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The Moral Underpinning of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Bruce Kauffmann

The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, which centered on the future of slavery in America, began this week (Aug. 21) in 1858. In debating Stephen Douglas, the incumbent U.S. senator from Illinois, Abe Lincoln hoped to unseat him in the upcoming Illinois senatorial election, but Lincoln also had a larger purpose in debating Douglas. He wanted to remind the citizens of Illinois, and the country (the debates received national press coverage), that America was losing its moral bearings.

It was this latter fear that prompted Lincoln to return to politics; in the mid-1850s he had been practicing law. What specifically drew Lincoln back to the political arena was passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and its promotion of the “popular sovereignty” concept as a way for people in the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide, upon entering the Union, whether they would be slave states or free states.

In fact, Douglas was the original champion of popular sovereignty, which he saw as a practical compromise between abolitionists who wanted slavery banned in all future states, and pro-slavery interests, which wanted slavery allowed in all future states. With popular sovereignty the residents in Kansas and Nebraska — and the people in any future territories seeking to become states — would decide the issue for themselves through the democratic process.

But to Lincoln popular sovereignty violated the American creed. Because the Declaration of Independence said that all men are created equal, no man can govern another man without that man’s consent. That was the very essence of “self-government,” meaning that self-government and slavery, and by extension popular sovereignty when it chose to allow slavery, were incompatible.

Further, Lincoln worried that the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s notion of popular sovereignty was especially insidious because it was becoming popular. Whereas most slavery issues had resulted in a clear divide between pro- and anti-slavery forces — between North and South — popular sovereignty had broad appeal among the populace, including northerners, because it seemed to be a form of self-government. In each territory the people themselves got to decide the issue through a vote in a popular plebiscite or some other democratic means. In other words, public opinion would be the ultimate decider, and what could be more democratic than that?

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Montgomery Meigs Establishes Our National Cemetery

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Bruce Kauffmann

This week (June 15) in 1864, Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs, who had been appointed Quartermaster General of the Union Army in 1861, established Arlington House, the former home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, as a cemetery for the Union’s soldiers. Today Arlington National Cemetery is America’s national military burial ground.

Montgomery Meigs was one of the true unsung heroes of the Civil War. As Quartermaster General he was charged with ensuring that military supplies — food, clothing, munitions, weapons — were effectively delivered to the Union armies in the field. It was a huge undertaking, involving more than 130,000 employees, yet Meigs did a first-rate job. Not only did he establish a transport system that was highly efficient, but he was also scrupulously honest. By war’s end Meigs’s department had spent nearly half a billion dollars, yet a later congressional audit found not one penny unaccounted for in any contract Meigs authorized.

And then in 1864 Meigs was charged with finding a new site for a military cemetery because — in a war that eventually resulted in 620,000 dead soldiers on both sides — all the nearby Union military cemeteries were full.

Meigs’s gaze soon fell on Arlington House, which the Lee family had evacuated when the war began because it was located in Union-held territory near the federal capital, Washington, D.C. Although a native of Georgia, one of the first states to join the Confederacy, Meigs was a loyal Unionist who despised all southerners who had chosen secession. That meant Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most celebrated soldier, was high on Meigs’s hate list. So in May of 1864 Meigs ordered that Union soldiers be buried in graves that would eventually surround Lee’s home. By the time Arlington House was officially designated a military cemetery in June, more than 2,500 soldiers were buried on its grounds.

That number would increase exponentially, and by 1865 it became obvious that regardless of the war’s aftermath, disinterment of that many soldiers was politically (and morally) impossible, meaning Robert E. Lee and his family could never again call Arlington House home — which had been Meigs’s intent all along. Indeed, although Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, later successfully sued the federal government to return Arlington House to the Lee family, he quickly realized they could never again live there, so he sold it back to the government for a paltry $150,000.

As a postscript, in October of 1864, Meigs’s own son John, then a 1^st Lieutenant in the Union Army, was killed in battle near Swift Run Gap, Virginia. John too was subsequently buried in the grounds of Arlington House. To be specific, he was buried in Mrs. Robert E. Lee’s rose garden.

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The Political Ramifications of the Dred Scott Decision

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Bruce Kauffmann

I have written before about the infamous Dred Scott decision, which the Supreme Court handed down this week (March 6) in 1857. In that case the slave Dred Scott sued for his freedom, arguing that because his travels with his owner took him into free territories where slavery was banned, legally he was a free man. The Supreme Court, as we know, ruled otherwise. In this lesson I want to review the case in a larger context because the political ramifications of Dred Scott are virtually unequalled in our history.

In its decision, the court ruled that because Dred Scott was originally a slave, he was not a U.S. citizen, and therefore had no standing in a federal court, meaning he couldn’t sue in a federal court, meaning he remained a slave.

Had the court left it there, sticking with the technical and arguably (at the time) correct point that Scott’s lack of citizenship undermined his case, Dred Scott would never have achieved its notoriety. But the court went further, rendering the sweeping opinion that even if Scott could sue in a federal court he would have lost because the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which forbade slavery’s expansion into all new territories north of Missouri’s southern border (resulting in the free territories that Scott based his lawsuit on) was unconstitutional. Slaves were property, the court ruled, and under the Constitution Congress had no power to forbid citizens from taking their property anywhere they wanted.

Politically, the decision galvanized northerners, who had long complained about the Constitution’s “Three-fifths Clause,” in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a white person when deciding a state’s population. Since a state’s population also determined the number of representatives a state sent to Congress, southern states had dominated both Congress and the presidency. In Dred Scott’s wake, northerners, especially northern Republicans, concluded that southern Democrats now also controlled the Supreme Court.

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