It’s pretty well known that strong evidence exists from Lincoln’s own pen that he deliberately sent the resupply ships to Ft. Sumter to provoke war. Gustavus V. Fox was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy who oversaw the “rescue fleet” for Fort Sumter. Abraham Lincoln had provoked his war and was pleased but “concerned that Gustavus Fox, was depressed that his Fort Sumter mission had failed.” Lincoln wrote Fox on May 1,1861 stating:
“I sincerely regret that the failure of the late attempt to provision Fort Sumter should be the source of any annoyance to you . . . . You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.” (Lincoln, Collected Works, Vol. IV, p. 350-351…)
What Lincoln meant was his provocation to cause the firing on the resupply ships was all the justification he wanted and needed to start his war. Like his predecessor Buchanan, Lincoln held concern that the Constitution did not grant the power to coerce a State by force of arms. And so he would not resort to coercion of arms without first being fired upon.
Additional evidence written only two months later exposes Lincoln’s deliberately provoking war. Charles Ramsdell in his book, “Lincoln and Fort Sumter,” gives additional evidence that Lincoln sought to provoke war. Lincoln confessed his plot to his friend Senator Orville H. Browning in July 1861. Browning would later put it all down in his diary. In his entry for July 3, 1861, Browning wrote:
“He told me that the very first thing placed in his hands after his inauguration was a letter from Majr Anderson announcing the impossibility of defending or relieving Sumter…. He himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without an attempt to reinforce giving notice of the fact to Gov Pickens of S.C. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter — it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could.”
Northern newspapers saw through the ruse:
“Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.” ~ (Providence Daily Post, Providence, R.I., April 13, 1861.)
But why such a deliberate immoral action to provoke war? Why refuse to meet with the Southern Delegation and just let the South go in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence? After all, the DOI was the first document in the Organic Law of the Union. Lincoln said his war was all about “preserving the Union.” But certainly, the Union could have continued without the Southern States that wanted self-government, and without resorting to the immoral denial of that basic natural right so fundamental to the founding. What motivated Lincoln to abandon his own affirmation of this basic right which he himself had affirmed only 13 years earlier:
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right…. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”
Why did Lincoln flipflop? In an April 1861 meeting with John Baldwin Lincoln admitted one major reason was economic plunder:
“But what am I to do meantime with those men at Montgomery? Am I to let them go….open Charleston, &c., as ports of entry, with their ten per cent tariff? What, then, would become of MY tariff?”
Baldwin related, “this last question he (Lincoln) announced with such emphasis, showed that in his view it decided the whole matter.” (Interview Between President Lincoln and Col. John B. Baldwin, April 4th, 1861, Statements and Evidence, Staunton Speculator, Staunton, Virginia: Spectator Job Office, D.E. Strasburg, Printer, 1866, 12)
President Tyler’s son Lyon Tyler writes:
“…. the deciding factor with him (Lincoln) was the tariff question. In three separate interviews, he asked what would become of his revenue if he allowed the government at Montgomery to go on with their ten percent tariff…” (Originally printed in Tyler’s Quarterly in Volume 33, October and January issues, 1935.)
In his provoking an immoral war, Lincoln abandoned a founding principle for the reason of revenue.
There is also good evidence that political expediency motivated Lincoln to abandon the founding principle of self-determination. It involved the immoral motive of cronyism and answering the demands of his deep pocket political supporters. Lincoln historian David Donald says that:
“Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune regarded the President as a kind of personal property, and when his faction seemed not to be securing its share of the patronage he raged: ‘We made Abe and by god we can unmake him…” (David Herbert Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon: A Biography, p. 153-154.)
The Lehrman Institute states, “The Chicago Tribune viewed itself as a founding stockholder in the Illinois Republican Party and as such entitled to regular dividends. Medill was editor and co-owner of Chicago Press & Tribune.” (The Lehrman Institute, Mr. Lincoln and Friends, The Journalists: Joseph Medill 1823-1899)
In an interview with McClure’s Magazine Medill shared the following story:
“In 1864, when the call for extra troops came, Chicago revolted. She had already sent 22,000 troops up to that time, and was drained. When the call came there were no young men to go, and no aliens except what were bought. The citizens held a mass meeting and appointed three persons, of whom I was one, to go to Washington and ask Stanton to give Cook County a new enrollment. On reaching Washington, we went to Stanton with our statement. He refused entirely to give us the desired aid.
Then we went to Lincoln. ‘I cannot do it,’ he said, ‘but I will go with you to the War Department, and Stanton and I will hear both sides.’ So we all went over to the War Department together. Stanton and General Frye were there, and they, of course, contended that the quota should not be changed.
The argument went on for some time, and was finally referred to Lincoln, who had been sitting silently listening. I shall never forget how he suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in a voice full of bitterness, ‘after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing war on this country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked, you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men, which I have made to carry out the war which you demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home and raise your six thousand extra men. And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men!’
I couldn’t say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn’t have an answer. We all got up and went out, and when the door closed one of my colleagues said:
‘Well, gentlemen, the old man is right. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Let us never say anything about this, but go home and raise the men.’
And we did—six thousand men—making twenty-eight thousand in the War from a city of one hundred and fifty-six thousand. But there might have been crape on every door, almost, in Chicago, for every family had lost a son or a husband. I lost two brothers. It was hard for the mothers.” (Ida M. Tarbell interview with Joseph Medill, June 25, 1895, journalist of McClure’s Magazine)
Medill’s testimony can be trusted because an axiom of historical critical method holds that if a testimony is self-deprecating, it is evidence that it is with a high degree of probability true.
John G. Nicolay and John Hay, both of whom were personally close to Abraham Lincoln, stated on April 1, 1861 in “Abraham Lincoln: A History:”
“When the President determined on war, and with the purpose of making it appear that the South was the aggressor, he took measures.”
The evidence demonstrates that Lincoln provoked a war that killed more Americans than did Hitler and Hirohito combined and for what…. Plunder and political cronyism.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
Poor Joseph Medill, losing two brothers in a war he helped start. Warmongering has its costs as well as its losses. Perhaps he should have thought of that beforehand. Money and power…are wars ever about anything else?
“Money and power…are wars ever about anything else?”
Not in Washington.
Amen, Paul.
Lincoln’s Attorney-General, Edward Bates, reported in his diary of the March 9, ’61 cabinet meeting in which various “army”and “navy” men discussed with the President the feasibility of the reinforcement of Fort Sumter. The army men advised that collision was inevitable “But the naval men convinced me the thing can be done, and yet as the doing of it would be almost certain to begin the war… ”
Gen. Winfield Scott was among the number of experienced military men who had advised abandoning the fort, yet Lincoln advisor Postmaster General Montgomery Blair (Postmaster General?) convinced the President to proceed with the re-arming expedition, later writing, “It was an irrevocable decision that the Union should be maintained by force of arms.”
As my “friends” of the winning side tell me, the South started the War by bombarding Sumter. A miserable hours long bombardment it was, yielding not a single casualty. I ask my friends if they know of Imperial Japan firing on a U.S. gunboat in the Yangtze River in 1937. Seeing the U.S. boat sunk and the killing of two American sailors, FDR nevertheless declined to declare it an act of war. My friends reserve comment.
Anderson seizing the fort in the dead of night was an act of war. Holding the fort in defiance of South Carolina’s legitimate authority was an act of war. Resupplying the fort was an act of war.
I’ve got a list of a dozen or more instances when prominent, influential men warned and advised against Lincoln’s expedition to re-arm Sumter. Among them are Secretary of War Simon Cameron, U.S. Commanding General Winfield Scott, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Attorney-General Bates and Army Chief of Engineers, Gen. Joseph Totten. Previously mentioned are only two such instances. There’s much in the Official Records, much was documented by Lincoln’s private secretary John Nicolay, and Dr. Samuel Crawford, serving on Maj. Anderson’s staff was close enough to the machinations to call his memoir, Genesis of the Civil War.
Lincoln had a hand in the provocation as President-elect and upon taking office sloughed off an armistice being observed over resupply of Fort Pickens in Florida. Indeed, it cannot be denied, with scrutiny of the public record, that only one man wanted war.
It should be noted that at the time most US Forts were constructed at state expense. Fort Sumter was built at South Carolina’s expense but offered Lincoln compensation for the state takeover of the fort.
So though it was true that the states paid for the building of forts, the forts were actually the property of the federal government as federal troops would be stationed there at the federal government’s expense.
Had it not been so, South Carolina would not have offered compensation for taking over the fort.
However, like all entreaties from the South to resolve the secession issue peacefully, Lincoln ignored all of them and chose war.
It should also be noted that there are various perspectives on what event actually started the war. Of course, the most common one is the firing on Fort Sumter. Nonetheless, others hold the view that it was the John Brown attack on the Harper’s Ferry Arsenal (I believe in Virginia), while many see the invasion of the South by 75,000 Union troops as the actual beginning of the “War of Northern Aggression”.
Grateful to see the Entire transcript from Medill. By 1895 he had married very well and was living on a magnificent Estate near Wheaton IL, where I was raised. An Estate in the Southern style of course, except top heavy and way over done. It’s called “Cantigny” now.
The guy never suffered, but would have been nice if he had, and immensely.
Some time ago, when my formed hatred of Abraham Lincoln was in full flower, I went to the tomb of Steven A Douglas in Chicago, to place a bouquet literally as Obama was giving his first Inaugural address. I did so to spite both Obama and Lincoln. But it was Lincoln who “spoke” at Douglas’s beautiful monument. He said ” what Judge Douglass and I have become in you’re lifetime bears little if any resemblance to who we actually were”. Of course it wasn’t a voice, but an impression that came from seemingly nowhere, and totally unexpected.
I wonder, sometimes, if a faction of his party didn’t help drive him to War.
“Whatever you have asked, you have had” is a statement of simple political truth by President Lincoln. I greatly appreciate the article by Rod O’Barr. Almost as concise is the query from Mr. Lincoln about the ports in the South:”….Montgomery…open Charleston, &c, as ports of entry…with their tariff? What, then, would become of my tariff?” These words from Mr. Lincoln make clear that he knew he was taking orders concerning business activities in the mid century Northwest and Northeast from Chicago and Boston business interests. Simultaneously, he was focused on the port challanges in the South. Why were the “men at Montgomery” and the business interests in Chicago at such odds that he could say to those in the Chicago meeting:”…you called for war…”?
Why was war necessary? Because the South was threatening to seceed which would mean that the Southern business interests would win the war over which regional businesss interest would control the railroads to the west coast as well as continue to control the Gulf of Mexico business. The northern business interests, such as Cornelious Vanderbilt, et al, refused to accomodate losing the opportunity to control of the wealth which was so close at hand due to the expanding nations’ technologial development. The South had to be brought to heel, its competetive capibilities had be be distroyed, its railroad linkage to the west had to be shattered. War became desireable. You might say, war was a necessary evil to President Lincoln.
“Southern business interests would win the war over which regional business interest would control the railroads to the west coast as well as continue to control the Gulf of Mexico business”
And the name change would have appeared a long time ago: “The Gulf of Dixie.”
Praise the Lord!
Excellent. The south wanted secession and self-governance, not war. Lincoln wanted his revenues and was willing to kill a million Americans to get it. “Preserving the union” wasn’t part of the job description and he did nothing on behalf of slavery. Everything he did on that subject and all others was tactical but also tyrannical in foundation. Curse the fact that he won. It’s past time for people to Lincoln for what he was.
A little fairness to the South when it comes to the subject of Lincoln would be a welcomed reprieve. I tire of seeing Lincoln pictures behind all of the “conservatives” on tv.
I am proud to say that as a South Carolinian, that man was never my president. 🙂
I cannot watch Mark Levin at all with that photo of Lincoln always in the background. It is unbearably distracting!
I no longer watch nor listen to Mark Levin because of his Lincoln worship.
I turn off Victor Davis Hanson because of his calling Confederates traitors. How dare he cally ancestors that
And anything from Prager U is avoided because i saw their video on Reconstruction being ended to early from that mental midget Ty Sedule
Excellent work! Abe wanted the war, it was the only way the Republican Party could save face, so it sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives.
What the “Victor’s History” DOESN’T want you to know about Abraham LINCOLN.
As a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln was the highest paid corporate attorney in America and a lobbyist for the burgeoning railroad industry. He was chief council for the New York Central Railroad; then the largest corporation in the world and he traveled about the country on railroad business in his own personal luxury railroad car. Likewise, his residence was the grandest mansion on “Old Aristocracy Row” in Springfield, Ill. His staunch advocacy for Henry Clay’s three point “AMERICAN PLAN” (known today as “crony capitalism”) consisted of (#1) “INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS” (massive government funded works projects that would be undertaken by large northern industrial corporations), (#2) a “HIGH TARIFF” (to protect these corporations from foreign competition) and (#3) his advocacy for a “NATIONAL BANK” (a bank run by politicians that could inflate the currency to fund these projects (and what 70 years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had condemned as “the perfect engine of corruption”), are what propelled Lincoln from a local politico into the presidency by this cabal of Chicago and other Northern industrial and banking interests who would come to be known in the following decades as the “robber barons”. Not surprisingly, his cabinet included Wm. Chase (Chase Bank), and the president of U.S. Steel. The Southern States which were the main consumers of imported steel agricultural products bore the burden of these tariffs (up to 48%). Called by the South the “Tariff of Abominations”, it effectively resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the agricultural South to the industrial North and was a leading cause of the secession of the Southern States from the Union. (Jefferson had opined that the Union he and the other Founders created might eventually break up into as many as four of five separate Unions owing to the differing economic interests among the states.) As a new UNION constitutionally formed by “the people of the SOVERIGN States”, the Confederacy sought to maintain ports of free trade. This would have caused a loud sucking sound as trade from foreign nations would leave the high tariff northern ports for the free ports of the South to discharge their cargoes. Northern newspapers proclaimed that grass would be growing in Wall Street if their source of revenue disappeared with the departure of the Southern States from the Union. Lincoln had said that the ONLY REASON HE WOULD GO TO WAR was to “collect the imposts (tariffs)” so crucial to his plan. To this end, King Lincoln denied the very right of secession upon which our independence in 1776 was founded, proclaiming that the peaceful constitutional ”States RIght” to secede was “INSURRECTION”. (In 1814-5 when 3 Yankee states had threatened to secede, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison had ALL recognized their RIGHT to do so). Today that FREE Union created by the Founders is dead; replaced by the 14th (civil war amendment) making the Union inescapable; a Venus Flytrap, held together forcibly, like the Soviet Union, by the point of a bayonet.