Holzer - A Just and Generous Nation

Copyright 2015 by Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinkle

Published by Basic Books

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Designed by Pauline Brown

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holzer, Harold.

A just and generous nation : Abraham Lincoln and the fight for American opportunity / Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinkle.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-07396-2 (e-book)

1. Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Political and social views. 2. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Causes. 3. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Economic aspects. 4. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Social aspects. 5. EqualityEconomic aspectsUnited StatesHistory19th century. 6. Economic developmentUnited StatesHistory19th century. 7. Social mobilityUnited StatesHistory19th century. 8. United StatesPolitics and government18611865. I. Garfinkle, Norton II. Title.

E457.2.H753 2015973.7092dc23

2015022842

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To our wives,

Edith Holzer and Sally Minard,

for their individual and collective inspiration

throughout.

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world,

labors for wages awhile,

saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land,

for himself;

then labors on his own account another while,

and at length hires another

new beginner to help him.

This, say its advocates, is free labor

the just and generous, and prosperous system,

which opens the way for allgives hope to all,

and energy, and progress,

and improvement of condition to all.

Abraham Lincoln, speech in Milwaukee, September 30, 1859

This middle-class country had got

a middle-class President, at last.

Eulogy to Abraham Lincoln by Ralph Waldo Emerson, April 19, 1865

Contents

T HE UNITED STATES has just concluded a five-year observance of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. As in the past, most new books about the period have focused principally on matters military, reexamining the familiar major battles or offering new biographies of generals of the war. A few have explored new aspects of Lincolns life and presidency and the political conflicts immediately preceding and during the war.

For all the merits of these recent volumes, too few have provided satisfying answers to an essential question: why was the Civil War really fought? This subject still cries out for serious and informed exploration and analysis. The prevailing argumentsthat the war occurred to preserve the American Union for its own sake, to defend or destroy slavery, or to expand or restrict federal authorityfall short because they do not embrace the full vision for the future held by those engaged in the conflict. The most illuminating way to begin this essential conversation is to focus on the commander in chief who chose war rather than cede the democracy to those who would divide it rather than recognize its legitimacy. That ever-compelling figure, of course, is Abraham Lincoln.

True, Lincoln has already inspired thousands of books. Yet while scores of new Lincoln volumes rolled off the presses during the period leading up to the bicentennial of his birth in 2009, and dozens more have appeared to coincide with the sesquicentennial of the years 18601865, only a few have actually dealt with the causes of the conflictthe conflagration that consumed nearly every day of his presidency and cost 750,000 American lives. Few have explored Lincolns motivations for fighting the war and maintaining the Union when the conflict expanded exponentially from a small struggle to an enormous war unprecedented in world history. The unanswered question remains more crucial to our own present and future than ever. Why would a basically peaceful man who might as easily have allowed the United States to divide in two, with no resulting loss of life or treasure, choose instead to lead a devastating American-versus-American war to maintain a fragile, still-experimental Union? This book offers a direct answer to that unresolved question with a new focus and a new emphasis.

For too long, historians have accepted without challenge the notion that Lincoln determined to preserve the Union primarily because nationhood held a powerfully symbolic, almost mystical importance to him from childhood on. Fueled by Weemss Life of Washington and similarly hagiographic stories of the American Revolution, the young Lincoln is said to have developed early a stubborn passion to cement the foundations of the Republic for all time. Another theory holds that Lincoln entered the presidencyand allowed the country to go to war with itselfto remove the stain of slavery that for more than fourscore years had blighted the original American commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Elements of truth support both arguments, to be sure, but ignore the overwhelming evidence that Lincoln focused his entire political career, in peace and war alike, in pursuit of economic opportunity for the widest possible circle of hardworking Americans. To achieve this ambition he was willing to fight a war to maintain the perpetual existence of the one nation in the world that held the highest promise for people dedicated to this cause.

Lincolns decision to resist Southern secession and fight a war to maintain the American Union was motivated primarily by his belief that the nation was founded on the idea that this country proposed to give all a chance and allow the weak to grow stronger. The toxic combination of secession together with an unending commitment to unpaid human bondage by a new and separate Confederate nation, he calculated, would be fatal to the American Dream. It posed a direct threat to a self-sustaining middle-class society and to the promise of America leading the way to spreading the idea of opportunity and upward mobility throughout the world.

I hold the value of life is to improve ones condition, Lincoln declared just three weeks before assuming the presidency, reiterating a lifetime of similarly expressed commitment to what historian Gabor Boritt brilliantly calls the uniquely American right to rise. Seven slaveholding Southern states had already declared by their independence the converse: the right to establish a nation of their own based on the denial of opportunity. Lincoln believed that the American nation based on the credo of opportunity for all was worth fighting for. Whatever is calculated to advance the condition of the honest, struggling laboring man, so far as my judgment will enable me to judge of a correct thing, I am for that thing, he said in 1861. In the face of unimaginable casualties and devastation, he remained for that thing for the rest of his life.