"The word government means coercion"

In a post last week, I wrote that the immediate cause of the Civil War was a Northern desire to maintain the Union. The following passage helps illuminate the philosophical quagmire that cause poses for people like me trying to judge the rationale for war.

From Lincoln and the Decision for War, by Russell McClintock, on Stephen Douglas:

Douglas...rejected the argument that the use of force was incompatible with free, republican government. "Sir, the word government means coercion....The necessity of government is found to consist in the fact that some men will not do right unless coerced to do so." However, "coercion must always be used in the mode prescribed in the Constitution and laws." Illustrating just how much Northern Democrats had come to appreciate Buchanan's fine distinctions of a month earlier, he avowed that the use of force in order to reduce the de facto government of South Carolina, a government whose legitimacy none of its own citizens questions, would be a perversion of the law, not its enforcement.

Coercion is an important word. Coercion precludes consent. Any consent given under threat of coercion cannot be thought legitimate. So, how do we judge a government's right to do anything? A familiar phrase from the secession crisis, and from states' rights arguments throughout history, is that government exists due to "the consent of the governed." But is consent really possible, or has it simply been coerced?

If "the word government means coercion," does that mean that government has a right to use force as it pleases, so long as it can? Does that mean, so long as the United States wanted to fight, and had a population to fill its armies, it was justified in pursuing civil war to enforce the laws in the seceded states?

I'm not sure there's much morality here. It would be easy to point to the secession declarations of the southern states* to argue that secession was immoral, because it was done to protect slavery in perpetuity. But then one must also point out the Corwin amendment, which Lincoln supported in his first inaugural address. It reads:

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

In other words, Lincoln supported an amendment to protect slavery in perpetuity.

How do we judge the beginning of the Civil War? Buchanan and Douglas thought that secession was illegal, but should not be reversed with force. To do so would be to invalidate the very idea of the republic. Buchanan's view changed as the secession crisis wore on, but his administration became an embarrassment because he had not acted quickly enough. Douglas' power in the senate waned, and he died in June 1861. People in the North knew how they felt about the war: they wanted it. I'm not so sure.


*Take Mississippi's, for instance: "a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization"

A "Lincoln" Review

"We must consider what will become of colored folk," shouts Michael Stuhlbarg as George Yeaman, stalking the floor of the House of Representatives in a scene from "Lincoln," Stephen Spielberg's amazing new film. For Yeaman, speaking about the upcoming vote on the 13th amendment to abolish slavery, the question is straightforward: the United States cannot afford to end slavery, because it is not ready to see freedmen as equals. White people will not stand for freedmen who can vote, or who can marry their daughters.

George Yeaman

As Yeaman speaks conservatives nearly froth at the mouth, standing from their seats and crying their indignation each time he names another milestone of black equality on the slippery slope lurking beyond the 13th amendment. The vitriol is shocking--a reminder that slavery remained divisive even within the Union as the Civil War raged in southern territory.

Yet the response from republicans to this bald racism, this racial fear-mongering, is equally shocking. Though Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the radical Republican faction in the House and played by Tommy Lee Jones, might believe the slaves should be freed and granted full political and social equality, he sees no traitors among the pro-slavery faction of his cohort. Stevens dishes out some spectacular name-calling, but it's all in good fun, and the message is clear: slavery remains a political issue, a matter to be debated within and decided by the political institutions of the United States. 

The tone is set: tempers flare, unscrupulous characters abound, ends justify the means, and abolition hangs in the balance.

Into this fray steps Abraham Lincoln. A magnificent, funny, charismatic Lincoln, a Lincoln capable of stopping the lives of a hundred indispensable people long enough to tell a poop joke. This is a Lincoln not conflicted about slavery, or about the 13th amendment--slavery is evil, and should be abolished--but conflicted in other ways. Conflicted about Mary Lincoln, whom he interacts with with something approaching tolerance. Conflicted about his son Robert, who wants to join the army.

In this way Lincoln becomes someone we recognize. A man capable of greatness, beset by the difficulties of his time and all times: a congress of ideologues; an unhappy home. Through it all he's human, in the way we expect our heroes to be. He's smart, but, more important, he's wise. He bears the weight of the horror and death of war, but remains resolved to end the conflict in such a way that that horror will not have been in vain. He is the most important person in any room. He loves his children, and his wife less. This is a Lincoln who, in true post-modern fashion, anticipates his loudest, most persistent critics, deconstructing his own legacy of illegal actions. In the next breath he explains this lawlessness away by claiming that the people, who re-elected him, have validated his actions de facto. Such a scene, in which I found myself nodding along with Lincoln's logic, is the bizzaro world twin of the moment in "Frost/Nixon" in which a clammy Frank Langella, as Nixon, bellows, "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal."

I can imagine that, with a lesser actor than Daniel Day-Lewis, or with a lesser screenplay, the entire movie might have fallen apart. A poop joke? While the telegraph office waits on pins and needles for news from the assault on Wilmington harbor? Somehow, it works: the moment seems appropriate because Day-Lewis's face, haggard and haunted, reminds us that he has never, not for an instant, forgotten the sacrifices of his soldiers. Day-Lewis's Lincoln is practically tactile, inviting us to admire the misplaced hairs sticking from his grey beard, or to trace the deep creases in his face as his mouth and eyes creep into a sly smile. Spielberg wants us to see Lincoln as a man, imperfect as anyone else, instead of the idol he's become. The depiction feels right. It's aided by the crisp screenplay, which dispenses enough comic relief to lighten a film that might otherwise have smothered in the smoky seriousness of the wood-paneled rooms where the fate of the 13th amendment was decided. 

The movie has minor characters galore, all of whom seem to contribute memorable moments. The strongest of these is Tommy Lee Jones's Thaddeus Stevens. His limp becomes the physical metaphor for his compromised principles as he publicly denies his more radical views to protect the passage of the 13th amendment. Yet the subtext is clear: he's limping, but still walking. He, and the country, can move forward. One of the final scenes of the movie shows him presenting a copy of the just-passed amendment to his common law wife, the mixed-race Lydia Hamilton Smith. This is what progress looks like.

"Lincoln" works hard not to fall into the trap of equating the end of slavery to equality for freedmen, but the emotional importance of its climax rests partially upon that assumption. As viewers, the passage of the 13th amendment at the end of the film is our payoff. All of Lincoln's work, and all of his belief in the equality of man, has come here to fruition. This, of course, is not quite how things worked out in real life. The 13th amendment was closer to a beginning than an ending, an early chapter in the story of American racial justice which has not seen an end, and may never.

Not to say that, even with the terror and death that followed, the 13th amendment was not a great advance for human dignity. The vote on the amendment is a worthy climax to a story about war and freedom and herculean feats of politicking. Throughout, the film nods to the potential difficulties of reconstruction, and to the necessity of the stuff of the 14th and 15th amendments, which came later to grant citizenship and the franchise to freedmen. Perhaps, if we're lucky, some brave filmmaker will attempt to show on screen how those two controversial amendments passed. But, as Lydia Hamilton Smith says, speaking about the 13th amendment at the end of the film, maybe "Lincoln" is "enough for now." 

Lincoln, again

Another Lincoln trailer. Hmm....

-I appreciate attempts to connect the Civil Rights Movement with the Civil War.  But tracing the line between them requires traveling through some pretty dark stuff--reconstruction, the post-reconstruction "nadir" of African American experience, Jim Crow, etc. The image of MLK Jr. at the beginning of this trailer was instead a ham-handed way of saying that Lincoln, like MLK, was a "uniter". Someone who "unites" the people. Then we get stock photos of other "uniters." Some soldiers? Nelson Mandela? First wave feminists? Gandhi? What? If Spielberg wants me to think that Lincoln is going to be complete nonsense, this is perfect way to do it. It's some meaningless post-modern melange of symbols, which need not be American (though, obviously, the soldiers are--no foreign soldiers can "unite" like we can).
-The trailer makes clear that the movie is about the 13th amendment. Excellent. If nothing else, the film's focus (i.e. its focus on something other than the Emancipation Proclamation) should help make clear that the end of slavery was a lot more complicated than often assumed.
-Interesting interplay between Lincoln the Emancipator and Lincoln the Power Hungry. I wonder to what extent the film will indulge the neo-confederate fantasy that Lincoln was a dictator at the head of the War of Northern Aggression (I can tell you the answer. It's not at all). "I am the President of the United States, clothed in immense power!" What a great line.

Freeing the Slaves

I've thought a lot recently about the way the Civil War is remembered on the most macro scale possible. That is, for a mainstream northern audience, the war is remembered as a righteous cause that ended slavery. I have problems with that interpretation of the war, but that's not what I'm speaking to here. Instead, I claim that this narrative--that the Civil War was just because Lincoln freed the slaves--whether "true" or not, is deeply conservative.

I'm finishing up Sick From Freedom, by Jim Downs, which examines the welfare of freed slaves during reconstruction, with an eye towards health. The book is disturbing. It reconstructs a smallpox epidemic among freed slaves, which went largely unrecorded and untreated by the overwhelmed doctors of the Freedmen's Bureau. It conveys general poverty, and a conspiracy of interests that served to frequently push freed people towards work and economical circumstances not unlike slave labor. For a few years after the war, radical republicans in congress often tried to help freed people, but by the mid-70s both north and south had had enough of freedmen, and the official end of reconstruction in '77 enabled a brutal southern culture of white supremacy and jim crow.

Ending slavery was, morally, the right thing to do. That point is not up for debate.  But the federal government had a responsibility to the freed people. The freed people faced particular challenges and suffered from absolute poverty. Eric Foner's Reconstruction dedicates much of its first quarter to detailing the ways that freed people educated themselves, found community in religion, and tried to make new lives. But they had very little money, and owned almost no land, so landowners and local governments often exploited them. Instead of helping freed slaves by providing them with accessible health care or land, the federal government pursued a policy that pushed many freed people back to the same plantations they had worked as slaves to restart the southern economy. Reconstruction, and certainly the end of reconstruction, betrayed freed people.

So: the Civil War was righteous because Lincoln freed the slaves. This short history only deals with the morality of slavery, which is simple, and forgets everything that came after freedom--the smallpox, the death, the exploitation, the lynching, every act of violence and exclusion perpetrated against African Americans through today. It posits that the only responsibility the United States had, after hundreds of years of bondage, was to let slaves go their own way. I think that's wrong.

150 years ago today...

About 2,500 people died on the field at Antietam. Another 20,000 were shot with minie balls and had limbs amputated, or took shrapnel from shells or splinters from fences, or fell and were trampled, or had their heads split open with a rifle butt.

Antietam is important in the story of the Civil War:

-It was the single bloodiest day in American history, and serves a reminder of the "cost" of war, as though war was something you want that you have to pay for.

-It was the "victory" Abraham Lincoln needed to make his Emancipation Proclamation viable politically.

-It was when, perhaps, any rational hope of Confederate victory fled.

I think there's a tendency to see history as a story that someone wrote a long time ago, which is already whole and complete. When the story of The American Civil War, or the War Between the States, or The War of Northern Aggression is told, Antietam is only another necessary scene in the middle, in which men die to help Lincoln provide the war's mature moral dimension. But Antietam never had to happen. The soldiers who died didn't have to die then. The war that brought those soldiers there to die didn't have to happen. Lincoln didn't have to write or issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

It's worth thinking about what the "cost" of not having a war would have been.

Dealing with that thought on a cosmic scale: 

-600,000 (more like 750,000 according to updated research) men (and an unknown, much smaller number of women) who died as soldiers would have lived.

-Four million slaves would have remained slaves for an indeterminate amount of time.

-There might have been an independent nation known as the Confederate States of America.

-If Lincoln is to be believed, democracy, the concept, would have been proved wrong.

Obviously, there are a lot of other things that would have been different if there hadn't been a war. 

I guess my question is: when Antietam is remembered, should it be celebrated? Is it good that so many people died or lost limbs? Does it make sense to discuss the "cost" of Antietam, because, really, it was something that we wanted, after all?

When I visited Appomattox last year the tour guide made a point to mention that the 150th anniversary was a "remembrance" and not a "celebration". But, why not? Wasn't the immediate outcome worth celebrating?

The "Lincoln" trailer

A few thoughts on the Lincoln trailer.

The voice. Everything I've read about Lincoln's voice suggests that it was tinny, nasal, and higher pitched than the prototypical masculine hero's. It's a good sign that DDL chose a reasonably "accurate" timbre and accent for the role. In some ways it's a brave choice, because Lincoln is often portrayed with a deeper voice. And since his words, and his voice, and one of the most important parts of his legacy, a thinner voice may shock some people. The makeup, beard, and hair coloring are right on.

The movie seems to be about the end of the war and the 13th amendment. This strikes me as a bold choice, but a smart one. The film seems like less of a biopic and more of a character study of Lincoln at the end of his life. Biopics almost never work for me, because the story of a life is often too decentralized and sprawling to make sense of in a movie. By limiting the scope of the film Spielberg has the opportunity to really build Lincoln's character.

I know this is only a trailer, and I know that this is a Spielberg film, so maybe I should expect this...but the trailer is full of hokey, overly simple racial politics. Slavery? Well, that's bad. But there are bad people out there! So, let's end it? It's presentism, thinking about history without historical context. One of the difficult aspects of studying history, for me, is trying to understand how someone I admire (namely, Lincoln) could think that black people are naturally inferior to white people. Or why he thought that we should send American freedmen to a colony in Central America. These sorts of questions are central to any real understanding of history, and the trailer didn't seem interested in tackling them.

Anyway, I'm stoked to see this. It can't be worse than the vampire movie.