Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Author:Mark Kurlansky [Kurlansky, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307497109
Amazon: B0017SWRTQ
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 2004-01-21T08:00:00+00:00

In view of the strong antiabolitionist feelings throughout the country, the Democrats tried to tar the Republicans with abolitionism, and this made Lincoln and his party defensive on the slave question in ways that are no longer remembered today. The John Brown Harpers Ferry raid, coming just before the 1860 election year, was particularly awkward. Many tried to say Lincoln and the Republicans were behind the raid. George Templeton Strong began to rethink his Republican leanings. In September 1860, less than two months before the election, he noted in his diary: “I do not like the tone of the Republican papers and party in regard to the John Brown business last fall, and I do not think rail-splitting in early life a guarantee of fitness for the presidency.”

During the campaign Lincoln was forced to repeatedly deny ties to John Brown and abolitionism and to assert that his position was not to question slavery in states where it already existed. He also maintained that there was no need to worry about a slave insurrection since the slaves lacked the prerequisite means of communicating between plantations and too many of them were happy with their kindly Southern masters. The happy slave was a persistent fantasy in the North that abolitionists such as Lydia Maria Child worked hard to dispel.

Lincoln knew that dying to free black people was not a sellable idea. The Union army would sometimes return escaped slaves to their masters, until the Republican-controlled Congress made it illegal to do so in March 1862. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” Lincoln said, “and is not either to save or destroy slavery…. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. 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.”

Nor were most Southerners fighting for slavery, an institution with which few of them had any connection. They were fighting to drive out the invader. This worked for a while, though the South, too, had its war resisters and even its abolitionists. A small group of Southern Quakers in eastern Tennessee, who were both, spent a substantial part of the war in a large cave, its opening concealed by brush. War resisters in the Confederacy were sometimes subjected to beatings, repeated bayonet stabbing, being hung by the thumbs, and other brutalities for refusing to help fend off the savage invader. But by the beginning of 1865 the rate of desertion in the Confederacy was several hundred a day and Lee could barely keep an army together.

The first three years of the war, however, went very badly for the North, far worse than anyone had expected, and the casualties on both sides were horrific. By January 1863 about two hundred men a day were deserting the Army of the Potomac, and one in four soldiers was listed as absent without leave. Abolitionists constantly pressured the Republican Party on slavery.

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