A History of the American People

and purposes are hostile to slavery.' But most presidents of the United States had been hostile to
slavery, not least Jefferson, the man whose opinions on the subject Lincoln most often quoted.
The Southern leaders assumed there were absolute differences between the peoples of North
and South. In fact allegiances were of whom were killed-and her emotional sympathies were
certainly with the South. Varina Davis' male relatives, the Howells, were all in the Union Army.
Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky (1787-1863), who did his best to promote compromise,
had two sons, both majorgenerals, one serving in the Confederate, the other in the Union army.
The best Union agent in Europe, Robert J. Walker, was a former senator from Mississippi, while
the best Confederate agent, Caleb House, came from Massachusetts. General Robert E. Lee's
nephew, Samuel P. Lee, commanded the Union naval forces on the James River, while another
Union admiral, David Glasgow Farragut (1801-70), the outstanding maritime commander in the
war, was born in Tennessee and lived in Virginia. The examples are endless. The young
Theodore Roosevelt was made to pray for the North, the young Woodrow Wilson prayed for the
South. There were, literally, millions of divided families, and the number of extremists on both
sides probably did not amount to a hundred thousand all told.
It became a necessity, Jefferson Davis wrote to a Northern friend, January 20, 1861, to transfer our domestic institutions from hostile to friendly hands, and we have acted accordingly.' Lincoln could not exactly be called friendly towards the South-he was, rather, exasperated and sad. But he was not hostile. Southern leaders like Davis would not accept that Lincoln was hated by many abolitionists, like Wendell Phillips (1811-84), the rich Boston humanitarian ideologue, who called himthe Slavehound of Illinois.' The most the Lincoln Republicans could do, and
proposed to do, was to contain slavery. To abolish it in the 1860s required a constitutional
amendment, and a three-quarters majority; as there were fifteen slave states, this was
unobtainable. A blocking majority of this magnitude would still have been sufficient in the
second half of the 20th century. It is worth noting that, at the time of secession, Southerners and
Democrats possessed a majority in both houses of Congress, valid till 1863 at least. If protecting
slavery was the aim, secession made no sense. It made the Fugitive Slave Act a dead letter and
handed the territories over to the Northerners. The central paradox of the Civil War was that it
provided the only circumstances in which the slaves could be freed and slavery abolished.
War was so obviously against the rational interests of the South that Lincoln did not consider
it likely. His concern was to prevent the Republicans from appeasing the South by abandoning
their platform and embracing Douglas' popular-sovereignty doctrine. Over and over again he
repeated his message to Republican congressmen: `Have none of it. Let there be no compromise
on the question of extending sovereignty. Stand firm. The tug has to come and better now, than
any time hereafter.’By tug, he meant confrontation and crisis, not war. If he had thought in terms
of war when appointing his Cabinet, Lincoln would never have made Simon Cameron (1799-
1889) his Secretary of War. Cameron was a millionaire banker and railroad tycoon, who was the
overwhelming boss of Pennsylvanian Republicanism and he was appointed for entirely political
reasons (his handling of army contracts led Lincoln to sack him and to a vote of censure in the
House). Nor, probably, would he have made Seward Secretary of State and Chase Treasury
Secretary. Lincoln knew a vertiginous time was ahead and he opted for a strong government
rather than a warlike one.
Seward, a clever, persuasive man, believed the administration's best strategy was to leave the
rebellious Deep South to stew in its own Confederate juice and concentrate on wooing the other
slave states to remain faithful to the Union. But that would have meant letting the seven go, and
Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union as it was, at all costs. That was the only thing