At a recent campaign stop in Iowa, Donald Trump made
some interesting comments:
“The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” Trump
said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have
been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that.
All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”
Trump
went on to describe the Civil War as “vicious” and suggested that “Abraham
Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who
Abraham Lincoln was.” Trump says Civil War ‘could have been negotiated.’ Historians disagree. - TheWashington Post
Ambrose Bierce, who served as an officer in the Union Army wrote that warfare “untied with the teeth a political knot which would not yield to the tongue.” Contrary to Trump's assertion, the political knot that led to the Civil War could not be untied with the tongue.
The question of whether to negotiate was settled in the election of
1864. George McClellan ran against Lincoln on a ticket which included
negotiating an end to the war. Lincoln’s re-election, which was aided by Union
soldiers returning home on furlough to vote, demonstrated that negotiating a
compromise wasn’t favored by either side, regardless of what Lincoln did.
A negotiated settlement would have been near impossible for the
following reasons:
The Southern leadership (aka the slave-owning planter class) had
been losing influence in national politics for years. The population boom in
the North was beginning to overpower the Southern leadership in the House of
Representatives. The addition of states in areas incompatible with slavery
threatened to erode the Southern leadership’s influence in the Senate.
The Southern leadership decided that if their economy was to survive,
it had to expand its influence or withdraw from the Union. The Southern
leadership saw the election of Abraham Lincoln as a sign that its national
influence was going to continue to wane; therefore, they seceded.
At the outset of the war, Lincoln’s stated aim was to preserve the
Union, not abolish slavery. His views changed over the course of the war. He
came to the conclusion that the only way to preserve the Union was to abolish slavery.
Shortly before the publication of his Emancipation Proclamation Horace Greeley,
the publisher of The New York Tribune, complained that Lincoln had no
real policy for the Civil War.
Lincoln replied with a letter to The New York Tribune in
which he said: “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under
the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer
the Union will be ‘the Union as it was.’ If there were those who would not save
the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with
them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the
same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in
this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 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 save
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
the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help
to save the Union.”
After Lincoln’s death, Greeley wrote that he though Lincoln’s letter was intended to prepare the public for his revised war aim—to free the slaves. Lincoln had decided that he could not preserve the Union by compromising on the issue of slavery with the Southern leadership. Any compromise acceptable to the North would continue the erosion of the Southern leadership’s influence in national politics through population growth in the North and the addition of new Free States, and the Southern leadership saw such erosion as leading to the inevitable destruction of their economy and the ruin of the planter class.
