“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions … are the general opinions of the English nation.” —London Times, November 7, 1861

        “The preservation of the union is the supreme law.” —Andrew Jackson, December 25, 1832

The Civil War was the greatest tragedy ever to befall the nation. Brother slew brother. Six hundred thousand of America’s best and bravest died of shot, shell, and disease. The South was bled to death, invaded, ravaged by Union armies, occupied for a dozen years. Under federal bayonets, her social and political order was uprooted and the 11 states that had fought to be free of the Union were “reconstructed” by that Union. America’s South would need a century to recover.

Thirteen decades after Appomattox the questions remain: Was it “an irrepressible conflict”? Was it a necessary war? Was it, as Churchill wrote, “the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass-conflicts of which till then there was record”? Was it a just war? What became of the great tariff issue that had divided and convulsed the nation equally with slavery in the decades before the war? Are there lessons for us in this most terrible of tragedies where all of the dead were Americans?

After any such war, it is the victors who write the history. That has surely been true of the Civil War. Among the great myths taught to American schoolchildren has been that the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, was elected to free the slaves from bondage, that America’s “Civil War” was fought to end slavery in the United States.

This is fable. Even the name given this terrible war is wrong. A civil war is a struggle for power inside a nation like the War of the Roses, or the horrible war between Bolsheviks and Czarists in Russia, “Reds” and “Whites,” after Lenin’s October Revolution. The combatants from 1861-1865 were not fighting over who would govern the United States. The South had never contested Lincoln’s election. The South wanted only to be free of the Union.

The war was not over who would rule in Washington, but who would rule in South Carolina, Georgia, and the five Gulf states that had seceded by the time of Fort Sumter. From the standpoint of the North, this was a War of Southern Secession, a War to Preserve the Union. To the South this was the War for Southern Independence.

The Birth of a Myth

At the dedication of Gettysburg Battlefield, on November 19, 1863, three years after Lincoln’s election, the Great Myth was born. There, Abraham Lincoln declared that the war had been, all along, about equality.

Four score 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.

But four score and seven years before Lincoln spoke was 1776. The “new nation” may have been “conceived” in 1776, but it was not born until 1788 after the ninth state had ratified the Constitution. In that Constitution, freemen, black and white, were equal. But slavery, the antithesis of equality, was protected. By Benjamin Franklin’s compromise, slaves were to be considered as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House. Painful to concede, it is more truthful to say that slavery, the essence of inequality, was embedded in the Constitution of the new nation.

Moreover, in reaching back to 1776, Lincoln had invoked, in defense of a war to crush a rebellion, the most powerful brief ever written on behalf of rebellion. The Declaration of Independence is not about preserving a union. It is a declaration of secession, of separation; it is about the “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” one form of government “and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” It is about a people’s right “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

Lincoln’s words, eloquent as they are, are the sheerest audacity. As Garry Wills writes approvingly, Lincoln, at Gettysburg,

performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.

On reading Lincoln’s address, many. North and South, were astounded. In suggesting the terrible war had all along been about equality, what was the President talking about? Quoting the Constitution back to the President, the Chicago Times charged Lincoln with betraying both that sacred document he had taken an oath to defend and the men who had died for it:

It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government?

Even as Lincoln spoke, slavery was still legal in Washington, D.C., the seat of government, as well in Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Delaware, and the areas of Tennessee that had remained loyal.

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freed only the slaves in those states that were still in rebellion. All other slaves remained the protected property of their masters. Prime Minister Palmerston noted in amusement that Lincoln had undertaken to abolish slavery where he had no power to do so, while protecting slavery where he had the power to destroy it. Indeed, when issuing the proclamation, Lincoln confided to his secretary that he had done so only as a “military necessity” after the defeats of First and Second Manassas, Jackson’s Valley Campaign, the Seven Days battle, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and the stalemate at Antietam;

Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operation we had been pursuing; that we had about played out our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game. I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy.

Far from universal celebration, the Emancipation Proclamation was regarded by many, even in abolitionist England, as a cynical and awful weapon of war, settled upon by Lincoln in desperation. As Sheldon Vanauken points out in The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy (1989):

[T]he Confederate states were winning the war. Only a few days before, Lee had smashed Burnside at Fredericksburg. The Proclamation freed all the slaves within the Confederate lines. . . . These slaves were grouped on the isolated plantations, controlled for the most part by the women since their gentlemen were off to the wars. The only possible effect of the Proclamation would be the dreaded servile insurrection (that which John Brown was hanged for inciting). Either a slave rising—or nothing. So Englishmen saw it. Lincoln’s insincerity was regarded as proven by two things: his earlier denial of any lawful right or wish to free the slaves; and, especially, his not freeing the slaves in “loyal” Kentucky and other United States areas or even in Confederate areas occupied by United States troops, such as New Orleans. It should be remembered that [in England] the horrors of the Indian mutiny, as well as the slave uprising in St. Domingo, were in every memory.

The effect of the proclamation upon many in the Union ranks was the same. They had gone to war not to free the slaves but to preserve the nation! As James McPherson writes in What They Fought For, 1861-1865,

plenty of soldiers believed that the proclamation had changed the purpose of the war. They professed to feel betrayed. They were willing to risk their lives for the Union, they said, but not for black freedom. . . . Desertion rates rose alarmingly. Many soldiers blamed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Closing his address, Lincoln spoke of the duty imposed on Americans by those who had fallen on the great battlefield. We “here highly resolve,” he said, in his immortal words, “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.” If Southerners found this incredible, it is understandable.

The Confederates had never sought to cause the Government of the United States to “perish from the earth.” It was the Union that was seeking to cause the Confederacy and the governments of the 11 Southern states to “perish.” Had the South wanted the government to “perish from the earth,” the Confederate army could have marched into Lincoln’s capital after the First Battle of Bull Run in June 1861, when the Union army had been sent up the road to Washington in wild retreat. The South did not want this; the South only wanted to be free.

While Lincoln surely knew his eloquent words would be noted, and remembered, he could not have known his brief remarks would become the most famous address in American history. Nor is there evidence that Lincoln, at this moment, deliberately enlarged the war aims of the Union. But at Gettysburg, the war aims of the Union were enlarged, dramatically. In that address, they do go beyond anything Lincoln enunciated before the war began. Indeed, if racial equality was now Lincoln’s and the Union’s goal, then Lincoln himself was a changed man. For the Abraham Lincoln of 1861 was no champion of political or social equality.

“We Cannot Make Them Equals”

The Lincoln Americans know, the father figure with the wise and wonderful wit, who came out of Illinois to free the slaves, and believed in racial equality—who would have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.—would be unrecognizable to his contemporaries. While Lincoln as early as 1854 had condemned slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” and bravely took the antislavery side in senatorial campaign debates with Stephen A. Douglas, here is the Republican candidate for the United States Senate on the stump, in Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, after he had been baited by the “Little Giant” to explain where he stood on marriage between the races, and on social and political equality:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Four years before, at Peoria, on October 16, 1854, Lincoln confessed to his ambivalence as to what should be done about slavery, and with the freed black men and women were slavery abolished:

If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land. . . . [But free] them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. . . . A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded. We can not, then, make them equals.

Three years later, in June of 1857, in Springfield, Lincoln was still entertaining the idea of repatriating the freed slaves back to their native continent:

Such separation, if ever effected at all, must be effected by colonization; . . . what colonization most needs is a hearty will. . . . Let us he brought to believe it is morally right . . . to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.

In urging colonization Lincoln was echoing men of far greater learning and higher station, such as Jefferson and Madison. In 1829, the author of the Constitution became president of the American Colonization Society—founded by John Randolph and Henry Clay after the War of 1812—”in the belief that its plan to return slaves to Africa represented the most sensible way out of that long-festering crisis.” Clay, Lincoln’s idol, advocated returning the slaves to Africa throughout his public career. In eulogizing Clay in Springfield on July 6, 1852, Lincoln celebrated his hero’s lifelong association with the American Colonization Society, and quoted Clay’s 1827 address to that society:

There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence. Transplanted in a foreign land, they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law and liberty.

In hearty approval of Clay’s words, Lincoln declared:

This suggestion of the possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African continent was made twenty-five years ago. Every succeeding year has added strength to the hope of its realization. May it indeed be realized!

Gradual repatriation and return of all the slaves to Africa, said Lincoln in the closing words of his long eulogy, would be a “glorious consummation”—Henry Clay’s greatest contribution to his country.

Lincoln’s words in the decade prior to his presidency are jolting to the modern ear. But all they tell us is this: on racial equality, Lincoln in 1858 was a man of his time and place. Like almost all white males of his age, he believed the races should remain separate. This is confirmed by his ardent admirer, General Donn Piatt, who thought Lincoln “the greatest figure looming up in our history.” After meeting with the President-elect in Springfield, Piatt wrote on the eve of Lincoln’s departure for Washington:

Expressing no sympathy for the slave, [Lincoln] laughed at the Abolitionists. . . . We were not at a loss to get at the fact, and the reason for it, in the man before us. Descended from the poor whites of a slave State, through many generations, he inherited the contempt, if not the hatred, held by that class for the negro.

A man must be measured against his time. As Lincoln himself said in his Second Inaugural: “judge not that we be not judged.” Lincoln’s position on slavery—that it was evil, that he would have no part of it—was that of a principled politician of courage. As for his views on racial equality, they were the views of almost all of his countrymen. But if Lincoln did not go to war to make men equal, did he go to war to “make men free”—to end the evil of slavery? For to answer the question, “Was this a just war?” we have to understand why both sides fought.

Lincoln’s Concessions to the South

Unlike the Lincoln of Gettysburg battlefield in 1863, the Lincoln who slipped into Washington in disguise in the dead of night in the winter of 1861 did not have the least intention of freeing any slaves. Nor did the South have reason to fear Lincoln would, or could, abolish slavery. The Supreme Court was Southern-dominated, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney of the 1857 Dred Scott decision. There was no threat to slavery from that quarter. And, during the campaign of 1860, Lincoln repeatedly assured the South he was no Abolitionist. In the first paragraphs of his Inaugural Address, Lincoln repeated his assurances that he would make no attempt to abolish slavery.

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed, and been open to their inspection. It is found m nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no intention to do so.” Those who nominated and elected mc did so with full knowledge that I have made this, and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them.

His party’s platform, said Lincoln, endorsed the “inviolate” right of each state to “control its own domestic institutions.” In excoriation of John Brown’s raid, Lincoln noted in his Inaugural that, in their 1860 platform. Republicans “denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”

South Carolina had seceded on the grounds that the United States was failing to uphold the fugitive slave provision of the Constitution. But Lincoln assured Southerners their escaped slaves would be returned:

There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

 

It is scarcely questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it, for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the law-giver is the law. All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution—to this provision as much as to any other. To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases come within the terms of this clause, “shall be delivered up,” their oaths are unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in good temper, could they not, with nearly equal unanimity, frame and pass a law, by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath? [Emphasis added.]

Lincoln is calling here for a new federal fugitive slave law to reinforce Congress’ constitutional obligation that escaped slaves “shall be delivered up” to their masters. In capturing and returning fugitive slaves, said Lincoln, some observers favor state authority, others federal authority. But, he asked: What is the difference? “If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him, or to others, by which authority it is done.”

The issue on which Republicans were united was that the extension of slavery to new states should be halted. Lincoln did not back down from this position in his Inaugural Address. But he did offer a guarantee to the South that where slavery existed, it could be made a permanent institution, by a new constitutional amendment.

One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. . . . I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable.

Thus, in this final concession, Lincoln says he would not oppose a constitutional amendment to make slavery permanent in the 15 states where it then existed. The first Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution Abraham Lincoln endorsed, then, did not end chattel slavery, but would have authorized chattel slavery forever. No true Abolitionist could have been other than horrified by Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address.

Is there a moral defense of Lincoln’s offer to make permanent an institution that all now agree was odious and evil? Only this: if it was not wrong for the Founding Fathers to accept slavery as the price of a constitution to establish the United States, it cannot be wrong for Lincoln to reaffirm the Founding Fathers’ concession—to repair and restore his fractured country. In appeasing the South on slavery, Lincoln was being faithful to the Constitution he had sworn to protect and defend, and to his duty as President to unite his divided nation. He was also being true to his belief that, if slavery were restricted to where it existed, it would wither and die.

At the dedication of Freedmen’s Monument in Washington in 1876—a sculpture depicting a slave on his knees looking up in gratitude into the benevolent face of the Great Emancipator—Frederick Douglass stunned an audience including President Ulysses S. Grant by calling Lincoln “the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground,” Frederick Douglass went on, “Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country . . . he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” A not unfair assessment.

Did slavery cause the war? In 1927, historians Charles and Mary Beard produced their famous and first in-depth study of American history, The Rise of American Civilization. It captivated scholars and laymen alike. After carefully examining the facts concerning slavery and the Civil War, they concluded:

Since, therefore, the abolition of slavery never appeared in the platform of any great political party, since the only appeal ever made to the electorate on that issue was scornfully repulsed, since the spokesman of the Republicans [Lincoln] emphatically declared that his party never intended to interfere with slavery in the states in any shape or form, it seems reasonable to assume that the institution of slavery was not the fundamental issue during the epoch preceding the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

To those who yet contend that Lincoln and the Union went to war “to make men free,” how do they respond to the fact that when the war began, with the firing on Fort Sumter, there were more slave states inside the Union (eight) than in the Confederacy (seven)? Four Southern states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, had remained loyal. They did not wish to secede; they did so only after Lincoln put out a call for 75,000 volunteers for an army to invade and subjugate the Deep South. That army would have to pass through the Upper South, which would have to join a war against its kinfolk. This the Upper South would not do. It was Lincoln’s call to war against the already seceded states of the Deep South that caused Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to leave a Union in which they had hoped to remain. Jeffrey Hummel notes in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996):

Previously unwilling to secede over the issue of slavery, these four states [Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas] were now ready to fight for the ideal of a voluntary Union. Out in the western territory . . . the sedentary Indian tribes—Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—also joined the rebellion. . . . Lincoln [by calling up the militia | had more than doubled the Confederacy’s white population and material resources.

Before Fort Sumter, the Confederacy sent emissaries to Washington to discuss a compromise. Lincoln refused to meet with them, lest a presidential meeting confer legitimacy on a secession he refused to recognize. Against the advice of army chief General Winfield Scott, Secretary of State William II. Seward, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, all of whom advocated evacuating Fort Sumter, he sent the Star of the Sea to resupply the fort. Viewing this as a provocation, the Southerners fired on the fort, and the American flag, and the great war was on.

And Southerners were perhaps not mistaken in their belief that Lincoln had provoked the conflict. As the President wrote with quiet satisfaction to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox, commander of the expedition to Fort Sumter, on May 1, 1861:

You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter [sic], even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.

Like Polk before him, and Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt after him, Lincoln had maneuvered his enemy into firing the first shot.

Did the South Have a Right to Secede?

In the modern era, one reads more and more that the great Southern leaders were “traitors.” Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, all heroes of the Mexican War, however, were no more and no less traitors than Washington, Adams, and Jefferson were traitors to Great Britain. At West Point, which George E. Pickett, Stonewall Jackson, and Joe Johnston attended, the constitutional law book that all three Confederate generals had studied, A View of the Constitution of the United States by William Rawle—a Philadelphia abolitionist and Supreme Court Justice—taught that states had a right to secede: “To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed.”

Union officers had studied Rawle as well. Indeed, the idea of state supremacy, of states’ rights to nullify federal law, and of a right to secede if the issue were truly grave, had a long, distinguished history in America. In the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, Jefferson and Madison, authors respectively of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—enraged at the jailing of editors under the Alien and Sedition Acts—argued that states had a right to nullify patently unconstitutional federal law.

Between 1800 and 1815, three serious attempts were made by New England Federalists to secede—at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, and Madison’s War of 1812. The secessionist leader was a Revolutionary War hero and a member of Washington’s Cabinet, Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering. The Federalist causes mirrored South Carolina’s causes: what they saw as an intolerable regime, interference with trade, incompatibility with alien peoples (Germans and Scotch-Irish), and a conviction the Union was being run for the benefit of the South. Said Pickering in 1805: “I will rather anticipate a new confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South.”

By a twist of fate, Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton, who had made Jefferson President in 1801 by persuading his allies to abandon Aaron Burr in the Mouse of Representatives in the tie election of 1800, probablv saved the Union. Federalists had conspired with Burr in 1804 to support him for governor, if Burr would lead New York into a New England Confederacv. But the rcvilemcnt of Burr bv Hamilton, as venal, corrupt, dictatorial, and dangerous, persuaded New Yorkers, by 7,000 votes, to reject him. Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel and killed him. Revulsion at the death of the patriot-statesman aborted the Federalists’ plot.

In anticipation of John C. Calhoun’s nullification, Massachusetts’ legislature in 1807 denounced Jefferson’s embargo, demanded that Congress repeal it, and declared the Enforcement Act “not legally binding.” Many merchants ignored the law; and the New England authorities looked the other wav. At the Hartford Convention of 1814, New Englanders, enraged by Madison’s war with England when the Mother Country was in a death struggle against the dictator Napoleon, and by the interruption of their trade, threatened to secede and reassociate with Great Britain.

In 1832 South Carolina “nullified” a tariff law it believed was bleeding the South to death and asserted a right to secede. In 1843, when Tyler was driving for annexation of Texas, a vast territory that might be broken into five states, tilting the political balance of power in favor of the slave states, John Quincy Adams thundered that the annexation of Texas would justify Northern secession. And, in 1848, a freshman congressman critic of the Mexican War spoke of the inherent right of states to secede:

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit. . . . It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.

These are the words of Abraham Lincoln, January 12, 1848.

Why Did the South Secede?

If Lincoln did not threaten slavery, why, then, did the Deep South secede? Answer: by 1861, America had become two nations and two peoples. The South had evolved into a separate civilization and wished to be a separate country. While moderates like Lee wanted to remain in the Union, Southern militants had concluded that, with the election of Lincoln, the North had won the great struggle for control of the national destiny.

The South had given the Union most of her Presidents, her Supreme Court Justices, her Speakers of the House. But, the South would never again determine the nation’s direction. This first Republican president had not received a single electoral vote in a Southern state; in ten Southern states he had not received a single vote. Lincoln owed the South nothing; but he owed everything to her enemies, to the admirers of John Brown, to the Northern industrialists who had Lincoln’s commitment to a protective tariff that the South believed threatened its ruin.

After decades of a troubled unhappy marriage, for the Deep South Lincoln’s