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| This November 8, 1863 photograph is often referred to as the "Gettysburg portrait". Taken by Alexander Gardner at Mathew Brady’s studio in Washington, DC, just days prior to his delivery of the Gettysburg Address. |
🔥 The Civil War: The Myth of "Negotiation"
The American Civil War didn’t erupt because politicians forgot to talk. It wasn’t a scheduling error, a missed handshake, or a failure of courtesy. It was a collision — decades in the making — between a nation trying to hold itself together and a region determined to break away.
Yet even today, some insist it could all have been avoided. In 2024, CNN commentator Scott Jennings offered the latest version of that old myth:
“I think that politicians could have negotiated an end to slavery without the bloodshed… maybe they could have settled it and gotten the South to agree.” [1]
It sounds reasonable. It sounds civilized. It sounds like the kind of ending we wish history had given us.
But it has one fatal flaw.
It isn’t true.
Here’s what actually happened.
🧠Lincoln the Pragmatist
Abraham Lincoln despised slavery — he said so openly and often — but he also understood the explosive reality of the moment. Slavery wasn’t just a moral issue in the South; it was an economic empire. Cotton, tobacco, rice, and indigo were fortunes built on enslaved labor. Any threat to slavery was seen as a threat to Southern wealth, identity, and power.
So Lincoln did what pragmatists do: he compromised.
From the very beginning, he ran on a platform of containment, not abolition. His goal was not to eliminate slavery where it already existed, but to prevent its expansion into new states and territories. He made that clear in his 1858 Senate race against Stephen Douglas and again during his 1860 presidential campaign.
He even promised the South that he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed, believing it would eventually die out on its own. He explained in a letter to a friend:
"I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states… to let the slavery of the other states alone; while… we should never knowingly lend ourselves… to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death…” [2]
Lincoln was offering the South the most generous deal any antislavery politician could offer.
They didn’t take it.
🗳️ The Election That Broke the Country
By 1860, the nation was in turmoil over slavery and whether new states would be free or slave. Voters understood that the next president would shape the country’s future. And they had four choices:
Abraham Lincoln, Republican — opposed to the expansion of slavery.
Stephen A. Douglas, Northern Democrat — champion of “popular sovereignty.”
John C. Breckinridge, Southern Democrat — demanding federal protection for slavery.
John Bell, Constitutional Union Party — urging unity while avoiding the slavery question entirely.
Lincoln won less than 40% of the popular vote, but swept the Northern states (plus Oregon and California), giving him 180 electoral votes and the presidency. [3]
But before he even took the oath of office, Southern states began seceding and forming the Confederate States of America.
Negotiation wasn’t failing. Negotiation was being rejected.
🚂 Lincoln's Last Appeal
Still hoping to prevent disunion, President‑elect Lincoln left Illinois early for a whistle‑stop tour of the North before his inauguration. His goals were simple:
Let the public see and hear him in an age before mass media.
Reassure the South — again — that he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.
Even in his March 1861 inaugural address, Lincoln repeated that promise:
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists… I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”[4]
But at that point, his reassurance came with a boundary. Lincoln made it clear that secession — and war — would not begin with him:
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow‑countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war… You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.”[4]
The South heard him — and fired anyway.
⚔️ The South Chooses War
On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The fort surrendered the next day.
Lincoln had no choice. He called for troops and went to war — not to free the slaves, but to save the Union.
For two years, the Union stumbled. Generals failed. Battles were lost. The war dragged on.
Then came the summer of 1863.
Vicksburg fell after a forty‑six‑day siege, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River.
At Gettysburg, Lee’s second invasion of the North was stopped in a three‑day battle that turned the tide of the war.
The Confederacy began to see the writing on the wall.
And suddenly, they were interested in “peace.”
But not reunion. Not emancipation. Not compromise.
Just an end to fighting — while keeping slavery and independence intact.
Lincoln rejected that idea completely.
📜 The Gettysburg Address: A Moral Answer
Although the Gettysburg Address was not written as a direct reply to any specific Confederate proposal, it became Lincoln’s clearest public answer to the concept of “peace without reunion.”
By accepting the invitation to speak at the dedication of the new National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln seized the moment to define the war’s purpose — and the nation’s future.
What followed was the shortest speech of his presidency, and one of the greatest speeches in world history. Memorized by generations, quoted by scholars, and studied across the globe, the Gettysburg Address reframed the war as a struggle not just for Union, but for a “new birth of freedom.”
Lincoln wanted slavery to end because he abhorred it. But he had been willing to tolerate it where it already existed — if the South remained in the Union. When the South left, violently, Lincoln saw the chance to right a national wrong. As he said:
“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.” [5]
This was not negotiation.
This was purpose.
📖 The Real Lesson
Lincoln did attempt to settle the crisis before the war began. He remained open to peace during the war — but only if the South returned to the Union. It was the South’s insistence on independence and the preservation of slavery that made settlement impossible.
Misunderstandings like the one that sparked this essay aren’t harmless conjecture. When Scott Jennings dismissed this as “irrelevant historical meandering,” he missed the point. Inaccuracies cannot be corrected if the past is treated as irrelevant. In this case, they turn secession into a misunderstanding, slavery into a negotiable detail, and Lincoln into a man who simply failed to schedule the right meeting.
Lessons cannot be learned if the facts of the past are ignored — or worse, falsified.
But the record is clear.
Lincoln tried compromise. The South chose rebellion. And the war that followed reshaped the nation.
To pretend otherwise is to forget what Lincoln himself warned: that a nation “conceived in liberty” can still be undone by those who reject its laws and deny its ideals. The same forces that tore the country apart in 1861 — defiance of democratic norms, contempt for lawful authority, and the belief that one’s own power outweighs the nation’s survival — remain with us going into 2026.
That is why the past matters. That is why the truth matters.
The past is prologue. Human nature — love, hate, greed, generosity, morality, corruption — has not changed since the beginning of time. And in 2025–26, the same disregard for laws and traditions that tore the nation apart in 1861 threatens “government of the people, by the people, for the people” again.
To preserve it, we — the living — must be “here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” A man who gave his life for these principles — expects no less.
Lincoln refuses to let us forget the dangers of the present — a warning preserved in the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.
Mac
📚 Works Cited
[1] Jones K. Scott Jennings undertakes herculean task of explaining what Trump meant when he said Lincoln should’ve “settled” the Civil War. Mediaite. October 18, 2024. Accessed December 19, 2025.
[2] "Letter to Williamson Durley (October 3, 1845)" Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 1 [1824-Aug. 28, 1848]. In the digital collection Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 19, 2025.
[3] Wikipedia contributors. "1860 United States presidential election." Wikipedia. . . Published 2024. Accessed December 19, 2025.
[4] Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 4 [Mar. 5, 1860-Oct. 24, 1861]. In the digital collection Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 19, 2025.
[5] Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 7 [Nov. 5, 1863-Sept. 12, 1864]. In the digital collection Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 19, 2025.
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