"The
long and short of the business seems to me to be that a war of this kind must
be conducted on revolutionary lines, while the Yankees have so far been trying
to conduct it constitutionally."
letter
from Marx to Frederick Engels August 7, 1862,
"This
huge mess of traitors, loafers, hospitals, axe-grinders, & incompetencies
& officials that goes by the name of Washington."
Walt
Whitman
"Up
to now, we have witnessed only the first act of the civil war – the
constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war,
is at hand."
Karl
Marx
"If
you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.
Abraham
Lincoln.
Edward
Achorn's new book is a superb narrative-driven account of the Second
Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. Achorn's descriptive powers separate his book
from a very crowded market.
As Gordon S Wood[1]
correctly states "It is hard to imagine anyone saying anything new about
Abraham Lincoln, the most written-about figure in American history. But Edward
Achorn has done it. No one has ever placed Lincoln's Second Inaugural in such a
full and rich context as he has. Achorn recreates the sights, sounds, smells,
and the feel of everything, and his Lincoln was never more real. This is the
work of a superb imaginative historian."
Achorn
introduces the reader to a growing number of prostitutes, Confederate spies, newspaper
reporters, women with low moral esteem and power-crazed politicians who swirled
around Washington at the time of Lincoln's speech. Unknown and famous people
came to Washington- to hear Lincoln's second inauguration. The poet and journalist
Walt Whitman is given a significant amount of space in the book as is African
American leader Frederick Douglass. Douglass called the speech "sacred
effort".
Achorn
gives Walt Whitman significant space in his book. Whitman, who was a journalist,
poet and nurse based in Washington. Whitman's most famous work is his poetry collection
Leaves of Grass. The book caused such a scandal that one critic demanded Whitman "be kicked from
decent society as below the level of a brute." Achord writes that Lincoln enjoyed
Leaves of Grass and read it to cure is often bouts of depression.
Perhaps
the most villainous of all the complex characters swirling around Lincoln at
the time was the actor John Wilkes Booth who would later assassinate Lincoln. Booth
is second only to Lincoln in the amount of space allotted in the book. Given
Booth's historical importance, this is entirely natural. Achorn's portrayal of
Booth at times takes the form of a novel, a difficult art to maintain which
Achorn does while not dropping academic standards.
As
James Macpherson so eloquently writes "This richly detailed account of the
events surrounding Lincoln's second inaugural address focuses on the many
notable and obscure personalities present in Washington as the Civil War neared
its end, including such opposites as Frederick Douglass and John Wilkes Booth,
whose lives intersected with Lincoln's in dramatically contrasting ways."
The
inauguration was set amidst a raging civil war that by March 1865, had killed 700,000
Americans and left an indelible mark on American society."The rebels…could
not at the same time throw off the Constitution and invoke its aid…. Decisive
and extensive measures must be adopted…. We wanted the army to strike more
vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example and strike at the heart
of the rebellion."[2]
It has
been claimed by most civil war historians as the most important inaugural
address in American history. In just 701 words Lincoln issues a stunning attack
on slavery: "If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those
offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having
continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives
to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the
offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do
we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily
pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the
bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and
until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword, as was said f[our] three thousand years ago, so still it must
be said: "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous
altogether".[3]
Perhaps
one of the most surprising aspects of the book was Achorn's almost God-given
gift for explaining the psychological impact of the war and the struggle
against slavery and how it impacted participants psychological well being
particularly that of Lincoln. As the French minister in Washington wrote "[h]is
face denotes an immense force of resistance and extreme melancholy. It is plain
that this man has suffered deeply." The president's secretary, John Hay,
noted that "the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the
eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects".[4]
Achorn also
notes that "Lincoln's hard life had left him with thick scar tissue over
his psychic wounds" from his upbringing, yet the war "had reawakened
his thoughts about God's role in this world of suffering".
Achord
rejects the strong theme in current historiography portraying Lincoln as a cynic
motivated by purely economic or political gains. This theme was promulgated by
the recent New York Times 1619 project.[5]
Achorn's principle view of Lincoln flies in the face of recent attempts by the
New York Times and its 1619 Project to present a racialised view of US history.
The journalist from the Times presents Lincoln as just another white racist indifferent
to the fate of the slaves. It denies the extraordinary revolutionary
significance of the American Civil War.
While
noting that slavery was an economic and political issue, Lincoln believed its
abolition was the right thing to do. As his Second Inaugural address expresses ",
One-eighth of the whole population were coloured slaves, not distributed
generally over the Union, but localised in the southern part of it. These
slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this
interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and
extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the
Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to
restrict the territorial enlargement of it". With malice toward none, with
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds,
to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his
orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations".
One of
the most commendable aspects of Achorn's book is that he allows Lincoln to
speak for himself. It is not said enough that Lincoln was a superb writer. One
look at the Gettysburg Address confirms the eloquence and power of his prose "Fourscore
and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or
any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a
great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that
field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives, that that
nation might live. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to
that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that Government of
the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth."[6]
As
Achorn points out in the book, Lincoln's inaugural address went deeper in that
it started to reflect on the causes of the war. As Achorn writes, Lincoln "would
not bask in the glory of recent, hard-fought military victories, or present a
detailed plan for reconstruction. He would speak about human depravity, about
the hideous sin committed by both sides, and about the justice of God's
infallible, implacable.
The black
abolitionist Frederick Douglass who attended the inauguration had in the past
been heavily critical of Lincoln's ambiguous attitude towards slavery, but on this
occasion, he applauded Lincoln's condemnation of slavery. As Achorn writes "He
came to understand that Lincoln was a statesman who had to time his actions to
what the public would accept, and I think that is a very poignant thing to see".
Douglas believed it was "a sacred effort."
While Lincoln's
speech was indeed stateman like he was conscious of the need to tie his
political fortunes with that of military ones. Achord correctly gives credit to Major General
William Tecumseh Sherman whose victories on the battlefield enabled Lincoln to
win a second term as president. Of particular importance was the taking of Atlanta
by Sherman. This victory changed the popular mood, and Lincoln won re-election by
a significant margin.
Although
Achorn does not dwell too much on the international aspect of the American
Civil war and Lincoln's role in that war, it is worth examining what the most
important observer from the standpoint of the working class had to say on the
war.
When Karl
Marx heard of Lincoln's re-election on behalf of the First International
Workingmen's Association he sent congratulations to Lincoln. "They
consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to a lot of Abraham
Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country
through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the
reconstruction of a social world."[7]
Marx's analysis
of the causes of the civil war still holds up today He writes "when an
oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the
annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on
the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic
Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man
was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the
eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic
thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of
the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a
beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of
"the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property
in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working
classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of
the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that
the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade
of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for
the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict
on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the
hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the
proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe,
contributed their quota of blood to the good cause".[8]
While
it was not possible for Achorn to look at every possible aspect of the Lincoln
presidency, some older historians have drawn parallels between Lincoln and other
leaders of civil wars. One such comparison was the leader of the English
revolution, Oliver Cromwell.
The
historian, Isaac Foot, in a lecture given in 1944 amid the Second World war,
drew far-reaching parallels between Lincoln and Cromwell. Foot writes "That
is the mark of each man. He was there at the particular time when his special
gift seemed to be adapted to the critical occasion that called for the
contribution which, as far as we can see could not have been made by any other
man of his day. The epitaph of each man might very well have been-"after
he had served his generation, by the will of God, he fell on sleep".[9]
The working class could learn a lot from each man. As the great Russian Marxist
Leon Trotsky said "Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who
knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against
the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt
from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is in this sense
immeasurably greater than many living dogs."[10]The
same could be said about Lincoln.
To
conclude, Achorn does offer a new and fresh approach to this complex
period of American history. The national crisis he writes about bears a striking
resemblance today. The significant book sales mean Achorn's work has resonated
with modern-day readers.
As the American
working-class comes into a direct struggle with its bourgeoisie, it will need to
armed with an understanding of America's revolutionary past. It will need to
form its own "Ironsides".
Its
first step must be to put an end to the removal of statues of Washington,
Lincoln and Grant. As Joe Kishore writes "The removal of monuments to the
leaders of America's revolutionary and civil wars has no justification. These
men led great social struggles against the very forces of reaction that
justified racial oppression as an incarnation of the fundamental inequality of
human beings".[11]
[1] Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of Empire of Liberty
[2] Battle Cry of Freedom:
James M. McPherson
[3] Transcript of President
Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (1865)- www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=38&page=transcript
[4] Every Drop of Blood: The
Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln-Edward Achorn- Hardcover –
March 19. 2020
[5] See The New York Times
1619 project: A racialist falsification of US and world history-wsws.org
[6] Lincoln delivered the 272
words Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, on the battlefield near
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
[7] Address of the
International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the
United States of America-Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865
[8] Address of the
International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the
United States of America-Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865
[9] Oliver Cromwell and Abraham
Lincoln: A comparison: a lecture delivered before the Royal Society of
Literature on April 19th, 1944-Isaac Foot
[10] Where Is Britain Going?
[11] Hands off the monuments
to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant!- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/22/pers-j22.html
