And now the spring of 1865 was coming. Lincoln’s armies had finally turned the tide and the war was stumbling toward what looked like the end. In November the country had given Lincoln its vote of confidence by electing him to a second term as president. Now, on this raw March afternoon, as he stepped up to the low dais where he would deliver his inaugural address and take his second oath of office, he was ready to begin asking why the great horror of civil war had spread across his country. At that moment, the clouds parted and the long-hidden sun shone a golden aura down on Lincoln, the Capitol, and the hushed citizens below him.
There were, Lincoln said, three fundamental causes that had pushed the United States into the war. One of them was political, and that was the fact that the United States had been organized since its birth as a union. It was the creation of thirteen former English colonies, huddled along the eastern seaboard of North America, that had declared themselves independent states in 1776 but also linked themselves together under a joint congress as a confederation. Ever since, there had been voices within those states arguing irritably that this Union was a bad bargain that ought to be terminated. The voices had come to a crescendo in the Southern states of the Union in 1861, and Lincoln had found himself as president “devoted altogether to saving the Union without war” while at the same time having to deal with people who thought it right and proper “to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation.” 2
But simply because the Southern states thought the Union should be dissolved did not necessarily mean that it had to be, ought to be, or even could be, and that led Lincoln to the next fundamental reason for civil war. “One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.” Protecting slavery, Lincoln declared, had become the chief irritant that provoked the Southern states to reach for the solution of disunion. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest,” one that Lincoln and the northern states of the Union had declared a moral abomination that needed to be contained and suffocated. Though the Southern states hotly denied that they wanted to withdraw from the Union merely for the pleasure of enslaving people, Lincoln insisted that “all knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Waving aside all the other supposed reasons for secession and war, Lincoln insisted that “to strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war.”
Even that much did not explain matters fully. Lincoln had come into office in 1861 swearing to uphold the Constitution, which gave a number of vague guarantees to slaveholding in the fifteen Southern states where it was legal, and which gave presidents no power to meddle in state affairs such as slavery. In his first inaugural address, he had taken pains to acknowledge that, as president, he had no “right” and no “inclination” to attack slavery in those states. But across the Mississippi River, out over the broad prairies of the western half of the North American continent, were the immense miles of U.S.-owned territory that had not yet been peopled and organized by white Americans, and which one day would want to be recognized and admitted to the Union as states equal to all the other states. Should slavery be permitted to plant itself in those territories?
There, Lincoln and his party had drawn the line: they would not crush slavery where it was, but they would not allow it to spread, either. The Southern states were outraged at this denial, fearful that if slavery could not grow and extend itself, it was doomed to a slow death. “The government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it,” but that was more than sufficient to make the slaveholding South begin thinking of cancelling its membership in the Union. “Both parties deprecated war,” Lincoln said, “but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” Lincoln paused for a long moment, looking out over the upturned faces crowding the Capitol steps. “And the war came.”
Since Lincoln uttered those words—and they amount to no more than two paragraphs in an inaugural address only four paragraphs long—something close to 50,000 books and articles on the American Civil War have been published. Still, we would be hard-pressed to find a more concise statement of just what it was that caused the American Civil War. If we want to understand what plunged the American republic into its greatest crisis, and map out the paths and highways that led Americans to four years of unplanned-for and unlooked-for carnage, we can hardly do better than to take our bearings from the three signposts that Abraham Lincoln left us.
THE AMERICAN UNION
Underlying everything else that pushed or pulled nineteenth-century Americans toward the abyss of civil war was one
