OPINION:
Leave it to President Trump to wake the populace.
This time his alarm bell is America’s slaughterhouse of 1861-65. “Why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?” he said last week.
He’s right. The war killed today’s equivalent of 7 million Americans. Think we’d put up with that now? No.
And as always, he’s gutsy. Questioning the Civil War isn’t easy. You’re taking on a fight that ended sanctioned slavery. Mr. Trump’s very supposition can sound like a racial case of benign neglect and could get regular people fired.
And yet Mr. Trump is fearless. Just as he has the backbone to rip anchor babies and Muslim terrorists and praise Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, aka Duterte Harry, for the great job of drubbing druggies.
Such stands gave Mr. Trump the White House. His fans love him for roaring the truth.
Most journalists trash him for exactly that. One of them is Scott S. Smith, who at least on this issue stops to ponder. Mr. Scott, a former colleague of mine, for years has wondered if the battlefield massacre in what he calls the Uncivil War was inevitable. Recently, he visited the Confederate capital, Richmond, Va., and wrote in the Huffington Post: “Most in the South who fought didn’t own slaves, but felt their states had the right to secede because their legislatures had voted to join the United States and there was nothing in the Constitution to prevent this. Many believed slavery should be phased out, but on their own timetable, since their economy was largely based on cotton and required a long transition, in their view. But Northerners were racist as well, and they wanted cotton for their mills and weren’t willing to die to abolish slavery, which is why President Lincoln didn’t make that a war goal in the first two years. Northerners were motivated to force the Southern states to stay in the Union because of fear that the long border with the South would enable Britain, France, Mexico, Russia and other powers to potentially become the [Confederate States of America’s] preferred trading partners and military allies. Unionists also believed that the exit of Dixie would provide the excuse for other regions to break away, leaving a rump USA that would be vulnerable.”
Otherwise, the media lose it over Mr. Trump’s take. Typical online headlines:
• With Civil War remark, a president who doesn’t go by the (history) book
• Historians: Trump gets Andrew Jackson and Civil War totally wrong
• Trump spurs outrage, mockery with Civil War comments
• Trump’s wacky history lessons continue
So typical of nervous historians. Fire heat at their frigid beliefs and they sweat.
I faced that glacier while researching a story on Lincoln five years ago. Tired of the-war-freed-the-slaves broken record, I asked this: What else did Abe do as president?
Nothing, answered a professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., just up the road from Gettysburg. All Lincoln did was prosecute the war.
Oh really? Just as Richard Nixon had no time during Vietnam to, let’s say, end the draft, open China, visit Moscow, desegregate schools, boost conservation, lower the voting age and oversee every moon landing? That president?
No, Lincoln had to accomplish more than winning the war during his 1,503 days in office. As it turned out, he did. Such as:
• Made America’s money count. As the Civil War turned costlier, the country desperately searched for cash. State currency wasn’t adding up. “The bottom is out of the tub,” Lincoln said in 1862. So he turned to drastic action: nationalize the money system.
• Set out the transcontinental railroad. This was the 1800s version of Eisenhower’s highway project that put America in the fast lane.
• Opened the West to settlers. Lincoln aimed for a rush to the prairies, calling in 1860 for “cutting up the wild lands into parcels so that every poor man may have a home.” Congress heard him, easily passing the Homestead Act for his signing in 1862.
• Started Thanksgiving. In October 1863, a month before his Gettysburg Address, the 16th president invited Americans to observe November’s last Thursday as Thanksgiving Day, declaring: “Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battlefield; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.”
Those are huge feats were clouded by the Civil War. So yes, Mr. President, question the bloodletting. Fresh answers are worth it.
• Bucky Fox is an author and editor in Southern California.
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