Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

Scholar James G. Randall understood Lincoln as a figure of conservative change and compromise with regard to emancipation procedures. But the nature of history at the time was one of profound change that uprooted American institutions, making Lincoln’s leadership through this change revolutionary by default. Lincoln himself believed that the right of people “to revolutionize their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose” (24) was sacred. Lincoln was a supporter of other European revolutions, and Marx was an ideological supporter of Lincoln.

Southerners also saw their own revolt against Republicanism as a revolution. Confederates invoked revolution to ideologically justify secession, creating the Confederacy to protect what they viewed as their constitutional liberty to property, namely slaves. Northerners such as William Cullen Bryant, editor of The New York Evening Post, understood the irony of a liberty to slave ownership, calling Southern secession “not in the interest of general humanity but domestic despotism” (27).

Other secessionists worked to define their movement not as a revolution but as a counter-revolution against the anticipated revolutionary threat to slavery. They did so to distance their movement from the bloody histories of other revolutions and to foist such accusations of needless violence onto the North. Lincoln saw secession as neither revolutionary nor counter-revolutionary but as a “wicked exercise” (28) with immorality at its base. Furthermore, he saw secession as the foremost threat to the “fragile experiment” (29) of the American Union, a unique project in a world of monarchies and autocrats.

Lincoln’s primary goal throughout the war was to maintain the Union. Though opposed to slavery, he wished to avoid the degeneration of secession into a violent revolutionary struggle, which pushing emancipation forward would surely do. Preserving the primacy of the American Constitution as a legal text allowed Lincoln to argue the illegality of secession, but this also preserved the legality of slavery as a constitutional right. Furthermore, some border states that remained in the Union but existed on the edges of the South supported slavery. Lincoln needed their representative support to keep Confederacy from overtaking the nation. Therefore, Lincoln opposed emancipation movements throughout 1861, his first year as president.

By 1862 secessionist conflict expanded into full-fledged violence. With Confederates bolstering their forces with enslaved soldiers, Lincoln’s preservationist policies came under more scrutiny from antislavery Republicans. Lincoln attempted to convince the border states that upheld slavery to undertake voluntary emancipation, thereby maintaining the Constitution but eroding slavery’s hold. When they refused, Lincoln embraced revolution, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863. This required a constitutional amendment, the 13th Amendment, which passed in 1865.

Lincoln’s proclamation changed the ideological course of the war, eliminating the possibility of peaceable reconciliation between the two forces. Understanding the need for greater forcefulness and resolve on the part of the North, Lincoln spoke openly of the necessary revolutionary measures of the war. In his second inaugural address he invoked the righteousness of God to justify violence against Confederate states that upheld slavery.

The Union army intentionally crippled the economy of the South to win the war. By 1863 Lincoln instituted a policy of enlisting freed slaves to fight, weakening Confederate forces. Republican forces also destroyed agrarian property in the Southern lands they occupied. This destruction, along with massive sets of new economic legislation—including higher tariffs, land grants, and the National Banking Act of 1863—secured the economic succession of Northern capitalists and created “the blueprint for modern America” (40).

In sum, Lincoln was not an ideological revolutionary but a pragmatic one. While personally opposed to slavery, he maintained it for as long as possible, emancipating the slaves only when it became necessary for the war effort.