When They Fought On
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s an election year in America – quite a stressful one I might add. Admittedly, I feel a bit more optimistic about the outcome than I did before a particularly eventful weekend in July. Still, things are far from certain. Polls, whatever you wish to make of them, show things balled up tighter than the Gordian Knot on a cold day and the campaign of the Democratic standard bearer has been far from perfect. An existential election, the kind of which none alive in this county has ever seen, and which none should ever have been subjected to, seems destined to come down to the wire, leaving the country at the edge of their collective seats.
I mean what doesn’t this election have? You want drama, we’ve got drama; you want last minute shakeups, we’ve got last minute shakeups; you want multiple assassination attempts, we’ve got multiple assassination attempts; you want a debate chock-full-of-memes, we’ve got it: you want senile old men yelling nonsense, we’ve got two - er, um, make that one now. All that’s left is the final act, the last crescendo, the moment of truth if you will. Four years of polls and discourse, three months of intense campaigning by a newly minded candidate called in fresh from the bullpen, billions upon billions of d0llars raised, and spent, and it all comes down to an otherwise innocuous Tuesday in November.
And this time around, 250 years of American democracy is very much on the ballot. How fun!
It’s all very dramatic, isn’t it? Very Homeric. And I’ve got the brand new gray hairs to prove it. The whole thing has kept me awake more than a few nights this past year, and judging by, well, the current state of everyone and everything, I’m not alone there.
Looking around, there doesn’t seem to be a lot for Americans to be proud of these days. It’s not totally undeserved; we’ve done it to ourselves after all. We allowed our apathy to fester into entropy, we sought easy solutions to complex problems and shrugged our shoulders when it didn’t work out right away, we latched onto incredibly dangerous personalities who brought us nothing but angst and fear and chaos, and we’ve sat idly by while powerful elites tore at the fabrics of free society for their own short sighted gain. It’s dark out there. It doesn’t have to be.
Lately I’ve been thinking more about revolution. Not the literal, pick up your guns and storm the Bastille kind of revolution. Instead, I’ve been considering the kind of events that occur much closer to home, in the small private moments when we’re asked to ponder the state of our lives and our world, and how these moments more than most else lead us to act upon our society in one way or another. In a democracy, if we may still be called that, Election Day is one of those moments. The bubble you fill in is a reflection of your answer to those spots of contemplation, a brief if intangible instance of you, a single individual among eight billion people, putting your fingerprints on the timeline of humankind. It may seem small, but so does kicking a pebble down a cliff side until that tiny rock has turned into an avalanche before you can even get down the hill.
That’s what has led me to write this, because all these anxious days and sleepless nights has led me to think about an even more divisive time in American history, when Americans fought Americans over the issue of slavery. The American Civil War claimed more lives than every other war in Unites States history combined – modern estimates put the combined death toll between the Union and Confederacy at 750,000 souls. Regardless of what revisionists might tell you, it was fought exclusively because a group of rich and powerful elitists desperately wanted to maintain their monopoly over the South’s –and the nation’s – economic and political power through their exploitation of forced labor in the form of brutally violent and particularly dehumanizing race-based chattel slavery supported by a complex edifice of white supremacist bullshit. Period. No citation needed. Water is wet, the sky is blue, and the South seceded over slavery. Thank you and have a nice day.
Though we don’t think of him in this manner – moderates rarely find themselves carved into gigantic statues in the image of Zeus – Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was, in every sense of the term, what we today would refer to as a compromise candidate. The Republican Party to which he belonged – and whose modern incarnation would cause the great man to keel over – had been founded as an anti-slavery party less just six years before his election to the presidency. At the time, Lincoln’s view on the issue of slavery was, as brilliantly illustrated in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s impeccable Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, was exactly in the center of his party, and indeed, the center of opinion among most of those who opposed slavery at all. He believed the Constitution forbade the federal government from abolishing slavery in the states in which it already existed but that Washington had the power, and ought to use that power, to prohibit its expansion to new states as they were admitted to the Union. He was not an abolitionist. Shamefully few in America were. Lincoln’s position, “represented perfectly the views of the moderate majority of the Republican Party,” writes Kearns Goodwin. Morally and historically speaking, this majority, Lincoln included, was dead wrong in every sense of the word, as Lincoln himself would later come to see. Throughout his presidency, he battled with both the abolition-leaning “Radical Republicans” who thought he moved far too slow, and by what remained of the conservative Democrats in the North who portrayed Lincoln as a tyrant, a Caesar, a usurper of powers the Constitution had not granted him.
But in those early days of his presidency Lincoln tried everything he could merely to maintain the status quo. Nonetheless, his elevation to the highest office in November of 1860 provoked the mother of all hissy fits from the slaveholding states, prompting them to secede and establish the Confederate States of America with its foundations steeped in the worst forms of American white supremacy and Black chattel slavery guaranteed as a right in its constitution. These traitors then proceeded to attack their former countrymen and wage war on the United States for five long and bloody years.
Yet, when they first marched from their homes up North down to Dixie, the Union soldiers were in no way fighting to destroy the barbaric institution the South was fighting to defend. Lincoln was adamant he had no intention to free the slaves of the South, that the preservation of the Union must be achieved at any cost, even proposing Constitutional amendments affording yet more power to the southern slaveocracy to satiate them. Then there was the matter of the Border States, the slaveholding states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri who had not seceded with the rest but whose potential for doing so forced Lincoln to walk a conservative-leaning tightrope when dealing with the slavery issue. So wrote the future “Great Emancipator” himself in a letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not, either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union.”[3]
As the war dragged on into its first, then its second year Lincoln became convinced of exactly that: the war could not be won, the Union could not be restored, the Republic could not endure, unless the institution of slavery as a whole was snuffed out entirely. In 1862, he issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation, a temporary war measure that declared all slaves in the Confederacy – by definition out of the jurisdiction of the edict – free, and instructing field officers to assist Black refugees who had reached Union lines. For the first time, the American military was being used as a force for emancipation. More important still, the Black slaves of the South could now look to the encroaching Union Army as a source of hope. Hundreds of thousands responded by throwing down the tools of their bondage and fleeing the plantations for the protection of Union lines. The consequences were immense. Through what the great W.E.B Du Bois dubbed “the Great General Strike,” the Southern war effort was deprived of essential free labor it required to fuel its unholy existence. Following the passage of a new Confiscation Act the same year, nearly 200,000 formerly enslaved Black men took up arms and dawned the Union blue against their former oppressors, an influx of fresh fighters ultimately so decisive it leads to the inevitable conclusion brought forth by Du Bois and other scholars: in the end, the American slaves freed themselves[4].
That being said, there could be no emancipation without the preservation of the Union, and the Union could not survive without total victory over the Confederacy. Despite making gains late in his first term, Lincoln and the nation could not yet see the finish line upon them as the election of 1864 neared. The Republic had been a failed state in the midst of civil war for nearly five years, cities and farmland alike lay in ruin, Richmond – the capital of the Confederacy – still refused to yield to Union forces. In the summer of 1863, New York City nativists had unleashed a storm of violent rioting against the draft, proclaiming they would not fight and die for Black freedom. England and France, long looming over the situation as potential Southern allies, seemed, for the moment, content to stay out of the matter, but any turn of events on the battlefield could still have invited European intervention. Though in hindsight we know peace would arrive in April of 1865, the situation exactly one year prior was, to say the very least, precarious.
Nobody, strange as it may sound, looked at Abraham Lincoln as a two-term president. By the time he stood for reelection in 1864 no president had been elected to a second term since the incumbent Andrew Jackson trounced his Whig opponent (and Lincoln’s political idol), Henry Clay, in 1832. Given the current state of the affairs, few thought Lincoln stood a chance against his Democratic opponent and former commander, the incompetent George B. McClellan. Though a paper tiger on the battlefield, McClellan cut a dashing figure; he was charismatic, quick talking, boisterous, as self-serving as he was a self-promoter; for all his military failings, he was immensely popular among the Union soldiers. Moreover, McClellan thought his platform couldn’t be beat, especially among the more than a million soldiers and military personnel serving in the field who would be casting absentee ballots in the November election: McClellan and the Democrats promised that their victory would mean immediate peace and reunion with the Confederacy, even if it left the institution of slavery untouched.
Picture, if you will, the situation these Union soldiers found themselves in. After almost five years of fighting, of bleeding, of dying, of eating dry, salted hardtack not far from the bodies of their dead friends, their dead brothers, after all that these men were given a simple out: vote for me and it’ll end; vote for me, and go home. By this time, Lincoln had made clear he foresaw a completely different vision than the one he had sworn by at the war’s beginning. It was not enough to preserve the Union, it had to be cleansed of its original sin. What’s more, the same man who had once suggested a plan of colonization that would send freed slaves “back” to Africa had come to be convinced of the humanity, if not the equality, of the Black man through both the lobbying efforts of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and the heroic achievements of Black soldiers on the frontlines. There would be no colonization. That much was clear when on April 8, 1864 – exactly seven months before the election – the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and indentured servitude and sent it to the House. For Lincoln – and, as a result, for the entire Union effort – the war had become, officially and explicitly, a crusade to end slavery in the United States of America.
In other words, the war would not stop until the South surrendered unconditionally. There would be no compromise. A vote for Lincoln meant a vote to fight on.
Given all that, it’s no surprise that come November 8 – Election Day – many of Lincoln’s allies, and even the president himself, felt they would lose the election to McClellan, in which case Lincoln was committed to assisting the incoming president-elect while working to get as many slaves as possible into Union territory before his lame duck period concluded the following March. The result would have been either reunification with slavery intact, likely with even greater protections to satiate the South, or the establishment of the Confederacy as a permanent, independent ethno-state. Such a result, so Lincoln foresaw, would not only be a catastrophe for the United States but an indictment of the entire concept of self-government.
Which is why what happened that Election Day, 160 years before the writing of this paper, remains to this day, for my money, the finest moment in the history of American democracy.
It probably (at least hopefully) comes as no surprise to the reader that Lincoln beat the odds and defeated McClellan to win a second term of office. That he overcame such impediments at all is in itself a testament to his political ability and to the feelings of optimism a man of such bleak disposition seemed to offer an ailing nation. But what stands out for me in this moment of time is not that Lincoln won, it’s who he won. While Lincoln would win all but three states for a total of 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21, the incumbent president won the popular vote by just around 400,000 votes, a narrow margin. The votes that put Lincoln over the edge, came from those in the electorate – meaning white men and only white men at this time – with the most to lose: the Union Army. Overwhelmingly – Doris Kearns Goodwin details margins of between 70 and 80 percent in some armies – soldiers in the field who mailed in absentee ballots or were given leave to return home and cast a vote did so in favor of Abraham Lincoln. Even seventy percent of the famed Army of the Potomac, which McClellan himself had led, voted to fight on. “By supporting Lincoln,” writes Kearns Goodwin, “the soldiers understood that they were voting to prolong the war, but they voted with their hearts for the president they loved and the cause that he embodied.”[To put that another way, a massive preponderance of Union soldiers, white men with their own longstanding, ingrained prejudices who had spent the last five summers dying and killing in the cotton fields of the South, voted overwhelming to continue to wage war on the slaveocracy, no longer as a force merely for unification, but for abolition. By plebiscite, an army of free men with everything to lose transformed themselves into an Army of Liberation.
No doubt, more than a few of the men who chose to vote for Lincoln that November would meet their premature ends before General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the Civil War. That January, before Lincoln took his second Oath of Office, the House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment, sending it to the states for final ratification, which was achieved that December. Though he would not live to see its final ratification, the Thirteenth Amendment represented the final victory for the greatest president in American history and perhaps the most decent man ever to hold a position of such immense power.
Which brings us back to today, a full 160 years after 1864. Nothing like a nice round number to really punctuate the poetic nature of it all.
Now I am not a Democrat, and I’m certainly no Republican. I find both parties nauseating and unwilling, or otherwise incapable of fundamentally bettering the lives of ordinary Americans. This election, for me, represents what it usually does for people of my political persuasion: the lesser of two evils. That’s terribly disappointing. I’ve spent much of my memorable life – since I first, as a fifth grader, watched Barack Obama inspire a crowd, only for him to later disappoint a teenaged me – waiting for a real change candidate. In eighth grade I traveled from my childhood home on Long Island to New York City’s Zuccotti Park to visit the Occupy Wall Street encampment mere days before Mayor Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to clear the protestors out. My senior year of high school was 2016 and like many young people I fell in love with the message of Bernie Sanders and the progressives that followed in his wake. Admittedly, and foolishly, my eighteen year old self let my anger at the political system over Bernie’s loss in the primary cloud my better judgment as a citizen and I refused to vote in 2016, at the time believing, like many, that a then-candidate turned would-be-dictator had no real way of winning the White House. I was wrong to stay out of politics then, I’d be wrong to do so going forward.
If I am speaking plainly and honestly, as I always strive to do, I do not much like Kamala Harris, and I’m highly critical of the campaign she’s currently running. I don’t think that should come as much of a surprise, particularly given her persistent endorsement of Joe Biden’s pervasively vicious policies in Gaza and of the general hawkishness of Democrats towards the Middle East. But I have never understood the notion that I had to necessarily like someone to cast a vote for them. Sure, that’s the ideal, right? I like a candidate and you like a different one and whoever gets the most people to like that candidate wins. It goes without saying nothing is ever that simple. Even in a perfect democracy – of which, none exists, nor has ever existed – there will persist to be great masses of individuals unhappy with the results of a plebiscite. There will be always be candidates and leaders who make mistakes we thoroughly disagree with and when it comes time to select new candidates we should consider those mistakes and hold everyone to account. But now that time has passed and we are presented with our options – our only two options – and a responsible citizen has to make a decision based solely on those options, not based off what we wish our options were. I am voting for Kamala Harris not because I agree with her on her Middle East policy, nor because I believe she will make my most ambitious policy dreams come true. I’m doing so because the other option is even worse than the one faced by the Union in 1864: the other option is the dissolution of American democracy, the other option is a warped vision of the United States as some tool of personal retribution by a mad man who thinks he stands above the people he wishes to serve and to lead and who would do, and has done, deranged and illegal things to maintain power at any cost. If keeping that person away from the most powerful office in the world requires me to compromise on issues that I fervently disagree with the Vice President on, then so be it.
Kamala Harris is no Abraham Lincoln, nor is anyone else for that matter. Few people who have ever entered into high politics have possessed Lincoln’s capacity for empathy, something that colored a great deal of his presidential policies and an element that seems absent from even our most popular leaders today. The Union soldiers who cast their vote in 1864 might have desired a candidate who could’ve achieved the best of both worlds: the immediate reunification of the country with the elimination of slavery. No such candidate existed. If some solution that could have achieved that end existed – as I’m sure one does to solve problems in the Middle East – then there was no one who was there to seize upon it and Lincoln’s vision is what remained. So faced with the choice to cut their losses, take the easy way out, to go home and have fought in vein, the soldiers voted to fight on, to, in the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, “strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle.”
The present epoch of America is a dark one. It need not continue to be. Let us now vote to bind the nation’s wounds, let us vote to fight on, to give self-government a chance and not abandon hope in America. Because for all its government’s awful ugly faults, for all its bad deeds, I still believe that America, and the American people, can rise to the occasion as the we did 160 years ago, that we can overcome our worst impulses in favor of better horizons, and, to borrow one last time from Lincoln, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”
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Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” The New York Times, April 2, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html
[Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, pg 224
[Abraham Lincoln, Selected Writings, “Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862,” Barnes & Noble Inc, New York, NY, 2013, pg 745-746
[W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, The Free Press, New York, NY, 1998
[Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, pg 627-666