A Letter to the Spectator (U.K.) on the American Civil War

Letter to the Editor

The Spectator

22 Old Queen Street

London, SW1H 9HP

England

 

RE: Amanda Foreman, ‘Towards Zero: the gruesome countdown to the American Civil War,’ The Spectator (10 August 2024), <https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/towards-zero-the-gruesome-countdown-to-the-american-civil-war/>

 

     Foreman wrote “South Carolina senator Preston Brooks beat[] the abolitionist campaigner Charles Sumner unconscious.” This is plainly error. Brooks was a member of the United States House of Representatives, not the Senate. Sumner, by contrast, was a United States Senator.

Foreman also wrote: Lincoln “insist[ed] he would defend the Union to his last breath while promising that slavery was safe in his hands.” In 1860, Lincoln’s and the Republican Party’s political programme was to contain slavery in the states where it already existed and, concomitantly, to preclude slavery from expanding into any of the federal territories (which were not then yet states which had congressional representation). Slavery was in no sense “safe in his hands.” And this policy, contra Foreman, was not “negotiable.” Likewise, Lincoln’s policy was grounded in his widely proclaimed belief that slavery was a moral wrong, and he believed that if slavery were contained it would be abandoned even in the slave states because their export market for slaves (that is, the federal territories) would have dried up.

          Two lesser points. Foreman wrote: “Only two naval fortifications were still in Union hands by the time [Lincoln] took office.” That should have read “Only two naval fortifications in the South were still in Union hands.” Likewise, Foreman wrote: “[G]iven the four-year conflict’s impact on society, and not just because of the immense death toll, which new estimates put as high as 750,000—[was] more than the losses from all other wars combined.” That should have read “more than the losses from all other United States wars combined.” And of course, you only reach the 750,000 estimate if you count confederate war dead. In estimating U.S losses in wars, other than the American Civil War, such estimates only include those fighting for the United States, and not those fighting against it.

 

Is mise, le meas,

 

A Letter to the Editor, Responding to Amanda Foreman’s ‘Towards Zero: the gruesome countdown to the American Civil War,’ The Spectator (U.K.) (submitted circa August 2024) (Sept. 3, 2024, 9:04 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2024/09/letter-to-spectator-uk-on-american.html>;