OPENING POSITIONS: EARLY 1861

Lincoln’s definition of liberty as no obstacles in the way of a successful career was shaped by his own experience; therefore the freedom to rise, what politicians would call today equality of opportunity, provided the basis of prosperity. Such a system required a steady stream of migrants to America with nothing, together with sufficient support provided by government development projects, funded by a tariff, to ensure that adequate opportunities were available. In contrast, Davis understood his liberty in terms of rights, especially to possess property, inherent in the preservation of a free state. The federal government’s role was to support these rights, for example, by protecting slavery. Prosperity would come from the pursuit of suitably advantageous economic policies, which from a slaveholder’s perspective meant embedding the United States in global markets for export.^{Footnote 2}

Before war broke out, Lincoln made clear his belief that the liberty of the individual was the precondition of prosperity. He defined liberty as “the principle that clears the path for all.” The authority of the Declaration of Independence “gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Liberty was identical to free labor. “The prudent, penniless beginner labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself,” he told attendees of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society fair in Milwaukee, “then labors on his own account another while and at length hires another beginner to help him.” As a result of this process of upward mobility, enabling the person to demonstrate his “enterprise and industry,” liberty was “the primary cause of our great prosperity.” A virtuous circle linking prosperity and liberty would ensue because “no community whose every member possesses this art can ever be the victim of oppression in any of its forms.”^{Footnote 3}

The existence of slavery rendered free labor uncompetitive and pursuit of prosperity impossible. According to Lincoln, the policy of the opposition Democratic Party “acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty” and once “the barriers which protected you from it are down; slavery comes in, and white free labor that can strike will give way to slave labor which cannot!” Slavery undermined the prosperity of the white laborer because it placed downward pressure on wages. As a priority and also practical politics, slavery had to be kept out of the federal territories; in time, Lincoln hoped for its gradual abolition elsewhere, but he recognized slavery was protected where it already existed as a state institution, so his role in achieving that outcome would only be indirect.^{Footnote 4}

Instead of slavery, what Lincoln wanted was a steady supply of workers who start with nothing. “Population must increase with accelerating rapidity”—or as he quantified to the citizens of Buffalo, New York, “tens of thousands will inhabit where only thousands inhabit now.” In such a context, efficiency and improvement were vital. “The most important skill of the future,” he continued, “will be the act of deriving an comfortable income from the smallest area of soil.” It followed that the great challenge for Lincoln in government would be how to help individuals achieve greater economic prosperity from less land. Schemes to promote industrialization, education, transportation, and mechanization of agriculture all cost money.^{Footnote 5}

The means of finance would also protect liberty and prosperity. The main government policy to fund this goal was raising and amending the tariff, which “is to the Government what a meal is to the family.” The tariff system would also become the embodiment of the varied yet harmonious interests of the nation; the occupations individuals would pursue would reflect the population’s diversity. Lincoln wanted such a tariff, “which serves to the working man liberal wages, to agriculture renumerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence.” Historian Richard Bensel understands that the Gilded Age Republican Party used a complicated and high tariff as a means to reach out to new constituencies of support with the offer of effective subsidies by protection—the same tactic was true for Lincoln. “One party insists that such [tariff] adjustment oppresses one class for the advantage of another,” while the other, Lincoln’s Republican Party, “argues that with all its incidents, and in the long run, all classes are benefited.” For Lincoln, the tariff was about national independence, increasing the diversity of occupations, and fostering a sense of interdependence between producers and consumers within a national economy.^{Footnote 6}

While Lincoln believed with evangelical fervor in the importance of individual autonomy enabling self-development as the true definition of liberty, Davis insisted that liberty only existed as defined by a citizen’s relationship to a sovereign state. Lincoln’s vision of liberty in part arose from his own experience as a man who rose from humble beginnings to great success, combined with a creed that this phenomenon only happened in the United States because of its unique combination of vast resources and free government. In turn, his status as a highly successful planter and slaveholder influenced Davis’s own thinking. Rather than owing his rise to being an autonomous individual, Davis regarded his liberty as being only possible because his state safeguarded his property, especially in enslaved people. In turn, his prosperity was due to that same State cooperating effectively, in an interdependent world, with other regional and national economies.

Davis regarded his state’s secession as motivated by “the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our sacred duty to transmit unshorn to our children.” In the past, the federal government performed the function of supporting States in the defense of those rights. Therefore as a U.S. senator, in order to avoid secession, Davis had earlier drafted a resolution calling for slavery to be safeguarded by the federal government as a “species of property” in “any state of the Union and any of the territories.” Davis interpreted President-elect Lincoln’s refusal to guarantee everywhere enslaved people as slaveholders’ property as tantamount to an act of tyranny overriding the liberties of all American citizens.^{Footnote 7}

Davis had a vision of prosperity that rested on the productivity of the southern slave-based economy and the northern capacity to utilize many of the South’s products in manufacturing and commerce. Even though the Republican Party Platform of 1860 only pledged to end the expansion of slavery, during his last speech to them on January 21, 1861, Davis reminded his fellow senators about Lincoln’s understanding of the meaning of equality for all men in the Declaration of Independence. Any equality for African Americans would upset Davis’s system of political economy and “emancipation would be the sinking millstone around the neck of southern prosperity and northern well-being.” He hoped instead that the creation of a slaveholding southern confederacy would not jeopardize, but rather perfect, the economic system in North America, given that political separation would, he believed, end disruptive antislavery agitation. Davis anticipated that commercial ties between the North and South “may be mutually beneficial for us in the future, as they have been in the past.” Otherwise, as he told an audience in Stevenson, Georgia, in February, on his way to be inaugurated as president in Montgomery, Alabama, the loss will be the North’s. The southern states would find alternative markets and opportunities through territorial expansion and growth of trade with Europe; meanwhile, the “grass will grow in the northern cities where the pavements have been worn off by the tread of commerce.”^{Footnote 8}

Davis wanted to be left alone to do what he believed he did best: to manage enslaved people, clear land, and grow crops for export—by these means he would achieve prosperity. Territorial expansion was both necessary to fulfill that vision and to provide a “safety valve” to disperse what he deemed to be surplus populations of poor whites and especially enslaved African Americans. Coming from one of the two states in the Union that were majority African American in 1860, Davis had a very different attitude to population growth than Lincoln. However, Davis’s optimism about future opportunities in an expansive southern confederacy was more prominent than fear of racial upheaval. “The expansion of both may have been restrained by the narrow views of each,” Davis told a northern correspondent, Anna Ella Carroll, on February 16. “Let them be left freely to grow,” he declared, and then asked, “Why not each hereafter rejoice in the prosperity of the other?” Davis’s view of prosperity rested on the nation pursuing policies most conducive to that outcome. Rather than Lincoln’s unfettered individual, Davis regarded the motor of prosperity to be an evolving community of interdependent nations, which, governed by the axioms of free trade and comparative advantage, would act in such a way as to maximize returns of each.^{Footnote 9}

THE WAR BEGINS: TO THE END OF 1861

The outbreak of war presented challenges to the visions of the future in terms of liberty and prosperity. The war hindered progress, although over time both Davis and Lincoln saw utility in linking the struggles of the present in a meaningful fashion to a wonderful future. Lincoln highlighted that although the liberty of the individual was central to delivering prosperity, it was the Union and its government that safeguarded that liberty. Davis contended that it was the federal government’s violation of the rights of slave states in the territories that ruined the prosperity in the Union. The Confederacy would now seek prosperity alone, with service in the army also reinforcing citizens’ understanding of political liberties.^{Footnote 10}

In the early months of the war, Lincoln stressed that the individual pathways to prosperity were only possible with the liberty to be had in the Union, while joining the Confederacy meant submission to tyranny and individual poverty. Choosing the Confederacy meant facing “the danger of complete ruin through an unnecessary and unnatural rebellion,” as Lincoln told a delegation from Baltimore, Maryland, on November 15, whereas “the prosperity of Baltimore up to April 19 was one of the wonders produced by the American Union.” Prosperity was contingent on liberty, not an entitlement, and in his message to Congress that December, Lincoln elaborated on what was at stake if the Border States joined the Confederacy. “Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disability and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost.”^{Footnote 11}

By the end of 1861, although in the northern popular mind the Confederate military victories earlier that year—First Manassas in Virginia and Wilson’s Creek in Missouri—remained unreversed, Lincoln looked forward to future prosperity. He knew about the impressive force General George B. McClellan had assembled around the capital. “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today,” he declared to Congress, “it is for a vast future.” The past achievements of the people, due to democracy, helped in the task of predicting the future. Lincoln reminded legislators “what the popular principle applied to government . . . has produced in a given time.” The eightfold increase in population since independence augured well, while “the increase of those other things which men deem desirable has been even greater.” The promise of popular government in the future meant that some people alive in 1861, “if the Union be preserved, will live to see it contain” a population of 250 million souls. Lincoln measured the fruits of liberty in terms of prosperity evidenced by the economy’s ability to support this massive rate of population growth with sufficient material goods. The United States, due to its resources and especially abundance of land, would prove Thomas Malthus wrong and be able to support a growing population in greater comfort, provided that the pathways for individual success were kept open by equality of opportunity guaranteed by a government elected by manhood suffrage.^{Footnote 12}

Davis used the outbreak of war to demonstrate that Lincoln’s objective was to undermine the liberty and prosperity of the Confederacy. In his first wartime message to Congress on April 29, Davis asserted that the Confederate decision to open fire at Fort Sumter been a defensive response to Union aggression against southern state rights in the Territories. The Republican Party, Davis claimed, had “the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave states from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the states in common.” The denial of the right of slaveholders to take their property—in the form of enslaved people—into the Territories undermined the security of all property, and hence, Davis argued, threatened both the prosperity and liberty of any citizen. The result of this policy was catastrophic for the prosperity of the South because it had the consequence of “rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.” Not only the South but also both the Union and the world would suffer economically from this depreciation in value. “The production of the South in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African Slaves was and is indispensable,” Davis explained, “has swollen to an amount which formed nearly three quarters of the exports of the whole United States and indispensable to the wants of civilized man.”^{Footnote 13}

During the summer and autumn, Davis began to stress that the prosperity and liberty of the Confederate States would be placed on a firmer foundation, both in terms of self-sufficiency and self-government, as a result of mobilizing for a long war. By the time he delivered his message to Congress on November 18, Davis understood that the “means of the Confederate States for manufacturing the necessities and comforts of life within themselves increase as the conflict continues.” He believed the best chance of prosperity for the citizens of the Confederacy lay in continuing with the cultivation of staple cash crops based on slavery. Such occupations suited the perpetuation of the system of slavery. However, “if in the process, labor in the Confederate States should be diverted from those great southern staples which have given life to so much of the commerce of mankind, “ Davis continued, “into other channels so as to make them rival producers instead of profitable customers, they will not be the only or even the chief losers by this change in the direction of their industry.” Davis continued to believe in the interdependency of national economies and the same factors that had driven southern prosperity before the war would also lead to the Civil War becoming a global conflict.^{Footnote 14}

THE INTENSIFYING STRUGGLE: 1862

During 1862, hopes in the Union of a swift end to the war were dashed by the Confederate military counteroffensive outside Richmond in July. This unexpected turn of events led to Lincoln’s addition of emancipation as a U.S. war aim. This measure affected the prosperity and liberties of all southerners, both black and white, while for many northerners it also signaled a potential transformation in their prospects. As late as 1864, Lincoln sought to mitigate the fears of westerners, who worried about the prospect of competition for work from freed and migrating African Americans, by advocating various gradual schemes of emancipation and a reinvigoration of old colonization plans once associated with Lincoln’s mentor Henry Clay. Concurrently, in response to U.S. military pressure and to support his administration’s new policies, preeminently conscription, Davis attempted to bring the priorities of prosperity and liberty down from state questions to individual concerns. In the process, he wished to educate citizens on how they needed to behave: with self-sacrifice and commitment.^{Footnote 15}

Lincoln portrayed emancipation as an act of policy designed to minimize the cost of the war. “If with less money or with money more easily paid we can preserve the benefits of the Union with this means, than we can by war alone,” he asked legislators in December, “is it not economical to do it?” Even with the money needed to fund compensated emancipation, the expense of a shorter war would be cheaper than the alternative of beating the Confederacy unaided, whose war effort on the home front depended on the labor of enslaved people. Lincoln built his case around how the vast future would shoulder the cost of compensated emancipation. “The war requires large sums and requires them at once,” he said, and by contrast, “the aggregate sums necessary for compensation would be large, but it would require no ready cash.” Lincoln recommended that slavery be abolished gradually until 1900, thereby enabling the Treasury to spread the cost over decades. Lincoln evoked his vision of rapid population growth, contingent on saving the Union, to defray the expense of this costly scheme. “At the end of thirty seven years,” he insisted, “we shall have 100 million people to share the burden instead of thirty one million now.” Disbursements would be spread over time, the expenditure shared between more people, and as a result the economy would benefit. “The proposed emancipation would shorten the war,” he concluded, “perpetuate peace, insure this increase in population, and proportionately the wealth of the country.”^{Footnote 16}

Lincoln believed his colonization plan would benefit all African Americans. Improvement, even by colonization, would be straightforward for people “whose intellects are clouded by slavery” and who were “very poor materials to start with.” For those African Americans free and living in the North, such as members of a delegation who waited on Lincoln at the White House in August 1862, any advances in liberty and prosperity, especially the latter, were unclear. However, Lincoln argued that their liberty would improve and this would be worth any sacrifice of prosperity made on leaving the United States. In the North, although free, “you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race.” Whereas if these potential leaders of the African American community chose to champion a colonization scheme, Lincoln told them that “you would open a wide door for many to be made free.” Such an opportunity would require each individual to renounce a degree of prosperity. “For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as white people.” If free African Americans established a successful outpost in Central America, Lincoln argued, such an achievement would stand comparison with the deeds of the Founding Fathers because they would uplift the condition of their race.^{Footnote 17}

Lincoln promoted African American colonization primarily as a means to assuage fears held by laborers in the West and cities across the North that freed African Americans would migrate in their hundreds of thousands westward and northward and drive down wages. “In giving freedom to slave,” Lincoln declared in his message to Congress, “we assure freedom to the free.” Economics would determine this outcome. “Reduce the supply of black labor, by colonizing the black laborer out of the country,” Lincoln said, “and by precisely so much you increase the demand for, and wages of, white labor.”^{Footnote 18}

In response to the intensification of the war and the enlargement of the war aims of the United States in 1862, Davis brought his earlier abstractions about liberty down to an individual level. At the end of the year, he went on a speaking tour of the devastated and demoralized lower Mississippi Valley and asked the people a series of questions. “Will you be slaves; will you consent to be robbed of your property; to be reduced to provincial independence; will you renounce the exercise of those rights with which you are born and which are transmitted to you by your fathers?” The answer was clear: if you value your liberties and the future of slavery, which guaranteed them for whites, you had to support the Confederacy. The end of African American slavery would mean the beginning of slavery for white southerners.^{Footnote 19}

The pursuit of individual prosperity had to be postponed. “The selfish grow clamorous for local and personal interests,” worried Davis to his army commander in Virginia, General Joseph E. Johnston, on February 28, 1862, as the scale of the disasters in Tennessee began to become clear. Such feelings intensified as McClellan’s army closed in on Richmond in the late spring. “The great temporal object is to secure our independence,” he wrote to his wife Varina on May 16, after she had fled the capital for the comparative safety of Raleigh, North Carolina, “and they who engage in strife for personal or party aggrandizement deserve contemptuous forgetfulness.” News soon reached Davis that his Mississippi plantation had been sacked by Union troops; with this development, his sense of personal loss further reinforced his contempt for those who prioritized prosperity over liberty. Besides, the independent Confederacy offered the chance to recover these losses over time, whereas Davis expected a Union victory to render his poverty permanent, with slaveholders expropriated in the manner of royalist aristocrats in the French Revolution. “If our course succeeds,” he vowed to Varina on May 30, as Johnston prepared to join battle with McClellan five miles away, “we shall not mourn over any personal deprivation. If it should not, why, the deluge.”^{Footnote 20}

Davis increasingly saw the army—especially Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—as reinvigorating liberty. Davis looked forward, as he told an audience in Jackson, Mississippi, on December 26, to a peacetime with universal military service when “every young man shall have served two or three years in the army.” So that if ever war broke out again, the citizen would be ready and willing to “take his place in the ranks as an educated and disciplined soldier.” Republicanism would benefit. “Serving among his equals, his friends, and his neighbors,” Davis insisted, “he will find in the army no distinction of class.”^{Footnote 21}

Davis regarded service in the Confederate army as proof of the preparedness of citizens to surrender temporarily their liberties, even state rights, in pursuit of securing them thereafter. Resistance to the centralizing tendencies of the Confederate government, which were always much more pronounced than its counterpart in the United States, began to grow in 1862, especially from the governors of Georgia and North Carolina, conscription being the main source of friction. Davis, at least with Governor Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina, successfully appealed to the latter’s pride in the prominence of North Carolinians in the Army of Northern Virginia. “I have been cheered by evidence of popular sentiment,” Davis told Vance on November 1, “which supports any measure necessary to protect our liberty and serve our political independence.” Patriotism required the paradoxical suspension of liberties now in order to recover those earlier won in the Revolution, “and that we should all be as a band of brothers,” Davis urged, “strike for the inheritance our fathers left us.”^{Footnote 22}

GROWING STRAINS: 1863

In 1863, especially during its first half when the military news was disappointing, domestic opponents challenged Lincoln over his controversial policy decisions. Opposition was most vocal about the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, the enlistment of African American soldiers, and the decision to inaugurate the Draft that summer. Lincoln’s response to this criticism was to justify his infringements of individual liberties on the grounds of public safety. At the same time, in order to rationalize the hardships and oppressions of the war, Davis presented to Confederates the prospect of a wonderful future of liberty and prosperity. However, for the present, especially in light of the military setbacks from July onward, he argued that the pursuit of prosperity was pointless because any accumulated property was vulnerable to seizure by the enemy.

Lincoln promoted African American enlistment as a measure designed to benefit all soldiers. “Whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers,” Lincoln explained in a letter to fellow Illinois Republican James C. Conkling on August 26, “leaves just as much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union.” African Americans had to be gainers by the new arrangements; “negroes,” he added, “like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us, if we will do nothing for them?” Lincoln reinvigorated his Free Labor philosophy by adding African Americans. “If they stake their lives for us,” he told Conkling, “they must be prompted by the strongest of motives—even the promise of freedom . . . For the Great Republic—for the principle it lives by, and keep’s alive—for man’s vast future.”^{Footnote 23}

Lincoln regarded emancipation not only as a war measure but also as a way to extend the scope of liberty in terms of both race and class, at a time when he realized liberty was under pressure due to the war. The Civil War was now “the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights,” he responded to a tribute from the workingmen of Manchester, England, on January 19, “and substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery.” In June, Lincoln had to answer the charge from a delegation of Ohio Democrats that he wished to “override all the guaranteed rights of individuals in the plea of conserving the public safety” by “struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative.” Lincoln retorted that he accepted his opponents’ right of protest, as long as this not extend into direct harm of the Union cause, for example by encouraging desertion from the army. “You will only arrest individuals and suppress assemblies or newspapers when they may be working palpable injury to the military in your charge,” he instructed his commander in Missouri, General John M. Schofield—on the same day as dealing with the Ohioans; “in no other case will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form or allow it to be interfered with violently by others.”^{Footnote 24}

Lincoln emphasized the temporary nature of the infringements on liberty. Nowhere was this combination of power and restraint more in evidence than with the Draft. “We have all we can get in terms of this voluntary weighing of motives” for enlistment, he wrote in a memorandum that September. The United States either had to get more troops “or relinquish the original object of the conquest, together with the blood and treasure already expended in the effort to secure it.” In short, “the republican institutions and territorial integrity of the country cannot be maintained without the further raising and supporting of armies.” Liberty remained the objective, the means by which it was attained mattered less. It was simply a question whether “men can be had only voluntarily; or involuntarily.”^{Footnote 25}

During 1863, Davis developed a broad theme that the achievement of future prosperity and liberty depended on the sacrifice of both now. As a further incentive, in speeches delivered in Richmond that January, Davis promised greater levels of both prosperity and liberty in the future. “When peace and prosperity shall come to us,” he told the crowd, “we will go on assisting each other to develop the great political ideas upon which our government is based and the immense resources which nature has lavished upon us.” Present-day achievements on the battlefield, mobilization for the war, and the economy provided evidence of capability to support this optimism. “Of the former, we are awakening to an appreciation of their deep significance. In the latter direction, we are displaying unexampled energy.” Davis went further than before on these political ideas. He regarded the Confederacy as “the last hope, for the perpetuation of that system of government which our forefathers founded—the asylum of the oppressed and the home of true representative liberty.” Davis still adhered to that liberty contingent on republican self-government, dependent in turn on the existence of the people acting in their sovereign capacity in the states; he said less about the necessary possession of property as a precondition for liberty.^{Footnote 26}

The prosperity of Confederates in the future would only be achieved by the securing of their liberties by independence. In April, during a time of prevailing optimism about the war, Davis issued a proclamation warning citizens (in particular, planters), about the dangers of a premature prioritizing of prosperity over liberty by resuming the cultivation of cash crops. “If through a confidence in an early peace, which may prove delusive,” he cautioned, “our friends should be now devoted to the production of cotton and tobacco instead of grain and livestock, and other articles necessary for the subsistence of the people and the army, the consequences may prove serious, if not disastrous.” Davis then introduced a theme to which he would return later in the year when the progress of the war worsened for the Confederacy. “Your country,” he told the planters, “therefore, appeals to you to lay aside all thought of gain, and to devote yourselves to securing your liberties, without which those gains would be valueless.” The message was plain: postpone your prosperity until after your liberties had been secured.^{Footnote 27}

After the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4 cut off the states of the trans-Mississippi from the rest of the Confederacy, Davis expanded upon this theme of sacrificing present gains for future liberty and prosperity. Referring to his losses incurred from the devastation of his plantation, and the flight of his enslaved people, helped support Davis’s argument. “Many like myself have been robbed of all which the toil of many years had gathered,” he told Senator Robert W. Johnson of the now cut off Arkansas on July 14; “But the prize for which we strive, freedom and independence, is worth whatever it may cost.” Liberty was beyond quantification. “If we leave our children poor,” he comforted Johnson, “we shall leave them with a much better heritage than wealth.” Addressing the citizens of Charleston on November 3, after visiting the Army of Tennessee outside Chattanooga, Davis expanded on this topic. Sacrifice was necessary to not only secure but also deserve liberty. “Let all our efforts in this crisis be directed to the future,” he told the crowd. “He who would attempt to promote his own personal ends,” he warned, perhaps mindful of the town’s reputation for wartime gaiety, “is not worthy of the Confederate liberty for which we are striving.” The main evil was pursuit of individual prosperity to the detriment of the general good; this was especially relevant for ports such as Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, where persons conducted blockade running and smuggled in luxuries to be sold for personal profit instead of vital supplies for the armies on behalf of everyone. According to Davis, attending to prosperity in current circumstances was also futile. “If in neglecting the interests of the country, and only anxious to keep up said gain, each man only attended to his own private interest,” Davis intoned in Wilmington, “then it would be found that such gains only accumulated only to fall into the hands of the plundering Yankees.”^{Footnote 28}

THE CLIMAX OF THE STRUGGLE: 1864, UP TO NOVEMBER

In a desperately difficult time in terms of morale and with elections approaching, Lincoln sought to reanimate the Union cause with a fresh appeal to the freedom of labor and how liberty was the opposite of slavery. He supported his argument by using the examples of both himself and his commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, to give new meaning to the cause. Davis likewise contrasted the foundations of liberty and prosperity preserved in the Confederacy with the tyranny and financial chaos prevailing in the United States.

In early 1864, peace seemed to be imminent and Lincoln invoked liberty in order to look forward to the future. “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” he complained to visitors at a Sanitary Commission fair in Baltimore on April 18, just a couple of weeks before the fighting season commenced, “and the American people, just now, are much in search of one” given that “we feel more hopeful and confident for the future.” He ventured his own meaning of liberty: it “may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the produce of his labor.” Slaveholders had a different version of liberty, as they wished “some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” Lincoln also invested this theme of laboring for liberty with transnational class significance. In his reply to a New York workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association on March 21, he argued that the Confederacy was by fighting for slavery in reality conducting “a war upon the rights of all working people.” Lincoln considered “the strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation, should be one uniting all working people.” Lest Lincoln be interpreted as advancing socialism by means of unionizing the workforce, he added, “Nor should this tend to a war on property, or the owners of property.” He defended the self-made wealthy “as a positive good in the world.” Wealth creation by individuals was both the product of and guarantee for liberty. “That some should be rich,” Lincoln insisted to the workers, “shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.”^{Footnote 29}

Lincoln used the example of Grant as the new republican hero to stress, following Davis, the importance of the army as the symbol of self-sacrifice in this hour of peril. “There is enough yet before us requiring all loyal men and patriots to perform their share of the labor,” he said on May 9, in the wake of the indecisive, costly, confrontation between Grant and Lee at The Wilderness, Virginia. He advised the people to “follow the example of the modest general at the head of our armies, and sink all personal considerations for the sake of the country.” In the summer, Lincoln faced a crisis with the combination of an apparent military stalemate in both Georgia and Virginia, the expiry of the terms of enlistment for many of his soldiers, and looming defeat in the approaching elections. Lincoln chose that moment to inspire veterans of the Siege of Petersburg with his own example, as he showed them the future they fought for was the only one that permitted freedom to rise from one’s station in life. “I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has,” Lincoln beseeched the 166th Ohio Regiment parading at the White House on August 22. “It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that you may have all equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations.”^{Footnote 30}

Davis reiterated that the Confederacy fought for the goal of liberty when he spoke to a crowd in Augusta, Georgia, on October 5, in the wake of the fall of Atlanta to the armies led by William T. Sherman. After telling an Irish heckler he had found a refuge because he was from a place “that has lost its liberty,” Davis proceeded to declare that on the Confederacy’s “success now alone depended the future of constitutional liberty in the world.” “We are a free and an independent people,” he continued, “in States that had the right to make a better government when they saw fit.” However, this right to revolution was not, Davis insisted, a recipe for chaos or crass utopianism such as had occurred during the French Revolution. “We are not engaged in a quixotic fight for the rights of man,” he assured his audience; “our struggle is for inherited rights.” “Could we,” he bluntly asked two northern visitors in July, “without giving up our manhood, give up our right to govern ourselves?”^{Footnote 31}

After three years of war, pressure on Davis to negotiate some kind of compromise with the Union was intense, including from his own vice president, Alexander H. Stephens. Davis countered by portraying Lincoln as a tyrant determined to trample on the liberties of southerners. Confederates would have to “acknowledge your crime, lay down your arms, emancipate your negroes and turn over your leaders to be punished,” Davis told a mass meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 4, and only “then you will have permission to vote with your negroes on the terms.” According to Davis, to surrender to the Union would be degradation, due not only to impoverishment and loss of status, but also much more important, the loss of liberties predicated on both white equality and black inequality. The preservation of such status among whites would be worth the surrender of prosperity.^{Footnote 32}

Prosperity likewise would be impossible under Union rule. “There are those who are longing to turn back to the flesh pots they have left and who thought there might be some flexible mode of reconciliation” with the Union, Davis told citizens of Columbus, Georgia, on October 2, and they were mistaken. Confederates were forewarned as to their likely future under Union rule. In an address to soldiers on February 9, he portrayed the United States as wracked by “debt, taxation, repetition of heavy drafts, dissensions occasioned by strife for power, by the pursuit of the spoils of office, by the thirst for the plunder of the public treasury.” Whereas “with peace and freedom,” he informed a public meeting in Augusta, Georgia, “a glorious career opens for these Confederate States.” Being freed of a tariff meant Confederates would be “relieved from class legislation, free from taxes,” Davis insisted, and as a result, “no longer subject to northern speculators, grinders in the faces of the poor, and derisive of the rights of men, you will start forward in the brightest of futures.”^{Footnote 33}

DENOUEMENT: THE END OF 1864 AND EARLY 1865

Lincoln’s successful reelection vindicated his understanding of popular government and reaffirmed that victory in the war, the conduct of Reconstruction, and regaining of prosperity thereafter rested on individual efforts. Davis likewise rested his authority on the people and regarded them as the mainstay of the Confederacy. However, the surrender of his armies left the people defenseless, including Davis’s own family, and there were limits even to his willingness to sacrifice all.

Once reelected in early November, Lincoln reflected on the delicate balancing act on liberties he had been forced to perform over the previous four years. “It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of the people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence, in great emergencies.” Given the trespasses made by the federal government against liberty, it was vital that the elections were held. “The voice of the people” achieved two crucial things for Lincoln, which he addressed in detail in his message to Congress on December 6, 1864: it confirmed majority support for the Thirteenth Amendment, “to maintain the integrity of the Union”; and higher voter numbers than 1860 in the northern states provided proof of “the fact that we do not approach exhaustion in the most important branch of national resources—that of living men.” The canvass demonstrated that the Union’s “natural resources are inexhausted [sic] and, as we believe, inexhaustible”; therefore it provided not only crucial affirmation of liberty but also of the power of the United States.^{Footnote 34}

As military victory approached in 1865, Lincoln forbore to set out a vast program delivering prosperity for a reunified United States, other than conveying a sense of the responsibility bequeathed to individuals. Lincoln’s ambition, as set out in his second inaugural, was for everyone “to do all that may achieve and cherish a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” The government, Lincoln insisted, would have a limited role, merely “strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way” of peace, his own part would be small as “the executive power itself be greatly diminished by the cessation of actual war.” Similarly, Lincoln sought to present his administration’s war aims as emancipating all southerners from restraints. “It is my wish for you to relieve the people from all burthens, grievances, and oppressions,” he instructed military commanders in western Tennessee on February 13. “The object of the war being to restore and maintain the blessings of peace and good government,” he reminded the officers. “I desire you to help and not hinder any advance in that direction.”^{Footnote 35}

Given Lincoln’s determination to root policy in the wishes of the people, he expected postwar reconstruction would be as contingent a process as the war itself. Lincoln prefaced his April 11 speech on Reconstruction with details about divisions among the people of both sections on what needed to be done; therefore it made sense that “no exclusive or inflexible plan can be safely presented.” Lincoln thereby signaled to radical members of his own party that no sweeping reconstruction scheme was workable and that it was more feasible to adopt an incremental approach. For example, “the question is not whether the Louisiana Government as it stands is quite all that is desirable. The question is will it be wiser to take it as it is,” he advised, “and help improve it or to reject and disperse it.” Adopting the latter course meant dismissing all white southerners from Reconstruction: “we say to the white men ‘you are worthless, or worse—we will neither help you, nor be helped by you.’” Even the African Americans, Lincoln argued, would think themselves let down by the imposition of federal rule, as it was vital for the process to work that white southerners were seen to be participating. “This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash down from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how.” The people of both races would have to drive the process of Reconstruction, with the federal government only acting as a facilitator. To Lincoln, liberty and prosperity remained the possession and outcome of individual effort and attainment.^{Footnote 36}

Davis adopted similar rhetoric as he sought a way forward in the context of the collapse of the Confederacy. “This is a war of the people, for the people and I have simply been the executive,” he declared in his last speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, on April 19, “and if they desire me to continue the struggle, I am still ready and willing to devote myself to the cause.” Any alternative, whether submission to the Union or attempts at negotiation via states acting on their own, would be to the detriment of liberty. In a letter to his nephew, Hugh R. Davis, that January, Davis paraphrased the French revolutionary Madame Roland in 1793, “Oh Liberty! What crimes have not been committed in thy name?” He explained that this pursuit of false liberty “appears in the conduct of those who assume the guise of state rights to sustain a policy, which in proportion to the extent of its adoption must tend to destroy the existence of the states of our Confederacy and leave them conquered provinces [through their] submission to Yankee despotism.”^{Footnote 37}

Davis remained committed to the utmost centralization and mobilization for the war because it was the only means to secure the basis of a resumption of republicanism necessary for liberty and prosperity in peace. Visiting Davis on an unofficial mission to the Confederacy, the old Border State Democrat Francis P. Blair, challenged his former friend about rumors of permanent concessions of liberties, even accepting monarchical rule, in return for European support. According to Blair’s record of the meeting on January 12, Davis “with some vehemence, expressed he was absolutely free and would die a freeman in all respects.” He was “thoroughly for popular government” as far as the Confederacy was concerned and assured Blair that he opposed “the potentates of Europe who feel the destruction of our government was necessary to the monarchical principles on which their own were founded.” Davis’s own priority was to “restore the prosperity and happiness of his country,” and despotism imposed from the outside, either by European monarchs or Lincoln, was inimical to this prospect.^{Footnote 38}

Only when news of the surrender of Johnston’s army in North Carolina reached him in late April did Davis give up on the promise of ultimate liberty and prosperity in the Confederacy. In terms of the settlement that Johnston negotiated with Sherman at Durham Station, Davis tried to console his wife that some vestiges of liberty remained for Confederates in the Union, because, as he told Varina on April 23, there were clauses “expressly recognizing the state governments and rights of person and property as secured by the U.S. Constitution.” Nevertheless, “the long night of oppression” would still ensue, but against that had to be weighed the futility of resistance. Even “should the spirit of the people rise to the occasion,” he warned his wife, “it would not be at this time possible to adequately supply them with the weapons of war.” With no such protection, all that would happen would be “the suffering of the women and children,” and “the few patriots . . . would struggle but to die in vain.” With that realization in mind, he turned to his own future, and even though he was still prepared to make further personal sacrifices, the limit had been reached because, with disorder spreading, “there is but one to which I am not equal, my wife and children. How they are to be saved from further degradation is now my chief care.”^{Footnote 39}

At the outset of war, Lincoln and Davis used similar language about political liberty and economic prosperity, even if the definitions of words used—notably “liberty”—sometimes differed. Lincoln’s “liberal” understanding of liberty contrasted with Davis’s “classical republican” variant. It appears that Lincoln’s conception of liberty was more dynamic and adapted itself better to the dramatically changing context of the war—in a sense it grew with events. However, if Davis’s call to defend what was already possessed lacked that vigor, it was undoubtedly more effective for a defensive war when combined with a call to sacrifice. In the same way, Lincoln’s vision of prosperity was always wrapped up with an individual’s liberty, so calls to sacrifice were always more difficult. Lincoln had to demonstrate that his measures were in the economic self-interest of the people to whom he appealed, not only in the future but also now. Davis had a vision of prosperity that was the product of global markets, territorial expansion, free trade, and interdependence of nations. The war put that outcome beyond the reach of people—indeed any pursuit of prosperity was damaging to the war effort—but it remained a powerful motivator to withstand loss and privation in the immediate term. Perhaps the successful enlistment of liberty and prosperity by both presidents to their respective causes help explain the intensity and duration of the Civil War.