When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated President in 1861, 7 states had previously seceded from the union because he had declared that in the future new states admitted to the union from territories west of the Mississippi river would no longer have the right to decide as sovereign states to be either free states or slave states. Loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to the powers granted to Washington by the Constitution is the real foundation of American national feeling. 7 states by seceding had disloyally violated their binding connection with the Washington government. Lincoln once in power plotted behind the scenes to start a war against seceded states, but his deliberate actions step by step to produce the Civil War have never been examined honestly and realistically by historians. Instead, after Lincoln won the war and a new “national” government was born in Washington, historians sought simplistic rationalizations to shelter Lincoln’s machinations from view. One rationalization was by far their favorite: it was a war to end slavery. Thousands and thousands of white men had maimed and killed one another in battles for four bloody years in order to free from their chains five million black African slaves. Nothing could be so false and yet so ready at hand for a simplistic explanation. It was red meat thrown into crowds of hungry historians eager to cheer for Lincoln’s actions which had made Washington supreme. Lincoln had warned in his “House Divided” speech that the “slavery agitation” in his opinion “ will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and past”. He warned that “either the opponents of slavery will arrest its further development…or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become itself lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south.” He made a clear and truthful judgment of the situation that “the nation” faced. He was right that a crisis was coming. However he did not mention that the 34 states contending with one another over the issue of whether they should be “free states” or “slave states” were sovereign states. The sovereignty of the states was itself the cause of the “slavery agitation.” Lincoln did not mention that to stop the agitation and end the crisis something big had to be done against state sovereignty. State sovereignty had to go in order for slavery north and south to go with it. When a bullet entered Lincoln’s skull in Ford’s theater on April 14th 1865, state sovereignty as it had once existed was gone, gone suddenly as though gone with the wind.
Daniel McNeill
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