“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!”
"I am the voice of God and anyone who doesn't like it will be hewn down.
God has revealed to me that I have the right and the power to call down curses on anyone who tries to invade our lands.
Therefore, I curse the gentiles."
The Republic of Deseret, 1857
Abraham Lincoln, the Mormons, and the Civil War:
An LDS Perspective on “Honest Abe”
Seventh Edition
Michael T. Griffith
2011
@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 said Lincoln was among “the cursed scoundrels who have sought our destruction from the beginning” (Journal History, 1861-1862, December 10, 1861; see also below). President 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. In commenting on Dawson’s speech, President Young associated Lincoln with “cursed scoundrels”:
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 loose reading of the Constitution. Although Lincoln would occasionally quote Thomas Jefferson, in truth Lincoln “hated Thomas Jefferson as a man and as a politician” (Michael Lind, What Lincoln Believed, New York: Doubleday, 2005, p. 102, quoting Lincoln’s friend William Herndon). 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 doubted 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. For most of my life, 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, 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)
During his time in the Illinois House of Representatives, Lincoln repeatedly opposed efforts to audit the corrupt Illinois State Bank. The bank had funded a number of boondoggle public works projects that Lincoln and other Whigs had supported. Even worse, when Illinois Democrats demanded that the state bank make payments in gold or silver instead of in paper money, Lincoln tried to block the measure by attempting to shut down the legislature. When the House was in session to vote on the bill, Lincoln jumped out of the first-floor window of the House building and urged other Whigs to join him, in the hope of denying the House a quorum and thus preventing a vote. Luckily for the citizens of Illinois, the stunt failed and the state adopted an honest-money monetary policy (Thomas DiLorenzo,Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006, pp. 134-136).
With regard to Lincoln’s religious views, he was widely known for being an “infidel” and a “free thinker,” i.e., a non-believer. Robert Ingersoll, a contemporary of Lincoln’s who spent years investigating Lincoln’s religious beliefs, said Lincoln’s skepticism was common knowledge among his friends:
Lincoln was never a member of any church. Mrs. Lincoln stated a few years ago that Mr. Lincoln was not a Christian. . . .
Hundreds of his acquaintances have said the same thing. Not only so, but many of them have testified that he was a free thinker; that he denied the inspiration of the Scriptures, and that he always insisted that Christ was not the Son of God, and that the dogma of the Atonement was, and is, an absurdity. (Letter from Robert Ingersoll to Charles Collis, February 15, 1893, in Charles Collis, The Religion of Abraham Lincoln, New York: G. W. Dillingham Company Publishers, 1900, p. 7)
As a young man, Lincoln read the writings of skeptics. 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.
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, he did not 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.
Scholars have found some evidence that suggests that toward the end of his life Lincoln may have begun to take religion seriously and may have converted to Christianity, although there is doubt about the depth and nature 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 (Seances in the White House?). 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 homosexual sex. 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 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 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. After Lincoln issued the proclamation, he immediately sought to undo it, as African-American scholar Lerone Bennett documents in great 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. The proclamation was a war measure and it 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 attained their freedom 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. 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 that key Confederate leaders supported 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 (1) banned slavery from 80 percent of the territories, (2) overturned the Dred Scott decision in relation to slavery in the territories, (3) set up a system of de facto compensated emancipation for runaway slaves, and (4) removed the financial incentive for federal commissioners to rule against Northern blacks who were accused by slave catchers of being runaway slaves. In fact, on orders from Lincoln, Republicans in Congress not only blocked the compromise plan but even blocked a proposal that would have allowed the people to vote on the plan in a national referendum. If a national vote had been allowed, the plan most certainly would have been approved by a huge majority in all parts of the country.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael T. Griffith holds a Master’s degree in Theology from The Catholic Distance University, a Graduate Certificate in Ancient and Classical History from American Military University, a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Excelsior College, and two Associate in Applied Science degrees from the Community College of the Air Force. He also holds an Advanced Certificate of Civil War Studies and a Certificate of Civil War Studies from Carroll College. He is a graduate in Arabic and Hebrew of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and of the U.S. Air Force Technical Training School in San Angelo, Texas. In addition, he has completed an Advanced Hebrew program at Haifa University in Israel. He is the author of five books on Mormonism and ancient texts, including How Firm A Foundation, A Ready Reply, and One Lord, One Faith.
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