Abraham Lincoln and Civil War memories

A North Carolina legislator has compared Abraham Lincoln to Hitler, calling our 16th president a tyrant and holding him personally responsible for 800,000 deaths. People like him are running this state's education system?

First, some admissions: Many southerners reviled Lincoln, partly because he threatened the economic system of the South, which was based on slave labor, but also because of his decision to forcefully prevent the Confederate states from leaving the Union. The Civil War wreaked horrendous damage upon the South, where nearly all of the battles were fought, and where federal policy called for destroying the ability to wage war, which included destroying crops and farmland that could support armies and civilians.

An elderly teacher from my childhood told about a Confederate veteran she had known when she was a child. Given change at a store, the old man refused to accept pennies because they bore the likeness of Abraham Lincoln, a man he hated. That is how ingrained and intense feelings toward Lincoln were.

News coverage of the Lincoln-Hitler analogy raised the question of whether secession of states was constitutional. Some "experts" said the states' ratifying of the Constitution made secession unconstitutional. That, it seems to me, is a stretch. There was nothing in the Constitution that forbade secession or made a state's ratification irrevocable. Secessionists claimed, with some validity, that their decision to leave the Union was no different from the Continental Congress' decision to leave the British Empire.

Even if we assume secession was a legitimate course, it need not lead to Civil War. This disagreement could have been fought in the courts instead of on the fields of Manassas, Gettysburg, Shiloh and other places. Secessionists in South Carolina are primarily responsible for turning the disagreement into armed conflict. They fired the first shot, bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in an effort to unseat the Union garrison. Lincoln responded by attempting to reinforce and resupply that garrison and by raising an army to enforce Union authority throughout the seceded states.

Small miscalculations often lead to tragedy. The secessionists were certain they could expel federal troops from the South. Lincoln was certain that a show of force would bring the secessionists to their senses. Both were wrong. What followed was the greatest tragedy in American history, but it came with one benefit: It ended slavery decades before that economic system would have died from its own shortcomings and the public's revulsion.

Lincoln did cancel habeas corpus and jailed people without trial, but he was facing imminent assassination and sabotage by Confederate agents and sympathizers. For any errors Lincoln might have made, he gets a pass based on his soaring rhetoric that defines American principles of "government of the people, for the people and by the people," and "malice toward none and charity for all."

His assassination denied the nation an opportunity for more peaceful and amicable reconciliation, with charity for all.

Lincoln as Hitler? Ridiculous! A shameful analogy!

Referendum is better way to resolve secession issue

On Thursday, the people of Scotland get to vote on secession. They will decide whether to remain a part of Great Britain, and the British, who conquered Scotland centuries ago, will go along with their decision.

How much more civilized than the secession crisis the United States underwent 150 years ago! Suppose South Carolina and the other Confederate states had opted for a peaceful referendum on secession instead of bombarding a fort occupied by what the S.C. secessionists considered a "foreign power"? And what if newly elected President Abraham Lincoln had not taken the bait and declared, instead, that the United States would respect the decision of the Southerners to decide their own destiny and "dissolve the political bonds that have connected them with another" (in the words of the Declaration of Independence). Could a disastrous civil war have been prevented? Would other Southern states follow South Carolina's lead and joined the Confederacy? It seems likely that North Carolina, which initially rejected secession, might have remained with the Union and not lost tens of thousands of its young men and much of its wealth to four years of war.

What if this dispute had been settled by a referendum instead of half a million deaths and the utter destruction from which the South, where most of the battles were fought, did not recover for 100 years? Not everything about this scenario is appealing. Slavery would have persisted in the Confederate States, but that "peculiar institution" could not have long survived the global revulsion toward such an inhumane system. Perhaps a peaceful settlement would have allowed for compensation of slaveholders for loss of their valuable property and compensation of slaves for their generations of bondage and uncompensated labor. The expense would have been tremendous, but probably no more costly than a war that nearly bankrupted the United States and made Confederate states destitute and feeble for decades.

If political ties must be severed, surely the better, more civilized way is through a binding referendum. My Scottish and Scot-Irish ancestors might disagree, but I hope Scotland remains a part of Great Britain.