times be tested within an inch of destruction. Triumph is not destiny. It is the measure of the incalculable debt that the United States owes Abraham Lincoln that any visitor to Washington might forget easily that. By any objective measure, Abraham Lincoln was spectacularly ill equipped by experience to direct the most comprehensive war effort yet seen in the Western Hemisphere. As has often been noted elsewhere, most recently by Doris Kearns Goodwin, all of Lincoln's main competitors for the Republican nomination in 1860 had significantly better credentials than he did. William H. Seward had served as a US Senator for New York since 1849, and had sat in the Governor's mansion in Albany for two terms before that. Salmon Chase had also been elected to the Senate in 1849, from Ohio, and as Governor of that state in 1855. Both Seward and Chase had remarkable progressive records, most notably for their eloquent opposition to the 'peculiar institution' of slavery in the South, but also for a host of other issues, from penal reform to the vital importance of public education. By contrast, Lincoln had occupied the Illinois Seventh Congressional district for a single term before winning the Presidency in 1860. His military experience was famously confined to ninety days in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk war of 1832. Little wonder that such titans of the nascent Republican Party as Chase and Seward initially viewed him as a placeholder. Of course such a comparison is unfair. Lincoln was denied the political connections and patronage that blazed the trail of both Chase and Seward into politics. Instead, Lincoln made the law his profession, to great effect, appearing in front of the Illinois Supreme Court 175 times. On 51 of these occasions, he was the sole counsel. Lincoln plainly thrived on the responsibility, for 31 of these cases were decided in his favour. It therefore surprised few within his adopted state that when he was given the chance to strike a major blow against the slave power, Lincoln proved worthy of the task. As the Republican nominee for a US Senate seat from Illinois, Lincoln took on the famous incumbent Democrat Stephen A. Douglas for the seat in 1858. By 1858, few politicians were thought able to win votes on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Douglas was one of the few. At these debates, he was championing his policy of popular sovereignty. This allowed settlers in US territories the right to vote on whether to allow slavery within their borders. This seemingly innocuous policy had national implications for the balance of power in the US Congress, between those slave states which encouraged the institution of slavery outside their borders, and those states which declared it illegal within their borders and sought to frustrate it elsewhere. Douglas' policy was particularly objectionable to many Northerners, since his Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened the possibility that slavery might be adopted by these two newly-created territories. By doing so, Douglas superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had explicitly outlawed the spread of slavery this far north. When Lincoln debated Douglas on seven occasions from August to October 1858, he was expressing the profound disquiet shared by many in the North that the institution of slavery appeared to be flourishing rather than withering on the vine. Douglas and Lincoln were both moderate men. They had much more in common with each other than the choleric firebrands in both their parties. Nonetheless, a chasm of difference existed in their thinking. Douglas, the Democrat, viewed his compromise as vital, for fear of the chaos which might ensue without it. Lincoln, the Republican, viewed the compromise as unacceptable, for fear of the germ of chaos contained within making such an important concession to the South. Lincoln narrowly lost the election, but his elegant and coherent arguments won him the credibility necessary to become the elected Republican nominee and President in 1860. Fortunately for the Republican Party and the North, Lincoln also lent the youthful GOP the credibility of his judgement and crisis management. A military confrontation with the South was inevitable. But the form it took was anything but. When Lincoln was inaugurated, Washington stood painfully exposed, surrounded by dubiously loyal Maryland on three sides and openly hostile Virginia on the fourth. The 6th Massachusetts regiment, one of the first units of volunteers to answer the call to arms, was assailed by an angry pro-Southern mob in April 1861 as they changed railroad cars at Baltimore, with men killed on both sides. In those uncertain days, another man might well have shifted the capital away from Washington, perhaps to safer ground at Philadelphia. However, Lincoln knew the huge propaganda cost of such a retreat. He garnered ridicule from arriving by train in the night. Democrat papers made fun of the lanky figure, who in their reports used a Scotch cap or shawl to hide his identity on his way from the railway station to Willard's Hotel. The new President suffered many nervous hours waiting for the reinforcements that would make his capital secure and keep Maryland in the Union, but the Republicans were saved the humiliation of abandoning the national capital. Both sides sought to paint themselves as the true heirs of the American Revolution; if the efforts of the Confederates to do so often resembled a child's first effort at finger painting, Lincoln revealed a customary polish to his politics entirely lacking in his personal appearance.

This resource was uploaded by: Thomas