The Brits critized him for denying autonomy to the South right after the colonists themselves fought for autonomy from England. Europe was worried about the cotton trade. And everybody wondered how the brutish, vulgar Americans could ever build a country after their “unecessary” and bloody war.

I began to wonder if Booth was egged on by this atmosphere and what this portends in today’s poisoned atmosphere.

Of course, with any politician who intends to win, you have to take his public statements as likely trimmed to the tenor of voters’ opinions. You didn’t need a Gallup back then to know what most white Northerners thought about race.

I think Lincoln personally was a little more of a slavery opponent than he let on, but not much more. Anyway, he was a strict colonizationist, like his mentor, Clay: free them, and send them all to Haiti or Africa or Yucatan.

[See Russell for what those Union soldiers were doing on the way to Bull Run. They hardly deserve the name “soldiers” at that point]

It was his willingness to keep his back straight and his determination unbent through the most horrible of times–and whatever his flaws, to know in the end what the right thing to do was.

Uhm, no. This was a military tactic, not a moral cause per se. There were slaveholders among those who fought for the Union and THOSE slaves were not freed, and indeed some mass-emancipations in the early parts of the war were repudiated by Mr. Lincoln. Still, it was often a smart practice to sow dissent with Johnny Reb to free some slaves and cause some fear and chaos in so doing.

But recall that the vast majority of those who fought for the South held no slaves, never held slaves, while many who fought for the North either had little care for the slaves or owned them themselves.

It was an issue. It was the biggest lightning-rod issue. But Lincoln himself denied that it was ever his explicit reason for fighting the conflict, and said that were the South to put down their arms they could keep their slaves…

…until late in the conflict, that is.

Bravo.

“Having it both ways” is the operating mode of true professional politicians, anyway. The stakes involved in 1861 were different – and horrible – but Lincoln’s tactics were not too terribly removed in spirit from the gyrations any representative or senator will attempt if they really desire something. Or corporate lawyer or accountant, as far as that goes.

I don’t have my Whitman bio (The Prairie Years/The War Years) to hand, but in it Lincoln’s position on slavery and the black man was described as accepting that it was a fundamental injustice when viewed against the constitutional principle of “all men are created equal”. He compartmentalized the fact, like any practical politician would in his time.

Like Bush in 2001, Lincoln in 1861 faced a legal fog in defining his enemy, and delineating his war. Even among many people in the North, the power of a state to secede from the union was held to be a legal right. The Constitution, as read by many, was seen as silent, or ambiguous, on the issue. A range of positions could be defended. Buchanan’s attorney general, for instance, had investigated the laws and concluded that, while the secession was not legal, the government had no authority to stop it.

Lincoln’s official position was that the Confederacy did not exist and that he was suppressing an internal rebellion. Yet in practice, he treated the South as a sovereign power. He blockaded its coast. His administration acknowledged its sea-rovers as privateers and not as pirates. When rebels invaded the North and were captured at Gettysburg they were treated as POWs, not as traitors to be hanged for treason, because they were commanded by officers holding commissions from the Confederate government.

In fact, Lincoln made every attempt to have it both ways, because his powers, as president, were limited differently in each case. Whichever situation gave him what he needed, that is how he painted the war/rebellion in that case.

He did so to recruit and maintain a large standing army to fight a modern war, and in doing so he broke the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, which was structured to provide temporary, minute-man armies (in a system little changed since King Alfred’s aldormen led the Anglo-Saxon fyrd to repel Viking marauders).

He did so in sweeping aside civil rights, including habeas corpus, and filling Northern jails with men never charged with any crime. He did so in full knowledge that his nation was full of dissent, and his agents couldn’t, or didn’t care to, distinguish honest loyal opposition from active treason.

Lincoln had at his back a Congress driven by his allies. And he managed to skillfully avoid the courts. When he couldn’t avoid them, he defied them. In the Merryman case in 1861, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney denounced the notion of arbitrary military arrest and defended civil liberties, and pointed out that only Congress had the right to suspend habeas corpus. And he admitted he could do nothing to enforce his ruling in the face of a military force “too strong for me to overcome.” Taney wrote as defiantly as any anti-Bush zealot today. And the cause for his wrath was more immediate and dangerous than the Patriot Act:

“I can only say that if the authority under which the constitution has confided to the judicial department and judicial officers, may thus, upon any pretext or under any circumstances, be usurped by the military power, at its discretion, the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.”

Lincoln wrote out a standing order for Taney’s arrest, but it was never served. But Merryman set the tone and left it to the justices to decide whether to provoke fights, legitimate or not, that they had no power to win.

Lincoln got a break when an important case came to Justice James M. Wayne, who was perhaps the staunchest war supporter on the Court. In U.S. v. Colonel Gorman Wayne upheld Lincoln’s extra-legal (at best) recruiting drive in 1861 and its retroactive endorsement by Congress. “It is my opinion,” Wayne ruled, “that Congress has constitutional power to legalize and confirm executive acts, proclamations, and orders done for the public good, although they were not, when done, authorized by any existing laws.”

Even some who supported the Northern cause blanched at this notion, but it was in keeping with the general spirit of the administration and the pro-war press, which was to “preserve the union at all costs.”

Lincoln used his presidency to pack the Supreme Court with justices who would be more sympathetic to his purposes. Three of five justices who sustained the administration in the important Prize case of 1863 were new Lincoln appointments.

But the full question of whether the Constitution gave the president a special power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during wartime never got to the Court. In large part that’s because the administration made sure it didn’t. It had a valid fear that the Court would rule against there being such a power under the Constitution, and such a ruling would undermine the war effort. On the other hand, by keeping the matter away from the Court, the administration could largely accomplish its policy.

Opposition, especially in the press, clamored for a test case to settle whether the arbitrary arrests were legal. Secretary of War Stanton thought it would be wise to do so, too, but Attorney General Bates talked him out of it. In a letter of Jan. 31, 1863, Bates wrote to Stanton that a Supreme Court decision against the habeas corpus policy “would inflict upon the Administration a serious injury,” and would do more good to the rebels “than the worst defeat our armies have yet sustained.”

Only after victory was secure, and only gradually and tentatively at first, did the Supreme Court begin to put the nation back on a Constitutional basis, which Lincoln and the Radicals in Congress had disrupted. Both Lincoln and Taney were dead by this time.

Lincoln had done what was necessary to his purpose, which he saw as saving America’s future, and he let the lawmakers catch up as they would. Or he left it to the courts to undo the changes long after they ceased to be necessary. Some of them were never undone, and America after 1865 was never again ruled by the government that had been created in 1787.

History forgives him these transgressions (though they are more bitterly remembered in the South) because the war he led America into had a great (if unintended) result of freeing slaves. It gave them an imperfect freedom, to be sure. The backlash brought explosive violence into their lives. And real civil rights didn’t come their way for another century.

Yet however imperfectly he did it, Lincoln defeated slavery — an institution that had enjoyed the protection and support of the U.S. government until then. (Even so radical an anti-South man as Thad Stevens once took a case on behalf of a master reclaiming his runaway slave.) And history gives him that honor and Americans rank him among their greatest presidents.