Now That's The Long Game, Mr. President

A nice companion piece to Spielberg's Lincoln.

...During the next nine months, however, the thrust of national strategy shifted away from conciliating the border states and anti-emancipation Democrats. The antislavery Republican constituency grew louder and more demanding. The argument that slavery had brought on the war and that reunion with slavery would only sow the seeds of another war became more insistent. The evidence that slave labor sustained the Confederate economy and the logistics of Confederate armies grew stronger. Counteroffensives by Southern armies in the summer of 1862 wiped out many of the Union gains of the winter and spring. Many northerners, including Lincoln, became convinced that bolder steps were necessary. To win the war over an enemy fighting for and sustained by slavery, the North must strike at slavery.

In July 1862, Lincoln decided on a major change in national strategy. Instead of deferring to the border states and Northern Democrats, he would activate the Northern antislavery majority that had elected him and mobilize the potential of black manpower by issuing a proclamation of freedom for slaves in rebellious states—the Emancipation Proclamation. "Decisive and extreme measures must be adopted," Lincoln told members of his cabinet, according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Emancipation was "a military necessity, absolutely necessary to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued."

By trying to convert a Confederate resource to Union advantage, emancipation thus became a crucial part of the North's national strategy. But the idea of putting arms in the hands of black men provoked even greater hostility among Democrats and border state Unionists than emancipation itself. In August 1862, Lincoln told delegates from Indiana who offered to raise two black regiments that "the nation could not afford to lose Kentucky at this crisis" and that "to arm the negroes would turn 50,000 bayonets from the loyal border States against us that were for us."

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And it was time to call in General Grant to kick some ass.

President Obama's two major achievements so far has been to keep us from a a McCain/Palin Presidency and a Romney/Ryan Presidency.

It looks like his long game is going to be more of his mind-boggling attempts at bipartisanship with Evil.

Comments

[Thomas Wallin]

I'm a thinking Lincoln should have let the South loose. We're still fighting the Civil War - to a ruinous seemingly eternal stalemate. The South is still pushing for minimal Federal government and individuals, families and businesses free of all governmental regulation. The South still has a very romantic view of the glory of the individual, the family, and the family business. But of course if Lincoln had given up the fight, there might still be slavery in the South and for the end of slavery the Civil War was worth the awful cost, which still is mounting.