When Lincoln Changed the War’s Pretext from “A Question Upon Slavery”

State Dept. Documents Prove Abolition Neither the Aim Nor the Cause of the Conflict

On April 1, 1861, Secretary of State William H. Seward sent President Abraham Lincoln a memorandum entitled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration.”

“My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one,” Seward wrote, “namely that we must Change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion.

In other words, from what would be regarded as a Party question to one of Patriotism or Union

The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter, although not in fact a slavery, or a party question is so regarded…

I would therefore terminate it as a safe means for changing the issue.”

Lincoln replied that same day:  “I do not perceive how the re-inforcement of Fort Sumpter [sic] would be done on a slavery, or party issue”.  So they changed it.

Well, unquestionably, if you can’t justify your war on the pretext of slavery, then slavery is not the reason for your war.  If you can change the pretext for your war from slavery to something else, then, with double certainty, slavery isn’t the reason for your war and never was.

That very particular and very explicit correspondence has always been plainly on the record — Robert Todd Lincoln spared the original from the fires of his purges, and it’s still in the Library of Congress, believe it or not.  Its text is given in Roy P. Basler’s standard Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers 1955), volume 4, pages 316-318, and of course in the online presentation at https:quod.lib.umich.edullincoln.  But Lincoln Studiers and qualified historians alike have uniformly ignored it.

Why?  Well, they’ve ignored everybody else, too, even the articles of secession in which the seceding states listed the long train of abuses prompting their move, slavery being only one among many, and not even mentioned in more than a few of them.  If you read them for yourself and know your history you’ll see that those abuses were nothing new.  The South’s complaints about union with the North ran back to the ratification of the Constitution and really to the landing of the Arbella fleet at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1630, as every record across those centuries confirms.

On the other side of it, abolition was never popular in the North.  Slaves were integral to the labor force of every state, usually under color of an indenture or of a lease from an owner across the state line of a slaveholding state.  Unskilled workers, barbers, blacksmiths, butlers, chefs, farriers, field workers, nannies, shop clerks, teamsters, waiters —  slaves served in every imaginable line of work, South and North alike.

In fact the whole Yankee economy depended upon slave labor for raw materials animal, mineral, and vegetable alike.  Almost all of America’s food had to be produced in the sunny South and shipped to the stern and rock-bound North, which was utterly unable to feed its own population.  Opposing slavery then was like opposing electricity today, or computers.  Nobody would dream of crippling the economy that way, and no Abolitionist could get himself elected to anything.  Seward, you know, was passed over for the Republicans’ nomination in 1860 because he was too prominently on the record as opposing slavery.  His family mansion in New York was staffed almost entirely by slaves, of course, but he was prominently on the record as opposing slavery.

Lincoln, by contrast, consistently promised to preserve slavery, even in his most familiar documents, also strangely overlooked by the pundits of Lincoln Studies.  There, too, the most ample evidence to the contrary of their view has all the while existed and been open to their inspection.

Of course you know that for his First Inaugural Address to be delivered on March 4, 1861, just a few weeks after they decided to change the pretext, Seward and Lincoln were sure to include the flat statement, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.  I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”  By the time he’d been nominated, he averred, “I had made this and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them.”

Even in the fury of the War a year later he asserted again in his famous letter to Horace Greeley that “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”  In these — and many similar declarations never recanted — the Emancipator conformed exactly to the Party’s decision to change the pretext and affirmed again that the War was never about slavery.  Which, again, is indisputable from the very fact that the Party decided to change that pretext to something that, although equally untrue, they thought more convincing to their constituents.

The Emancipation Proclamation, of course, was written very precisely to free nobody and let Northerners like Seward keep their slaves.  That plain meaning, too, is somehow overlooked by Lincolnolators, but it was glaringly obvious to the British and French whom it was intended to turn away from recognition of the Confederacy.  The Thirteenth Amendment was pushed through by Lincoln’s political opponents, the Radicals led by James Mitchell Ashley and Thaddeus Stevens, and ratified only after the War had removed Southerners and the assassination had removed Lincoln.  Even then it met serious opposition across the Northern states.

So, as Jefferson Davis explained in his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, “slavery was the lightning, but it was not the storm.”  Or, to quote another unimpeachable authority often cited in justification of the War, “What further need have we of witnesses?  Behold, now ye have heard.”

Kevin Orlin Johnson

Kevin Orlin Johnson holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the History of Architecture, a Master’s degree in Art History, and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History; he has also fulfilled the requirements for a Bachelor’s degree in History. His publications in his principal field, on topics as varied as Louis XIV’s first designs for Versailles or the design of the Chapel of the Most Holy Shroud in Turin, are considered definitive by many scholars here and abroad. He is the author of The Lincolns in the White House (Pangaeus Press, 2022)

View all posts