Today is “President’s Day”, a meaningless holiday created by our stupid lords in Congress in order to denigrate George Washington by devaluing the holiday celebrating his birth, February 22nd, by applying that holiday to all presidents, from great to the trashy. This fake holiday also acted to devalue any remembrance of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th, as it forced many states that used to celebrate that holiday separately to fold that celebration into today as well.

I don’t accept Congress’s stupid holiday. Instead, I separately try each year to honor both Washington and Lincoln on their actual birthdays, because without these great men the nation of my birth would never have become the great and free and prosperous place it became.

In honor of Lincoln today, I thought I’d post a short review of Russell McClintock’s fine 2008 history, Lincoln and the Decision for War. McClintock took a decidedly different look at the Civil War by focusing not on larger events, but specifically at the time period between the election of Lincoln on November 6, 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861.

What many forget with the passage of time is that the Civil War did not start instantly with Lincoln’s victory. For six months furious negotiations took place between politicians from the North and South, with Northern politicians desperately trying to somehow convince the southern states not to secede from the Union. McClintock details those negotiations, including Lincoln’s own efforts in numerous ways to placate the most radical southern states.

You see, as much as Lincoln opposed slavery — and he truly did — he was far more committed to the American Constitution and the nation it had created. If he had to let the issue of slavery take a back burner to saving the Union, he was quite content to do so. More important, as McClintock shows, if the southern states hadn’t seceded and had stayed part of the Union, their power block in Congress would have been strong enough to block any anti-slavery action by Lincoln anyway. He really didn’t have sufficient political power in Congress to change anything.

For the South, none of these actual facts about Lincoln mattered. The South had developed Lincoln Derangement Syndrome, and was not going to allow itself to be ruled by Lincoln no matter what, even if that rule was weak and ineffectual. As noted by the Ohio’s radical anti-slavery senator Ben Wade in a speech on the Senate floor on December 17, 1860:

You [the South] intend either to rule or ruin this government. That is what your complaint comes to; nothing else.

As Wade noted, Lincoln had been fairly elected, by law, and this is what the South did not like. It was demanding some compromises of power to hold them within the Union, even though it had lost the election.

Sir, it would be humiliating and dishonorable to us if were to listen to a compromise by which he who has the verdict of the people in his pocket.

McClintock’s book makes very clear who wanted war, and who didn’t. The South lusted for it, led by its most radical state of South Carolina where Fort Sumter was located. The Northern states wanted to limit slavery, but were not initially willing to go to war to do so.

Even in 1860, few Northerners proposed to interfere with slavery in the Southern states. The chief reason for this was the same imperative that dictated their political response to apparent Southern aggression: their firm commitment to the system of government created by the Founders. To them, as we shall see, that system was institutionalized by the Constitution and embodied in the Union. Specifically, the Constitution permitted neither the general government nor the free states to interfere in the domestic affairs of the slave states, and even those who felt an ethical or moral aversion to slavery believed the Union would be threatened by antislavery agitation.

So for six months the two sides negotiated, to no end. The South simply was not going to accept the legal results of the 1860 election. South Carolina declared its secession in December and placed Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor under siege. When Lincoln finally attempted to resupply the fort in April, after months of dithering and fruitless negotiations, South Carolina forces fired on the fort and the supply ships, capturing it.

Lincoln at this time wasn’t trying to stop South Carolina from seceding. He merely was acting to protect what was clearly federal property, the fort itself that the federal troops stationed there.

The attack however galvanized the North, as Lincoln knew it would. While beforehand the public had been reluctant to fight, the attack convinced them that to save the Union and the Constitution and its grand experiment in self-government, they were now forced to fight. And so the war started.

The bottom line remains however: The South wanted to keep slavery, an institution that allowed some men to own others. For those who lust power, such an institution is addictive in the extreme. For the South, the addiction was so strong they were glad to go to war to keep that addiction supplied.

The North was for freedom and the rule of law. The Constitution as they understood it allowed the South to keep its slaves, but it also allowed them the right to resist the spread of that peculiar institution. If the South wanted to keep its slaves the North was willing to tolerate that, even if it hated the idea. “Let’s find a way to live together, without fighting!”

When the South would not obey the law, however, and committed violence against the legal election results, then the North finally rose up to fight. It did so reluctantly, but when it finally did it did so with righteous anger.

My readers will of course notice some interesting parallels to our own time. The Democratic Party and its supporters today cannot accept the fact that they lost the last election. Donald Trump and the Republicans won, and Trump did so under a platform to end illegal immigration and to deport the millions of illegals who were allowed to come here during Biden’s administration. His platform also included promises to shrink the federal workforce, reduce regulation, and to eliminate raced-based hiring.

Trump is doing exactly what he promised during his 2024 campaign. The country apparently approved, because they voted for these promises quite handily.

Gadsden Flag – a symbol of unbowing defiance to oppression

And the Democrats today are acting exactly as the southern Democrats did in 1860s, refusing to accept their defeat, Trump’s victory, and more important, the will of the people. To the Democrats, maintaining their grip on power is all that matters, and if it requires them to throw out the Constitution and the rule of law to keep it, so be it.

As always, it is the power-hungry who lust for war. And the civilized struggle to avoid it, if at all possible, and only as a last resort finally rise up for battle.

We can only pray that the civilized today will have the same will to fight as freedom-loving Americans in the North did in 1860. Because I think it will be required of them.