Nonviolence (14 page)

Garrison, the Lincoln supporter, had joined the establishment after a lifetime of resisting its trappings. Was this what Thoreau
meant when he wrote: “Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions?”

The Civil War was begun with the standard arguments. In the South, slave-owning aristocrats tried to convince poor farmers who never had and never would own a slave, who were lucky if they owned a workable plot of land, that they were fighting to preserve “our way of life” against the Yankees, a label that implied less than human status, who were menacing barbarians invading sacred lands. Soon the Union Army indeed did invade with a barbarity that would do much to confirm this line of reasoning. Northerners were fighting Southerners, who likewise had already been established in many of their own circles as less than human. Though the Union Army spent most of the war invading the South, Northerners were convinced that the war was justifiable as a defensive war because the South had fired the first shots at Fort Sumter.

There were those for whom fighting to free the slaves became a holy war, including free blacks and many formerly nonviolent abolitionists. But there were many for whom fighting and dying for what they termed “a bunch of niggers” was unacceptable. Even many of Lincoln's loyal supporters were not interested in ending slavery and tended to have a higher regard for slaveholders than they did for the generally disliked abolitionists. George Templeton Strong, a wealthy New York corporate lawyer who became an ardent Lincoln backer, wrote in his diary in 1850:

My creed on that question is: that slave holding is no sin. That the slaves of the Southern States are happier and better off than the niggers of the North, and are more kindly dealt with by their owners than servants are by Northern masters.

That the reasoning, the tone of feeling, the first principles, the practices, and the designs of Northern Abolitionists are very particularly false, foolish, wicked, and unchristian.

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. In the debut edition of
The Liberator,
in 1831, Garrison had attacked Congress for allowing slavery in the District of Columbia, writing, “That district is rotten with the plague, and stinks in the nostrils of the world … open to the daily inspection of foreign ambassadors.” In the spring of 1862 slavery was abolished in Washington, D.C., so that at least the Union's capital was no longer a slave zone.

Lincoln, in need of a crusading cause, said that he would free the slaves “if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and three other states would rise.” The Union included border states, such as Maryland, where slavery was practiced, and Lincoln worried about holding on to them. He backed a plan to buy slaves for $400 each and send them to a repatriating colony, in either Africa or Haiti.

Lincoln was looking for a half measure that would address the great cause but not offend its opponents. For this to work he believed he needed to announce it on the crest of a Union victory. In desperation he considered Antietam to be that victory. On one day, September 17, 1862, considered the bloodiest day of the Civil War, 23,000 men were killed or wounded. The casualties were almost evenly divided, with slightly heavier losses on the Union side. But Lee's advance had been stopped, and so the Union claimed it as a victory. Five days later Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a much misunderstood little document that reads: “All persons being held within any state, or any part of a state, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be, thence forth, and forever free.” Lincoln had only freed the slaves
that he could
not
free, the slaves living in Confederate-held territory. Not a single slave was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

After a war has spent lives, people invariably demand that it be for something. It had to be for more than holding the Union together. Soon after Lincoln's inauguration to a second term the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing slavery, was announced. After the war ended it was ratified by twenty-seven of the thirty-six states. Misssissippi was the only state to reject it and never reverse its decision.

Between 618,000 and 700,000 Americans, including 36,000 African-Americans, died in the Civil War, more than the total deaths from all other American wars combined. The $20 billion cost of the war was five times the total of government spending from its founding until 1861. One Confederate family, the Christians of Christianburg, Virginia, had eighteen family members killed. The Twenty-sixth North Carolina lost 714 of its 800 men at Gettysburg. The First Minnesota suffered an 82 percent casualty rate at Gettysburg. It was not unusual for a regiment to lose more than half its soldiers in a single battle—in a few cases in a matter of minutes.

The question is: Was this bloodbath necessary to free the slaves? Considering the fact that the war had not been fought for that purpose, it is hard not to wonder what could have been negotiated without warfare, if the will to end slavery had existed in the North. Most European countries had already negotiated the end of slavery and were sweetening with sugar beets and ignoring the anger of Caribbean planters. What is certain is that the great bloodbath in America freed the slaves in name only.

In May 1865, one month after the Civil War ended, the American Anti-Slavery Society met and lapsed pacifist William Lloyd Garrison faced a room of largely lapsed pacifists. Thinking, contrary to his lifelong beliefs, that violence had accomplished good work, he jubilantly announced that slavery had ended, their task was done, and he suggested that the organization disband. But Frederick Douglass insisted that the Southern black could not vote
and was not free. The majority, many of whom, not coincidentally, later moved on to the cause of women's right to vote, agreed with Douglass that without full rights of citizenship, blacks were still not free.

Because war had been the tool of emancipation, emancipation became the task of a hated occupying army. The Union army was the only guarantor of black rights and safety in the South. There is some question of how much enthusiasm the army brought to this task. Though most soldiers had never been interested in the cause of abolition, freeing slaves had been done enthusiastically because it was seen as a punitive measure against the South. In fact, one of Lincoln's arguments in favor of emancipation had been that it would hurt the Southern economy. But continued strife to gain the black man his rights was of little interest. Lincoln was dead and the new president, Andrew Johnson, was from a slave state, Tennessee. Johnson appointed proslavery governors to rebuild the conquered states, and these men formed governments that despite the Thirteenth Amendment were proslavery. The new legislatures of the Southern states passed laws to deprive African-Americans of rights and economic opportunities including “black codes,” laws under which a former slave could be arrested if unemployed and ordered to pay large fines. Former slaves who could not pay the fine could be hired out for labor until the fine was earned, making them, in effect, slaves again. Black children were forced to work as unpaid or barely paid apprentices. Blacks were barred from owning land.

By 1870, military rule ended and the Confederate states were back in the Union. Republican majorities in these states supported by black votes evaporated as blacks were deprived of their voting rights and the states fell under solid Democratic control. State governments in the one-party system were free to pass laws inhibiting black rights, and where they couldn't because it contradicted federal law, they could use force. Violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan made it extremely dangerous if not impossible for blacks to vote or attend schools.

In reality, the only right Southern blacks had gained was to go north, if they could get together the money, live in an urban slum,
and labor long hours at an underpaid, dangerous job created by the new industries that the Civil War had developed. With 700,000 dead and hundreds of thousands more maimed, the agenda of “freeing the slaves,” emancipating the African-American South, was deferred, left on a back burner for future generations in another century. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the monument to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., before an unprecedented rally of hundreds of thousands and promised the black people of America that someday in the future they would see the fulfillment of the words of the old spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!”

Someday, but a century after the great bloodletting it still had not happened.

VIII

Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence, we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.

—WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON,

Declaration of Sentiments adopted by the Peace Convention of Boston, 1838

F
or the Paris World's Fair of 1867 a group of notable writers including Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Victor Hugo put together a book for which Victor Hugo wrote the introduction. They sent a copy to the National Library in Paris, which they said would one day be called the Library of the United States of Europe. Hugo and the others, like numerous European intellectuals of the time, had looked at their recent history of constant warfare and concluded the problem lay in the existence of the nation-state. They reasoned that if there were no countries there would be no wars. They imagined a future in which Europe would be at peace because it would no longer have nations.

The Hugo piece begins:

In the twentieth century there will be an extraordinary country. This will be a large country but that will not keep it from being free. It will be illustrious, wealthy, thoughtful, pacifist, cordial to the rest of humanity. It will have the gentle gravity of an elder. It will be bemused by the glory of conical projectiles and will find it hard to understand the difference between an army general and a butcher; the royal purple of one not seeming very different from the red of the other. A battle between Italians and Germans, between the English and the Russians, between the Prussians and the French—this will seem to it as a fight between Picts and Bourgognes might seem to us. It will consider the wasting of human blood pointless.