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Northern War Aims - Defend Democracy

Upon reflection, it will be seen that these words are not mere soaring rhetoric, but the core expression of why Lincoln fought. At the time of the Civil War, the Union was surrounding by hostile aristocratic states, a democratic island in a sea of aristocracies. The slave power in the Confederacy was predicated on a fixed social hierarchy. In Mexico, the emperors Napoleon III and the Habsburg Maximillian were busy re-imposing aristocratic rule. And the British Empire, with which America had already fought two wars, at least one in living memory, loomed in Canada and the high seas. In London, Prime Minister Palmerston made no secret of his sympathies for the aristocrats in the Confederacy. Under these aristocratic regimes, the rail-splitter would have still been splitting rails, while his betters ruled the land.

The political aristocrats of the South, although pretending to the world that they only wished to be "let alone," were really aiming at the subjugation of the North. Nearly ever since the birth of the republic, they had almost complete control of it, and were now stung to the quick by the consciousness that the Northern States had at last shown a disposition to take a hand in its management.

The politicians of the South had always believed that the people of the Free States were "too ignorant, cowardly, and selfish" to have a controlling voice in the halls of legislation. They had so long fostered this idea that they had, finally, come to the conclusion that all that was grovelling and degrading in human nature belonged to the North. Whereas, on the other hand, all that was ennobling and great is indigenous to the South. They "have all the talent, bravery, and generosity;" the Yankees had all the ignorance, cowardice, and selfishness. To use a Hoosier phrase, a sound thrashing was really the only thing that could ever induce the fire-eaters to correct these views.

The "South" was " neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle cry ....

"The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders' party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an autonomous group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more false: "The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it." With this battle-cry the secessionists fell upon Kentucky.

"By their "entire territory" they understand in the first place all the so-called border states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery....

" ... were it to cede the contested territory peacefully to the Southern Confederacy, the North would surrender to the slave republic more than three-quarters of the entire territory of the United States. The North would lose the whole of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, except the narrow strip from Penobscot Bay to Delaware Bay, and would even cut itself off from the Pacific Ocean. Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas would draw California after them. Incapable of wresting the mouth of the Mississippi from the hands of the strong, hostile slave republic in the South, the great agricultural states in the basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valleys of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio, would be compelled by their economic interests to secede from the North and enter the Southern Confederacy. These north-western states, in their turn, would draw after them into the same whirlpool of secession all the Northern states lying further east, with perhaps the exception of the states of New England.

What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganisation of it, a reorganisation on the basis of slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy."

John Bright, Member for Birmingham, was the leading opponent of slavery in Britain during the American Civil War. Of the two portraits hanging in Lincoln’s own office, one was of Bright. Bright was greatly esteemed by Abraham Lincoln for his advocacy in the months prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Lincoln on 22 September 1862 as an executive order in his capacity as the Commander-in-Chief on the grounds of military necessity and consistency.

In June 1863, Bright defeated a resolution in the House of Commons for an alliance between Britain, the Emperor Napoleon II of France, and the southern Confederate states against the North, as well as ditching the £16 million support raised in England to support the South.

On 26 March 1863 Bright stated, in words that the laborers of England could understand, the significance for them of the Civil War. In his speech "America and England" at St. James's Hall, he said: "Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American contest, and every morning, with blatant voice, it comes into our streets and curses the American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty millions of men happy and prosperous, without emperors-without kings [cheers]-without the surroundings of a court [renewed cheers}-without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and virtue - without State bishops and State priests, those venders of the love that works salvation [cheers] - without great armies and great navies - without a great debt and great taxes and Privilege has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if this great experiment should succeed."

The United States was surrounded by hostile and powerful states, and following a Confederate victory the challenge of hegemonic powers in Europe could possibly force America to become a "garrison state" - democracy would slowly deteriorate from within. Nearly a century later, Harold Lasswell wrote of "a world of "garrison states" - a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society... The duty to obey, to serve the state, to work-these are cardinal virtues in the garrison state. Unceasing emphasis upon duty is certain to arouse opposing tendencies within the personality structure of all who live under a garrison regime. Everyone must struggle to hold in check any tendencies, conscious or unconscious, to defy authority, to violate the code of work, to flout the incessant demand for sacrifice in the collective interest. From the earliest years youth will be trained to subdue-to disavow, to struggle against - any specific opposition to the ruling code of collective exactions... This means that instrumental democracy will be in abeyance, although the symbols of mystic "democracy" will doubtless continue... " The similarity to George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel 1984 can hardly be coincidental.