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Workers Vanguard No. 1015
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11 January 2013
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Civil War, Not Compromise, Smashed Slavery
Lincoln-A Review by Jacob Zorn
Lincoln—Steven Spielberg’s new movie based on a screenplay
by Tony Kushner—begins with a battle scene that highlights the bravery of black
soldiers, some 200,000 of whom fought in the Civil War. Two of them are seen
talking to President Lincoln and criticizing the Union Army’s racist policies,
paying blacks less than whites and preventing them from advancing to officers.
One of the soldiers wonders whether blacks will have the vote in a hundred
years. This sequence hints at the crucial role played by black soldiers in the
armed struggle that broke the slave power in the South, but the film then
entirely switches gears.
The movie’s plot reduces the abolition of slavery to so many
parliamentary maneuvers by the wise and clever Lincoln to get the House of
Representatives in early 1865 to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which abolished slavery. In the process, it distorts the
significance of the Amendment and the role of the abolitionists, who were the
main force, then and for decades before, pushing for an end to slavery.
To its credit, Lincoln is forthright that the Civil War was
about slavery and does depict Lincoln, with all his contradictions and
strengths, as devoted to not just winning the war but smashing the Southern
slavocracy. The movie is based in part on a chapter in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005). While
other historians—particularly James McPherson, who wrote the classic Battle
Cry of Freedom (1988), and Eric Foner—present a deeper understanding of the
social and political forces at work in the Civil War, Goodwin’s book underscores
Lincoln’s political genius and canny leadership in leading the North to victory.
The opening scene is done in a manner to wrongly suggest that
racial oppression is a relic of the past long since overcome. The
not-too-thinly-disguised goal of the movie is to laud President Obama and to
underline how he, supposedly like Lincoln, should seek “bipartisan” compromises
with adversaries. By extension, his left critics are expected to give the
president a break. When interviewed on NPR, Kushner gushed about what a great
president Barack Obama is and what a “blessing” it was to see “the Obama years
through a Lincoln lens.” Kushner then rhapsodized about the virtues of
compromise and horse trading. This message was not lost on most of the bourgeois
commentary on the film—as shown in the L.A. Times (28 November 2012)
headline: “Gov. Jerry Brown Could Learn a Lesson From ‘Lincoln’.”
Lincoln is not without entertainment value, with its
excellent acting by Daniel Day-Lewis (as Lincoln) and Tommy Lee Jones (as
Pennsylvania Republican Congressman and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens). If the
only problem of the movie was simply the narrow focus of its plot, it could be
partly alleviated by watching it in conjunction with the superb movie
Glory. An inspiring portrayal of the black soldiers in the
Massachusetts 54th regiment, Glory gives a sense of what was required for
Union victory in a way that Lincoln does not.
But the main weakness of Lincoln is that in trying to show
the Lincoln years through the Obama lens the movie distorts history. Barack
Obama is Commander-in-Chief of a capitalist system long into its imperialist
epoch of decay. The Civil War was the last great progressive act of the American
bourgeoisie. To further the consolidation of industrial capitalism, when the
exploitation of free labor represented an historical advance, the North was
compelled to destroy the system of chattel slavery in the South. Today racist
U.S. imperialism continues to carry out what has been more than a century of
pillage and war across the globe, brutally exploiting labor at home and abroad
while qualitatively arresting wider social and economic development. The
American capitalist rulers are the main enemy of the world’s working people and
oppressed.
It will serve some good if Lincoln piques interest in the
Civil War among its viewers. But it must be understood that the movie obscures
the fact that only a social revolution could have uprooted slavery, smashing
everything that stood in its way. By the same token, it will take a socialist
revolution by the proletariat and its allies to eradicate capitalist wage
slavery.
The Thirteenth Amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment, which had its origins in a petition
campaign by anti-slavery women suffragettes in early 1864, states: “Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or
any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Thirteenth Amendment codified the
end of slavery. Lincoln’s insistence that his generals fight to crush the
opposing Confederate armies, and not his search for “bipartisanship,” paved the
way for the passage of the Amendment.
In July 1862, as slaves were fleeing Southern plantations and
seeking freedom behind Union Army lines, Congress authorized the
“confiscation”—i.e., emancipation—of Confederates’ slaves. In January 1863,
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had drafted the previous
September. It declared that slaves in Confederate-controlled areas “shall be
then, thenceforward, and forever free.” With the Proclamation, the war openly
became a social revolution to emancipate an oppressed class, the chattel slaves,
and destroy an oppressor class, the slave masters. The Emancipation Proclamation
also sanctioned the recruitment of black soldiers, such as those Lincoln visited
in the first scene of the movie.
The revolutionary aspect of the war was resisted by many
Northerners, especially those in the Democratic Party, which was the party that
ran the slave South. These Northern Democrats—the so-called “Copperheads”—were
antiwar and opposed abolition. In the movie, their main spokesman is Democratic
Congressman Fernando Wood, a former mayor of New York City. The clash of the two
parties came to a head in the election of 1864, when the Democrats ran General
George B. McClellan—whom Lincoln had fired as the commanding general of the
Union Army because he refused to fight to win the war. Meanwhile, with Ulysses
S. Grant in charge, the tide of the war had begun to decisively turn, and the
Union Army was on an offensive through the South.
In the election, the Democrats’ slogan was “The Constitution As It
Is and the Union As It Was.” In other words, end the war and keep slavery.
McClellan was decisively defeated, winning only New Jersey and the border states
Delaware and Kentucky. Lincoln’s victory signaled support for continuing the war
until the slavocracy was defeated, with the Republicans gaining enough seats in
Congress to guarantee passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
From Lincoln’s perspective, the question was not whether slavery
would be abolished, but whether the Amendment would be passed by the outgoing
Congress in early 1865 or the incoming Congress later that spring. This
consideration was not trivial. Rather than wait for the new Republican-dominated
Congress to be convened, Lincoln wanted it to pass with some Democratic support.
To do so would be a show of national support for abolition and would undercut
the Copperheads, making it impossible to conclude peace on any basis except
abolition.
The movie shows in detail how Lincoln—mainly acting through his
secretary of state, William H. Seward—manipulated, cajoled, flattered and bribed
various Democrats to support the Amendment. In the end, he obtained enough
support from “lame duck” Democratic Congressmen to get it passed. Rather than
the culmination of the Civil War, the drama in Congress represented a
sideshow—albeit an important one—to the abolition of slavery. Eric Foner
stressed in a letter to the New York Times (26 November 2012) about the
movie: “Even as the House debated, [Union general] Sherman’s army was marching
into South Carolina, and slaves were sacking plantation homes and seizing land.
Slavery died on the ground, not just in the White House and the House of
Representatives.”
The viewer would not know from the movie that to become law,
amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. When this happened
in December 1865, it was because the North had militarily defeated the
Confederacy. Among the states that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment were
several in the South. James McPherson captured the real lesson of its adoption
when he wrote: “Without the Civil War there would have been no confiscation act,
no Emancipation Proclamation, no Thirteenth Amendment (not to mention the
Fourteenth and the Fifteenth), certainly no self-emancipation, and almost
certainly no end of slavery for several more decades at least” (Drawn with
the Sword, 1997).
The Abolitionists and Radical Republicans
Radical abolitionism, the first interracial political movement in
the United States, had pointed out decades before the Civil War that the slave
system could not be reformed but had to be destroyed. At the time, mainstream
politicians either essentially ignored slavery (the Whig Party) or supported it
(the Democratic Party). For their bravery, the abolitionists were attacked,
denounced and belittled.
The more farsighted elements of the capitalist class in the North
eventually coalesced into the Republican Party. At the time of the 1860
presidential election, the Republican Party was not an abolitionist party, and
Lincoln, its candidate, wanted only to limit slavery from expanding into the
West. But both the slavocracy and Republicans understood that if slavery were
prevented from expanding, it could not survive, in large part because its
agricultural methods demanded ever more virgin soil. Lincoln’s victory prompted
the Southern states to secede, provoking the Civil War. From its outset, the
abolitionists understood that slavery was the central issue. Former slave and
abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass insisted that it was futile to “separate
the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government.” He declared: “War
for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of
slavery.”
This was underlined by Karl Marx, who from London agitated among
British workers in support of the North. In “The Civil War in the United States”
(October 1861), Marx stressed: “The present struggle between the South and North
is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of
slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the
two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American
continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”
Criticizing Lincoln’s early wavering on emancipation, Marx declared, “Events
themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan—emancipation
of the slaves.”
In the early stages of the war, Lincoln was fearful of the reaction
of the four pro-Union slave border states as well as the Copperheads. The
abolitionists and Radicals pushed Lincoln to grasp the need to smash slavery in
order to win the war. Thaddeus Stevens declared: “It is plain that nothing
approaching the present policy will subdue the rebels.”
In our article “Honor Abraham Lincoln!” (WV No. 938, 5 June
2009), which elaborates on the evolution of his views on race over the course of
the Civil War, we stated:
“The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln
was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the
contradictions this implies.... Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could
argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social
system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of
slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift
when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of
the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only
by means of social revolution.”
It is hard to say to whom the movie does more injustice, Lincoln or
the abolitionists. Lincoln is turned into some Obama-style centrist, and the
abolitionists into well-meaning people who couldn’t get the job done. Kushner in
his interview with NPR condemned “impatience on the part of very good, very
progressive people” as one of the main obstacles Obama faces today. In other
words, like Obama, Lincoln’s virtue was that he knew that the way to get what is
important is to give as well as take.
One of the most egregious aspects of the film is the lack of even a
mention of Frederick Douglass, a powerful advocate for abolition and black
rights. It was Douglass who not only urged Lincoln to recruit black troops, but
advocated that they be treated fairly and paid the same as whites. Douglass had
met and argued with Lincoln on a number of occasions, including at the reception
after his second inaugural address, as Goodwin relates in the chapter of her
book on the Thirteenth Amendment.
The one abolitionist who factors prominently in the movie is
Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens has long been vilified, like many Radicals, as a
vindictive fanatic who was likely mad. By portraying Stevens sympathetically,
the movie hopefully will spur people to learn more about him and the other
radical abolitionists.
Yet the film deals with Stevens one-sidedly. At one point in the
movie, during a private conversation, Lincoln lectured Stevens that if matters
had been left to the Radicals, emancipation would have failed: “But if I’d
listened to you, I’d’ve declared every slave free the minute the first shell
struck Fort Sumter; then the border states would’ve gone over to the
Confederacy, the war would’ve been lost and the Union along with it, and instead
of abolishing slavery, as we hope to do, in two weeks, we’d be watching helpless
as infants as it spread from the American South into South America.”
There is a grain of truth to this since Lincoln the politician was
mindful of public opinion and tried not to put himself too far ahead of it. But
it leaves out how instrumental abolitionists like Stevens were in the fight
against slavery. As Stevens’ biographer put it, “Thaddeus Stevens in the House
and Charles Sumner in the Senate led the struggle against widespread apathy and
fear, pushing through Congress the limited emancipation measures that prepared
the nation for general emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment” (Fawn M.
Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, 1959).
A telling example of how the movie tries to fit the abolition of
slavery into the mold of compromise and bipartisanship is the dramatic tension
over what Stevens would say in the House debate over the Thirteenth Amendment.
Stevens was known for his saber-sharp sarcasm. In the movie, Ohio Congressman
James Ashley—who sponsored the Amendment—begs Stevens to “compromise” in his
advocacy of racial equality, “or you risk it all.” The movie then shows Stevens
arguing with Fernando Wood on January 27, i.e., shortly before the final vote.
In response to Wood’s badgering, Stevens states that he did not believe
everybody was equal, but only should be treated equally before the law.
The drama of the scene is false, concocted in order to bolster the
movie’s message of political conciliation. In fact, it was over three weeks
before the voting when Stevens said that he advocated only “equality before the
laws,” and he did so in response to Ohio Representative Samuel Cox, a Democrat
who ended up voting for the Amendment. In any case, Stevens’ supposed
“compromise”—civil rights for black people—was not only far ahead of most other
politicians but also ahead of the actual Thirteenth Amendment.
Reconstruction
Several times in the movie, Lincoln declares that he was focused
only on the task at hand—winning the war and abolishing slavery. He tells
Stevens that he refuses to discuss Reconstruction after the war: “We shall
oppose one another in the course of time. Now we’re working together.” Fair
enough: one cannot fault a movie about Lincoln for not delving into what
happened after the president’s assassination. But the movie’s refusal to even
touch on what happened after the war serves a purpose. To do so would expose the
folly of moderation and compromise with the pro-slavery forces.
After Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from the mountains
of Tennessee, assumed the presidency following Lincoln’s death, remnants of the
defeated Confederacy made it clear that, while their military defeat had forced
them to accept the end of slavery, they had no intention of accepting black
people as genuinely free. Southern states sent former Confederates to Congress
and passed “black codes” that all but re-enslaved blacks. Meanwhile, Johnson
carried out a policy of conciliating the South and was openly disdainful of
black people.
Combating Johnson’s equivocal Reconstruction policy, Stevens and
other Radical Republicans carried out what became known as Radical
Reconstruction. Refusing to allow the Southern representatives to sit in
Congress, they passed laws—overriding Johnson’s repeated vetoes—that protected
the rights of former slaves, extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and
politically disenfranchised the former slaveowners. The Union Army was stationed
in the South to enforce these laws. Meanwhile, black people were asserting their
basic rights by voting, standing for office and building schools. Radical
Reconstruction was the most democratic period in American history, bringing
advances for poor whites, such as public education, as well.
Among the Radicals in Congress, Stevens pushed to extend
Reconstruction the furthest. He advocated black suffrage, disenfranchising
former Confederates and, most radical of all, seizing the former slaveholders’
plantations and redistributing them to the freedmen. In the movie, Stevens
articulates this vision, telling Lincoln: “We’ll build up a land down there of
free men and free women and free children and freedom.” Since Johnson tried to
subvert Reconstruction at every step, Stevens helped spearhead the drive to
impeach him, which failed by one vote in Spring 1868.
One of Stevens’ last acts was to campaign for the ratification of
the Fourteenth Amendment. That Amendment extended the rights of citizenship to
everybody born in the United States, regardless of race. While Lincoln
implies that it was with the Thirteenth Amendment that Stevens compromised, it
was in fact over the Fourteenth. He had pushed to give black men the right to
vote, but the Amendment instead reduced the number of representatives for states
that denied blacks the right to vote. Stevens told Congress that he was going to
vote for it “because I live among men and not among angels.” Only in 1870, with
the Fifteenth Amendment, did black men gain the right to vote.
As we wrote in our 1966 document “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road
to Negro Freedom” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 9, “Basic Documents
of the Spartacist League”): “Capitalist and slave alike stood to gain from the
suppression of the planter aristocracy but beyond that had no further common
interests.” In other words, even though a section of the bourgeoisie pushed to
deepen Reconstruction, as a whole the ruling class had no such interest.
For Reconstruction to have succeeded would have required what
Stevens advocated: breaking up the large landed estates and actually giving
blacks “40 acres and a mule.” But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when
the Northern capitalists formed an alliance with the remnants of the slavocracy
in order to exploit Southern resources and the freedmen. Particularly following
the Paris Commune of 1871, when the proletariat seized power for two months in
the city, the American bourgeoisie saw expropriation and redistribution of
private property in the land as a potential threat to themselves.
After the election of 1876, the last federal troops were recalled
from the South as part of a compromise between the Republicans and the
Democrats. Black freedmen and poor white sharecroppers didn’t have the social
weight to defend their gains. With the racist Democrats returned to power in the
South, they steadily stripped away the rights that black people had won. By the
end of the century, the Southern states had disenfranchised black people and
instituted formal Jim Crow segregation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
would be dead letters until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
The defeat of Reconstruction was a betrayal of the promise of black
equality. To this day, the Civil War remains unfinished business, with black
people making up an oppressed race-color caste. They form an integral part of
American society but at the same time are overwhelmingly segregated at its
bottom. Although the Democrats are no longer the pro-slavery party they once
were, they are no less foes of black liberation today, administering along with
the Republicans the capitalist system in its death agony. The tasks of the Civil
War can be finished only by smashing American capitalism through socialist
revolution.
