February 22, 1861 (Friday)

Caution:  Trouble Ahead in Baltimore

Lincoln said, in defining the struggle before the American people:

"I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and adopted that Declaration of Independence -- I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army, who achieved that Independence. (Applause.)  I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together.  It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the mother land; but something in the Declaration giving Liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.  (Great Applause.) 

Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis?  If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it.  If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful.  But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle -- I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it."

(Given what we now know of the assassination threats that were swirling around him, and what he had learned the night before about a conspiracy in Baltimore, that was not mere rhetorical flourish.)  (All or Nothing, Ted Widmer, Disunion--New York Times, February 22, 2011)


"The Confederacy also worshipped the founders, as Davis made clear in his inaugural a few days earlier.  But they could not embrace the fundamental premise of the Declaration, that 'all men are created equal.'  The vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, would finally come out and admit this in his famous Cornerstone Speech, delivered in Savannah a month later, on March 21.  After probing the early history of the United States, he said, 'Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong.  They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races.  This was an error.  It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it 'fell when the storm came and the wind blew.'  Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition." 

(This was the nub of the conflict, and slavery was precisely what the war was about, as Stephens himself admitted, in the same speech, when he said that African slavery "was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."

Lincoln took the exact opposite idea, and pushed the word "all" to its logical conclusion.  by doing so...he was offering "nothing less than the progressive steps of African emancipation."  More than African -- meaningful citizenship to every individual man, "white, red, yellow, or black."  He would leave it to the next century to work out the "man" part.)  (All or Nothing, Ted Widmer, Disunion--New York Times, February 21, 2011.)