Prelude to Slaughter

...Unfortunately, the only Northerners who would have done so, the Abolitionists, lacked the power...

...Early in the next month the breakaways convened in Montgomery, Alabama—chosen, oddly, because of its many Unionists...

...No doubt slavery would have ended by now even if the rebellious states had been allowed to depart peacefully...

...of the idea of secession...

...Unlike the far more experienced Davis, Lincoln realized that it was important to "place the onus of firing the first shot" on the other side...

...How could he have challenged slavery outright in March and April 1861...

...Unlike him, some Republicans were willing to compromise on the expansion of slavery...

...By then, however, the North was dominant in population, in industry, in resources, in trade, and in agriculture...

...In Montgomery, the Confederates promulgated a constitution featuring a number of items that have persisted on Right-wing agendas to this very day, including the line-item veto...

...It will be carried into the enemy's territory...

...In short, for decades it had been controlled as a matter of public policy...

...Thanks to the longstanding Southern domination of Washington, Davis and most of his fellow founders of the Confederacy had held high Federal office much longer than any Republican...

...The Northwest Ordinance (1787) banned it from the lands of the Ohio Valley...

...Virginia had towered over the early republic...

...South Carolina demanded the fort's surrender...

...In other words, he envisioned an invasion of the North...

...In fact, in the insanity that attended the moment of secession, Jefferson Davis actually claimed that come what may, "There will be no war in our territory...

...Like Quebec nationalism today, though, they represented a problem that simply refused to disappear...

...Before 1860-61 the fire-eaters had much more influence in the South than the Abolitionists had in the North...

...As Klein puts it elegantly, their demands were "not some fine old brandy kept in the cellar for special occasions but rather a house wine always on hand" to disturb the country's peace...

...Lincoln opposed slavery, yet he came into office willing only to stop its expansion...

...Following the election every Northern state had a Republican governor, and the not yet Grand Old Party controlled the legislatures of all but two of those states...

...The national government's presence there was important not only as a matter of principle but also because tariff revenues were its sole steady source of income...

...President James Buchanan, who was spineless in most respects, stood his ground here...

...though not the Confederate) Army had at its disposal an early machine gun that was the most lethal weapon yet invented...

...Every Confederate state except South Carolina had significant numbers of white people who remained loyal to the United States, and parts of Alabama were governed by local officials in Washington's name throughout the War...

...Seward made a number of offers disowned by the President when he learned of them...

...Congress acted at the earliest possible moment, passing a law, signed by Thomas Jefferson, that took effect on January 1. Twelve years later, the Missouri Compromise barred slavery north of 36° 30...

...The Constitution deliberately contains no explicit recognition of it and gave Congress the right to end the importation of slaves, though not until 1808...

...I certainly think so, but that is much easier to believe here in New York than in the South, where almost all of the fighting took place and most of its victims lived...

...the rebels hoped to capture public opinion there by staging an impressive event...

...In 1860 Lincoln was quite an unlikely Presidential candidate for a maj or party— he had lost many more political battles than he had won—but his nomination by the Republicans automatically made him the front-runner...

...Those who advocated secession—the "fire-eaters"—were a minority in the South for most of the three decades in which they afflicted our politics...

...Lincoln himself, though responsible for the elimination of an age-old form of property and for a revolutionary alteration of relations between the states and the Federal government, was something of a conservative: He had earned his living as a lawyer for railroads and before joining the Republicans had served in the House with the Whigs, the party of privilege...

...Six days later the commander of Federal forces in Charleston, Major Robert Anderson, withdrew his men and their families to the most defensible position available to them —Fort Sumter, on an artificial island in Charleston harbor...

...Klein stresses another cause for anger: the South's seemingly permanent domination of our national institutions...

...news spread rapidly via telegraph and the press...

...Second, the War was about slavery—not, as Southern apologists still claim, about the desire of the North to impose its will on the South...

...Ours was the earliest major conflict conducted along industrial lines: Troops moved by railroad...

...The South had therefore been continually transplanting itself westward from the very beginnings of American history in the 17th century...

...Of course, most Northerners and even most Republicans were not Abolitionists...

...Restraints on slavery thus became less acceptable, because the South now felt that the institution had to expand or die...

...Three main points emerge from Klein's outstanding book...

...No result of the War," he rightly contends, "was more important than the destruction, once and for all...

...That most of the white South rejected his very moderate position infuriated many Northerners who could not stomach slavery itself...

...By early January the secessionist delusion spread to the cotton states, then onward to Louisiana and Texas...

...From the 1830s onward, the Democratic bastions of the future Confederacy usually controlled the White House and Congress by attracting support in a few states elsewhere in the country...

...and the U.S...

...Even so, as Maury Klein shows clearly in Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (Knopf, 512 pp., $30.00), a study of the months between Abraham Lincoln's election and the outbreak of hostilities at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, during the preceding winter (and for many years before then) slavery was an expanding, aggressive force...

...In the late 18th century, the twilight of the tobacco era, slave-based agriculture had not been terribly profitable...

...Tobacco, the traditional cash crop, depleted the soil...

...And he went on to win 180 electoral votes, exclusively in the North, because Southern, Northern and moderate Democrats all ran separate tickets...

...The city was a major port...

...Klein shows in fascinating detail how Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward— a close friend of Jefferson Davis—conducted virtually independent negotiations with the Confederate commissioners sent to Washington...

...Between 1856 and 1860, the Democrats, the party of slavery, dissolved in the acid that had already destroyed their Whig rivals: an inability to hold their Northern and Southern branches together...

...They also chose Senator and former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as their president...

...Secession was pursued not to escape the hegemony of Yankee industrialists but to protect the right of slaveowners to extend their detestable system to the West, for that was the only threat President-elect Lincoln really represented to them...

...Had Lincoln been an active Abolitionist, he would never have won the nomination, never have entered the White House, and never have had an opportunity to act on his nonetheless very real moral convictions later in the War...

...It was the South that opened hostilities at Fort Sumter...

...As the election of 1860 approached, it was the North, not the South, that was united...

...Cotton plantations began to proliferate in the "Old Southwest" of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi...

...South Carolina, whose small and paranoid white population had always been the avant garde of secessionism, did not wait to find out what Lincoln would actually do: State officials decided before Election Day to convene a special session of the Legislature if he won...

...Our great Virginian Founding Fathers unanimously regarded slavery as an evil...

...By December 20, the state departed the Union...

...Yet by 1860-61 such limits were precisely what the South's political class could not abide...

...Otherwise conservative Yankees felt permanently shut off from power...

...Lincoln was elected promising to go no further than this...

...The transformation of opinion reflected a change in the region's economy...

...No doubt, too, most Confederate soldiers fought not to uphold the oppressive institution but to defend their homes from what they considered to be an invasion...

...Was this atrocious War, with its more than 620,000 dead, really necessary...

...The Republican Party had done extremely well in its first test, in 1856, winning 11 states and 114 electoral votes, all in the North...

...Since restrictions on the spread of slavery were deeply rooted in the Federal system, more and more slaveholders concluded that it threatened their interests...

...The South was not alone in nursing regional grievances...

...Consequently, Charleston served as the "flash point" m 1860-61...

...But Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin (1793) cut the cost of cleaning short-staple cotton sufficiently to make it a worthwhile crop...

...Cotton, its successor, promoted erosion...

...First, although for the average Confederate soldier the War may well have been a defensive one, that can hardly be said for the leaders...

...indeed, during the period covered by Days of Defiance he proposed to grant it explicit constitutional protection within its existing limits...

...Third, while Lincoln was hardly blind to the hatefulness of slavery, he drew the line not at the thing itself but at its extension...

...The North's first complaint was slavery...

...Abolitionists were not a majority even in his own party...

...Three were especially destructive— those of Russia, China and the United States...