The Lincoln Fable, Pt 2

by Clyde Wilson

I think Lincoln’s crackpot realism caught up with him in the secession crisis. He really thought, and his party certainly preached to the Northern public, that Southerners were not serious about secession. He thought they were merely using maneuver and rhetoric for advantage, which was his own method and his only conception of politics. He did not understand that Southern leaders came from an older world in which a man said what he meant and meant what he said. Lincoln believed that firmness and perhaps a little show of force would bring the South to accept what he regarded as realism and after awhile buckle under to the fait accompli. Refusing any sort of negotiation, he maneuvered for an excuse for force. When he got Fort Sumter he called for troops. The call for troops immediately more than doubled the population and resources of the Confederacy, put the border states into bloody play, and guaranteed a loing and horrible war. One must conclude that this great wise and all-seeing statesman either wanted the war or else he made the most terrible miscalculation in American history.

see also his essay on General Lee (archives at lewrockwell.com)