A new president-elect from Illinois

Seven score and ten years ago, on this day, America elected a president so American and still so different from all the others that it triggered a mental collapse of half the country. Follow it on the New York Times great new Disunion blog.

If the South had kept its cool, it could have continued its game of obstruction and hold on to its vile peculiar institution for much longer. Instead it plunged itself and America into an abyss from which the country has not completely emerged even today.

Eric Foner, a real historian (not only playing one on TV), has written a beautiful treatment of Abraham Lincoln's complex relationship towards slavery in The Fiery Trial, the underlying issue of the war. While Europe could abolish slavery relatively easily as a non-problem, the United States had to establish how to live with and integrate a sizable minority many of its citizens both North and South were unwilling to tolerate. Lincoln himself struggled with transforming the easy moral problem (slavery bad) into a working social solution. It's the great tragedy that the man who traveled so far in solving that problem was murdered by an extremist.

Very nicely put, Mr. Brunner. Thank you for summarizing so much in so few words.

Allan Nevins in his series The Ordeal of the Union wrote that the Civil War was not as much about slavery as it was about how slavery would be ended and how government and society would deal with African-Americans as free people. In a state like South Carolina where black people were a majority in many regions this was a critical question. Thomas Jefferson wrote that slavery had created such hate that when it ended there would be a great war between the races until one was extinguished. He had the revolution on Saint-Domingue as an example.
I am now reading The Coming Fury whose author, Bruce Catton, states that slavery was the only solution to the race problem that the people of the South knew.
The Mind of the Master Class by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese is a thoroughly documented look into the minds of the ante-bellum Southerners. The authors make it very clear that slaveholding was an integral part of their identity and the election of Lincoln after John Brown's raid convinced them that the Republicans were determined to extinguish their peculiar institution.
Lincoln's home state Illinois had laws on the books in 1861 prohibiting free blacks from moving into the state. In 1862 Lincoln held meetings with black leaders to promote the idea of colonization of free blacks.
150 years after Lincoln's election America has an African-American president. I do not think that means that the problem of toleration between the descendants of the slaves and the rest of the population has been satisfactorily resolved.
I will have to read Eric Foner's book.

Thanks, glad somebody read and liked it.

Today's Disunion blog post mentions abolitionist Wendell Phillips' title "ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE SLAVE-HOUND OF ILLINOIS”, castigating this fairly conservative politician, whose views were, however, still not conservative enough for the oligarchy that ruled the South.

Eric Foner gave an interview to NPR about Lincoln and slavery.

Both Nevins and Catton are authors of a different era. An era exemplified by the Life Magazine 1963 centennial special I bought on Ebay. Indulging in the Lost Cause, it shows not a single black person (not even a Black Confederate) in any of these paintings.

In my view there are two problems: 1. The economic one. The slaves ("chattel") were a big part of the Southern capital stock (human "pecunia"), thus the government would probably have to compensate the owners for their value loss. Fortunately, the US had huge land reserves it could have used for this. Secondly, the war utterly devastated the South's economy, compounding the problem of both reconstruction and integration. The lack of a Marshall plan led to the failure of reconstruction.

2. The social one. Many other countries managed the smooth transition of the abolition of serfdom. This would not solve the main, persisting problem of huge inequality. One way to tackle it is a federally funded public education, creating at least a basis for a level-playing field. Abolishing racism is easier if income and social disparities are small.