Union Preservation Quotes
The words are those of President Andrew Jackson. See {604550}. After occupying New Orleans, General Butler infuriated the Confederate Sympathizers with this act. Jackson was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and an unapologetic slave owner. The Southerners had erected a magnificent statue of their hero Jackson on horseback in a major section of the city. Butler, then ordered that the Jackson quotation be chiseled in the stone base. The townspeople were furious that this Union General would make up words and attribute them to Jackson; however, when they finally realized that Jackson had actually said those words they felt even more humiliated. There are still a few Southernors who consider this terrible insult to the Confederacy, and of course that is just what Butler intended.
Jackson was reacting to the claimed right of South Carolina to nullify Federal tariffs and other Federal laws.
The amendments failed as did the compromise.
Abraham Lincoln’s major political opponent in Illinois agreed with Lincoln on the criticality of preserving the Union from a split off of the Southern States. He tended to be more willing to pander to the South than Lincoln, however they were strong allies on the fundamental issue. However, what the slavery forces in the south wanted and needed to forever protect slavery was not in the power of any President to do, short of ending the democracy. Slavery was doomed in the long run if there was no way to enforce the Supreme Court’s Dredd Scott decision upon (Northern) states whose constitutions and laws made any slave who entered the state free and whose people would not use its police and legal powers to return runaway slaves. It was the abolitionists who won the majority in the battle of public opinion on slavery. It was only a matter of time when slavery would become untenable in the South. Lincoln was unwilling to force the Northern states to return fugitive slaves against the constitution, laws and will of the people of those states as Buchanan said he was (but had a hard time doing). Also Lincoln was unwilling to allow new territories to enter the union if they allowed slavery.
Seward, the newly appointed Secretary of State was extremely concerned that if the radical direction that many of the Southern States were moving in turned into a Civil War, that the Union should not be seen as the precipitating initiator. His policy was followed and the secessionist extremists, not so politically sensitive, attacked Fort Sumter and became the initiator of the war so far as public opinion was concerned domestically and internationally. It was very important for the Union effort that the Confederates by seen as a group of radicals rebelling against the authority of a legitimate state. If that was the case, any effort to aid or help the South could be seen as an unfriendly act of war against the United States. Conversely, the South would have liked to be seen as an independent nation, no longer connected to the United States and entitled to diplomatic relations and foreign trade with all other nations. But the attack on Fort Sumter made that position much harder to maintain.
Some Lincoln critics point to this quotation to illustrate their belief that Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves was not based on deeply held personal moral convictions but was the result of pragmatic political forces pure and simple. Others believe that this statement to Greeley represented a political tactic to hold Maryland and Kentucky—then slave states—in the Union, but that Lincoln was waiting for the right time to adopt a policy of making emancipation paramount.
