Did William Coggeshall Save Lincoln's Life?

[John Fazio]

(09-11-2016 10:50 AM)Wild Bill Wrote:  John,

I was just about to thumb back the hammer on my ole .44 when I read your second paragraph and realized that we will be arguing until the Devil’s domain freezes over.

The real argument that brought on the Civil War was not over slavery, but the expansion of slavery into the western territories. This is a political question, not a moral one. It generally was referred to as the Slave Power Conspiracy in the North. Slaves were counted as 3/5 of a citizen but with none of the rights of citizenship as ruled in the Dred Scott case.

The slave Power Conspiracy worked this way: Before the Civil War the white male population. i.e., potential voters, of the North outnumbered those of the South by about 2 to 1. Yet Southerners controlled fully half of all cabinet and diplomatic appointments and had 22 extra representative in the lower house of Congress from counting 3/5 of its slaves, The Old South, more or less, according to this theory, unfairly and disproportionately, ran the whole nation.

Not counting numerous clerkships, secretaries, sergeants at arms, and pages in every executive and congressional department of the Federal government, which, in that age of difficult and expensive travel, frequently went to local Washingtonians, Marylanders, and Virginians (who backed the institution of slavery if they were not slaveowners themselves ), individual presidential administrations were eve more lopsided in their appointment policies. Andrew Jackson, e.g., appointed 57% of his subordinates from the South.

In the 62 years between 1789 and 1850 slaveowners controlled the presidency 50 of those years, and only they served 2 terms. In the 1850s even the Northerners elected to the presidency were sympathetic to the South.

In addition, the Speakers of the House were Southerners for 51 of those years. During the same period, 18 of 31 Supreme Court justice were from the Old South, while the 2 most important Chief Justices were Southerners.

So slavery was important, John, just not in the way you posited.

Wild Bill:

Sorry for not getting back to you until now; I have been away and I had a few other contributors to address.

"My ole .44". Isn't that the same gun Gene Autry sang about when he was "back in the saddle again"? As you can see, my memories go back a long way.

Your distinction between slavery where it already existed and its expansion into the territories is a spurious one. You are into my territory: I have written and taught extensively about the causes of the war and therefore know that the underlying cause was slavery, both actual and threatened, and that this underlying cause had political, economic, social, cultural and moral dimensions. Its expansion cannot be separated from its Constitutional preservation and protection in the states where it already existed. Anti-slavery forces made no such distinction, except, in some cases, temporarily for tactical reasons.

Your description of the Slave Power and its pervasive and disproportionate influence on the government is essentially accurate and well known. Seward spoke about it at length in 1858, pointing out that 3.6% of the total population of the South (the slaveholding class) practically chose 30 of 62 members of the Senate, 90 of 235 members of the House and 105 of 295 electors of the President and Vice President. Edgerton, too, spoke about the phenomenon and acknowledged that the anti-slavery forces in Congress "deserved the burning taunt for (our) past subserviency" to the Slave Power. It was fear of the loss of this power that moved the Southern-controlled government, under Polk, to instigate the war with Mexico, i.e. for the express purpose of acquiring more territory, which, they believed, would enter the Union as slave states.

Again I say, read the ordinances of secession, the state declarations of their causes of secession and Stephens's Cornerstone Speech, wherein you will find nothing said about states rights, railroads, homesteading or tariffs, but only slavery, the rightness of it and the necessity for it in the Southern states, and the threat to it and, consequently, to the lifestyle, culture, prosperity, safety and purity of the white race, posed by the Republican Party and the election of Abraham Lincoln.

When facts are compelling and evidence overwhelming, it is time to man up to them and to put our biases, prejudices and self-interest aside. None of us should have the slightest hesitation about condemning what we did to Native Americans, a story well told by Helen Hunt Jackson (A Century of Dishonor), among others, nor should we hesitate to condemn human bondage and the misguided war that was fought to continue and expand it.

John