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Abraham Lincoln's War For The Union Saved (Classical) Liberalism

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“All republicans throughout the world have their eyes fixed upon us… Our success is the foundation of all their hopes.”

As Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) spoke those words in March of 1848, Europe was consumed by revolutions. French liberals had deposed King Louis-Philippe in February. In Vienna, popular uprisings forced Austrian autocrats, including the

Tim Reuter Contributor

I write about books, economics, foreign policy, and history.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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reactionary Prince Klemens von Metternich, into exile. Elsewhere, Italian unification gained traction despite the opposition of Pope Pius IX. It seemed to many Americans that liberalism had finally taken root in the Old World.

Thirteen years later, liberalism was close to death. Suppressed by autocratic rulers at home, European liberals could no longer look across the Atlantic Ocean for inspiration. Aristocrats shrieked with glee as seven southern states seceded from the Union in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. A high official of the Second French Empire told one American in March of 1861, “No Republic ever stood so long, and never will. Self-government is a Utopia, Sir; you must have a strong Government as the only condition of a long existence.”

It is a testament to how thoroughly classical liberalism has swept the world that such an assertion is hard to fathom today. Indeed, liberalism’s victory has produced a quirk in liberal thought. Some American libertarians, such as Judge Andrew Napolitano, believe the Civil War so reoriented the U.S. away from classical liberalism that a peaceful separation of the North and South was desirable.

In The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War, Don Doyle demolishes such a baseless claim. He places the Civil War in an international context by chronicling the diplomatic battles fought between the Union and the Confederacy in Europe. In doing so, he reaches an illuminating conclusion: The Civil War was not just a “brother’s war” over the fate of the Union and slavery. The “American Question” preoccupied Europeans given what its resolution meant for liberty, particularly political

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freedom, in the Old World. “Conservatives welcomed the American secession crisis, seeing it as the coup de grace to the republican experiment in both hemispheres.” Liberals believed the war was “the crucial trial” for “popular government” at home and abroad.

That trial began under foreboding circumstances in the spring of 1861. With few exceptions, autocrats ruled Europe. Worse, President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward faced considerable hostility from Europe’s two ostensibly liberal nations, Great Britain and France.

Lord Palmerston, Britain’s septuagenarian prime minster and head of the new Liberal Party, had been involved in British politics since 1809. He was also an aristocrat and a jingoist who had regularly intervened in foreign conflicts throughout his career. His hatred for democracy was both legendary and longstanding. (As a young child on vacation with his parents in France, he observed revolutionary chaos in 1792). Of the Union’s struggles, he wrote to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell that it “shows that Power in the Hands of the Masses throws the Scum of the Community to the surface.”

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte played the jackal to the British Lion. Elected President of the French Second Republic in 1848, he was not content with serving one four-year term. A coup on December 2, 1851 helped him consolidate power before he crowned himself Emperor Napoleon III a year later. His quest for imperial glory soon took several strange turns. France fought alongside Britain against Russia in the Crimean War, aided Italian nationalists against the Austrian Empire, and invaded Indochina before the American Civil War. With the U.S. torn apart, the emperor launched his “Grand Design.” France would check Anglo-Saxon expansion by uniting the fledgling nations of the Americas into a “Latin Empire” ruled by Catholic European monarchs. To that end, the

Confederacy would serve as a useful buffer state.

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Pro-Confederate sympathies ran deep among Europe’s ruling classes. A wave of repression gripped the continent after the failure of the revolutions of 1848. Revolutionaries who were not captured or killed went into exile, primarily in America. The countrymen of the “Forty-Eighters” arguably had it worse. They might have held liberal




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opinions, but were muzzled by government censors. This disconnect between public opinion in Europe and the inclinations of European policymakers would prove important as the Confederacy lobbied for recognition as a sovereign state.

Diplomatic recognition was not a trivial matter. Recognition brought with it the right to negotiate treaties, form commercial and military alliances, and assume international loans. If Britain or France recognized the Confederacy, other states were likely to follow. After that point, the Union would come under immense pressure to end its blockade of Confederate ports or the war, probably both. “Recognition, in other words, quite likely meant independence for the South.”

By a quirk of fate, the Confederacy got to make its case to Europe before Lincoln was inaugurated in early March of 1861. Southerners framed secession in conservative terms. They “insisted they were merely withdrawing from the existing ‘compact of states’” as opposed to fomenting revolution. (Ironically, delegates gathered at a constitutional convention in Montgomery, AL on February 4 in order to create a “permanent federal government”). The new government echoed the secessionists’ conservatism in its foreign policy. Confederate diplomats were instructed to emphasize the “right of self-determination” and free trade to European governments.

Liberal rhetoric aside, the Confederacy suffered from two major disadvantages. First, its foundation upon slavery, the “cornerstone” as Vice President Alexander Stephens called it, did not endear the new nation to ordinary Europeans. Second, Confederate trade policy aggravated European governments. Cotton accounted for two-thirds of U.S. exports in 1860, most

















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of which went to British textile mills. But rather than offer generous trade deals in exchange for recognition, as was proposed by future Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, President Jefferson Davis ordered an embargo. He believed a cessation of cotton exports would coerce British and/or French intervention in the war.

The Union initially failed to take advantage of the Confederacy’s twin weaknesses. Although Seward repeatedly threatened war with any nation that recognized the Confederate States of America, he urged Lincoln to de-legitimize the C.S.A. to European policymakers. To that point, Lincoln’s diplomats stressed the preservation of the Union. Foreign intervention would legitimize the act of violating the sovereignty of any nation coping with a separatist rebellion. (This argument was partly aimed at Britain given its existence as an amalgamation of England, Scotland, and Wales).

Why Lincoln and Seward stressed preserving the Union instead of destroying slavery in 1861-1862 is complicated. Domestic considerations, namely keeping the Border States in the Union, weighed heavily on Lincoln’s mind. Seward had a related fear; a war for emancipation would unleash racial mayhem in the South. (Fears of a racial conflagration were encapsulated by references to the horrors of “Saint-Domingue”, now known as Haiti). But, the most salient factor was the recognition question. Seward did not believe those most sympathetic to abolishing slavery, ordinary Europeans, were the foreign audience that mattered.

Seward was not wrong to think that way. Ominous signs emanated from Europe in the first year of the war. The Monroe Doctrine became a dead letter on March 18 as Spain recolonized the Dominican Republic. On May 13, Britain extended “belligerent rights” to the Confederacy. On October 31, Britain, France, and Spain signed the Tripartite Pact and prepared to punish Mexico for its sovereign default. On November 7, a Union captain created an international incident when he seized two Confederate diplomats, John Slidell and James Mason, off of a British warship (Trent). By the time war fever in

Britain had passed in early January of 1862, a French invasion force had landed in Mexico.

Yet, the Union did not lack friends abroad. Immigrants, or what Confederates called the “dregs of Europe”, helped bolster Union ranks in its war of attrition. European liberals discreetly lent their pens in support of the Union’s cause, none more so than Giuseppe Garibaldi. Italy’s most famous liberal enjoyed world renown for his military exploits in Europe and South America. The “Hero of Two Worlds” repeatedly voiced his support for the Union in its war against “traffickers in human flesh.”

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However, European liberals did not understand why Lincoln refused to make the war one for abolition. When offered a command in the Union Army in August of 1861, Garibaldi reacted with disbelief to the claim that Lincoln had no legal authority to abolish slavery. He turned down a commission to fight in an “intestine war” over territory “in which




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the world at large could have little interest or sympathy.” A month later, U.S. Minister to Spain Carl Schurz made a similar point in a letter to Seward.

By the spring of 1862, Lincoln, over Seward’s objections, was coming around to Schurz’s point of view. He told Schurz in a private meeting: “I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it became clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.” Seward strenuously objected. He feared that European governments would regard a war for emancipation as an act of desperation and thus make intervention more likely.

What Lincoln and Seward did not know is that plans for intervention were afoot after a year of bloody stalemate. Lord Palmerston had decided to craft a plan where Britain, France, and Russia would offer mediation. Although the Union would reject the offer, a united European front would make recognition of the Confederacy easier. Lord Russell concurred with Palmerston’s plan after the Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run on August 28-30. He wrote that should the Union reject mediation, “we [Britain] ought ourselves to recognize the Southern States as an independent State.”

“ It is my profound conviction that as soon as the war becomes distinctly one for and against slavery, public opinion [in Europe] will be so strongly, so overwhelmingly in our favor, that in spite of commercial interest or secret spites no European Government will dare to place itself, by declaration or act, upon the side of a universally condemned institution. Our enemies know that well, and we may learn from them.

















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France would invariably follow Britain. Setbacks in Mexico, including a humiliating defeat at the town of Puebla on May 5, had seemingly discouraged French intervention in America’s fratricidal war. However, Judah Benjamin suspected that Paris and London had a tacit agreement to act in concert. His suspicions were more or less confirmed on July 16 when the emperor met with John Slidell. Napoleon III took great interest in a proposed exchange of diplomatic recognition for a lucrative trade deal. Three days later, he instructed his foreign minister to “Ask the English government if they don’t think the time has come to recognize the South.”

In September of 1862, the Confederates took matters into their own hands. General Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland for various reasons (including influencing the midterm elections), but he understood the diplomatic implications of the expedition. A victory on Union turf would send a clear signal to the world that the Confederacy was a viable nation-state.

Amid machinations in Europe (including Napoleon’s dispatch of reinforcements to Mexico), Union and Confederate forces met at Sharpsburg, MD on September 17. The Battle of Antietam (named for Antietam Creek) was the bloodiest engagement of the entire war. Although it ended in a draw, Lincoln treated the battle as a Union victory. He used Lee’s withdrawal from Maryland as a pretext to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and finally, in the words of Carl Schurz, place the conflict on “a higher moral basis.”

The reaction in Britain seemed to confirm Seward’s worst fears. The pro-Confederate Times warned of “massacres and utter destruction” that would follow an imminent “servile insurrection.” Others, particularly Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, did not believe that Lincoln could win

the war. Gladstone, the future four-time prime minister and “Grand Old Man” of British liberalism, expressed his skepticism on October 7 in New Castle upon Tyre.

Regular Europeans did not concur with their rulers. They agreed with Lincoln when he spoke of the war as a “people’s contest” with implications for “the whole family of man.” Liberals saw the Confederacy’s planter elite and Europe’s ruling dynasties as animated by the same retrograde force(s), the aristocratic privilege to live off the toil of others. A young German volunteer in the Union Army put the matter bluntly. “Much the same as it is in Germany, the free and industrious people of the North are fighting against the lazy and haughty Junker [German aristocrats] spirit of the South.”

Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July of 1863 extinguished the South’s hope for military victory. (Oddly enough, the C.S.A. suffered the majority of its casualties after these proverbial points of no return). The diplomatic situation mirrored the military one in terms of desperation; Britain showed few signs of recognizing the South; France was busy crowning Maximilian I of Mexico; an alliance with slaveholding Spain had failed to materialize. So, Confederate diplomats turned to one of Europe’s most conservative sovereigns, Pope Pius IX.

The arch-conservative pontiff was a logical choice for a

“ We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation… We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North.

reactionary separatist movement seeking diplomatic recognition. Originally considered a liberal, Pius had a change of heart as the upheaval of 1848 threatened his control of the Papal States (Rome and the surrounding areas). Aided by President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Pius suppressed the Roman Republic of 1849. In 1864, he denounced democracy, freedom of speech, and other pillars of liberalism in his “Syllabus of Errors.” In 1868, the pope called the First Vatican Council in order to hash out the Catholic Church’s position on liberalism. (Vatican I also codified papal infallibility as an infallible church dogma).

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But in November of 1863, the pope’s conservatism did not extend to recognizing a nation founded upon slavery. Pius advised Ambrose Mann, the Confederate emissary to Rome, that it “might perhaps be judicious in us to consent to gradual emancipation.” The pope’s reluctance closed off one of the last avenues for recognition left to the




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Confederacy.

A year later, the end neared. Lincoln had won reelection as the Union Army rampaged through Georgia. In a bout of desperation, Jefferson Davis made a final bid for recognition: He promised to emancipate the slaves. This proposed repudiation of the Confederacy’s raison d’être went nowhere in the capitals of Europe. So, for that matter, did an attempt by Louisiana to secede from the C.S.A. and become a French protectorate.

Louisiana’s gamble was a fitting, if not farcical, ending to Confederacy’s bid for acceptance into the community of nations. The fight over recognition speaks to the deeper point that the Civil War was an international conflict. The war was also, as Doyle’s masterful book makes clear, a fight with profound implications for liberty.

In 1864, Édouard Laboulaye, a French professor of law, eloquently outlined the stakes of the American Civil War:

Modern-day critics who claim the Union’s victory was anti-liberty should re-read the professor’s words. The dissolution of the Union would have amounted to an admission that self-government could not work. Furthermore, there is little reason to believe the Union and Confederacy would have been left alone

“ The world is a solidarity, and the cause of America [the Union] is the cause of Liberty. So long as there shall be across the Atlantic a society of thirty million men, living happily and peacefully under a government of their choice, with laws made by themselves, liberty will cast her rays over Europe like an illuminating pharos. But should liberty become eclipsed in the new world, it would become night in Europe, and we shall see the work of Washington, of the Franklins, of the Hamiltons, spit upon and trampled under foot by the whole school which believes only in violence and in success. [Emphasis added]

















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after separating. A crippled United States could not prevent Europe’s empires from reversing the gains that liberalism had made in the Western Hemisphere. As France and Spain demonstrated, some nations were more interested in imperial glory than commerce.

It is true that Lincoln and Seward did not initially make the war one for abolition. The legalism of their early arguments hurt the Union’s cause in 1861 and 1862. However, Lincoln eventually framed the conflict as a war for union and liberty. As if to underscore the complexity of the situation, the Union received help from a strange place. The plans of liberal Britain to divide the United States met firm resistance from Czar Alexander II of Russia.

Although briefly mentioned in Cause of All Nations, Alexander played a more pivotal role than many realize. The emancipator of the serfs did not just proclaim Russia’s neutrality, but also worked to prevent Anglo-French intervention. In 1879, Alexander explained his actions in an interview with an American banker named Wharton Barker.

“ In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York…

All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia, rather than for love of the American Republic. I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.

Alexander admittedly had his own reasons for restraining Britain and France. Yet, Americans never forgot the kindness of Russia’s greatest czar. In November of 1871, Grand Duke Alexei arrived in New York City for a goodwill trip of the U.S. He received a boisterous welcome. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the father of the future Supreme Court Justice and veteran of the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., eloquently expressed Americans’ pro-Russian sentiments in poetic verse.

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The world is a strange place. Perhaps that is why the last redoubt of naysayers about the Civil War is the butcher’s bill. Cynics claim that Lincoln expended 600,000 lives primarily to save the Union, which is to say the state. The critics have drawn the right conclusion. Arrayed against the world’s largest “republican experiment” was an unholy alliance between Europe’s aristocrats of the sword and the South’s lords of the lash.

No one should romanticize the South’s bid for nationhood as one premised on liberal principles. Gaining admission to the family of nations is nasty work. New states are often the product of “hostile divorces, arranged marriages, and patricidal violence.” They are subject to constant questions about their viability until their fates are decided by virtue of war or diplomacy. Those who win recognition have, in a sense, passed a Darwinian test.

Indeed, that is the hard truth of the matter. Arguments about the right of secession are a matter of semantics. What counts is the power to vindicate a claim to nationhood at the diplomatic table and on the battlefield. By that measure, one that was acknowledged by the highest officials in the Union and Confederate governments, the Confederate States of America failed completely. Considering that its raison d’être was the preservation of racial slavery, the Confederacy deserves neither sympathy nor defense.

“ Throbbing and warm are the hearts that remember

Who was our friend when the world was our foe…

Fires of the North, in eternal communion,

Blend your broad flashes with evening’s bright star!

God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union;

Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar!

















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In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln promised the United States would have a “new birth of freedom.” It is to his everlasting credit that government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” did not “perish from the Earth.” Its survival helped keep the flame of liberty alive in a world ruled by autocrats and other holders of exclusive privilege(s).

How was that not a cause worth fighting for?

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Tim Reuter, Abraham Lincoln's War For The Union Saved (Classical) Liberalism, Forbes.com

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Transcript of Tim Reuter, Abraham Lincoln's War For The Union Saved (Classical) Liberalism, Forbes.com