@JayHawkFanToo
First, I don’t want to mislead you,or others, into thinking this book by Abbott is a radical reinterpretation of the Civil War. It is not. But it certainly comes at it from an abolitionist perspective that differs from most mainstream historians.
Second, as indicated above, and now reemphasized here, much of what I wrote above was triggered by Abbott’s brief discussion of Fremont and was not in Abbott’s book. Abbott’s remarks about Fremont enabled me a premise from which to bring together much other arcane reading I have done on the Civil War the last seven or so years that has focused on reading about many of the often overlooked aspects of the Civil War, such as the burgeoning rock oil kerosene exports, the repurposing of the whaling fleet, the ensuing decline of northern whale oil illuminant and southern camphene illuminant (an blend of alcohol and turpentine) exports, and Lincoln’s conspicuous high tax on camphene and conspicuous low tax on kerosene. I also have read what I could about the Baltimore and Ohio railroads, and about the transitional era in railroading that began with railroads being built to connect the old north east with the Great Lakes and that then lead to a huge boom in Great Lakes economic growth that lead to much dislocation in the northeast subsequently. Likewise, I have read some about plantations, plantation development, and plantation financing, as well as about the aspect of the New York banking industry that financed both the slave trade and the plantation development and yearly operations budgeting. Yet another area of reading has been the connection between West Point military academy and the railroad industry. West Point was before the Civil War kind of the Silicon Valley of American Railroading. It produced a large number of the engineers and surveyors that oversaw location and building and later operation of building of railroads. West Point and the US Army were also intricately involved in the study and thinking and strategizing about the grand plan of transcontinental railroading and its relationship to what we might call force structure today. It is not an exaggeration to say that the two largest influences on the building and operation of the United States rail network was the US Army and the Morgan banking interests. Army engineers surveyed the the most important right of ways. Army engineers rolled out and took jobs working in management of the railroads. And the US Army was indispensable to providing the military force structure needed to both build the railroads, and then secure them during operation for several decades during the 19th Century. The US Army understood from early in the 19th Century that trains reshaped the battle space and constituted crucial lines of communication for fighting wars. They also understood that once the telegraph became technologically feasible that the telegraph line was the most important leap in lines of communication in war and peace in human history and that railroads, even if they had done nothing else, were necessary to enable the Army to secure the telegraph lines themselves, so that trade and military action could be conducted with the advantage of faster communications than one’s opponent whenever possible. But I digress. Back to your question about where has this book by Abbott been? I will try to answer you question the following way, since I think it is a very good question.
There is a saying that “the winners write history.”
That saying oversimplifies things some.
Winners are comprised of different subgroups.
First, there is the subgroup that came out on top and orchestrated the victory and usually orchestrates the peace afterwards.
Next, among the winners are the subgroups that helped win the war, or even catalyzed the war, but were maneuvered out of control, or were never in control, once the war started, and so after the victory find themselves marginalized increasingly. Abolitionists from the old northeast would fit this description during and after the Civil War.
So: while it is true that the winners write the histories that get canonized and taught, the winners that get marginalized, often write histories, too. And because they are on the winning side, they can often get them published, because the lesser winners like to read about their accomplishments, early on, too. But these histories by those that helped win the war, but were not in control, are apparently not canonized and taught forever after.
Note: losers also write histories, but they apparently often cannot get them published, unless what they write calculatedly portrays the losers as the “causers” of the war and quite outclassed by the winners. There are exceptions of course. Sometimes the winners have to immediately remobilize the loser to help the winner get the war torn country back producing again, and maybe even to take on another mutual enemy. In those cases, the losers histories are allowed to portray the losers in a more favorable, but not TOO favorable, light. Usually the loser gets its leaders to be portrayed as tactically brilliant, and it soldiers as heroic and courageous in their devotion to duty, and that it was the evil politicians of the losers that wasted the loser’s great generals and brave soldiers on a lost cause, or a misguided cause. Its probably mostly orchestrated by the winners how the history by the losers is written. It probably depends on the expedient needs of the winner, as the peace unfolds.
Now back to the winners.
My impression so far is that the author, Cabbott, was solidly apart of the northeastern abolitionist movement and wrote about the early stages of a war in progress from the POV of such an abolitionist.
While the abolitionists were on the winning side, it at least appears to me that they ultimately may have been used by Lincoln and his core base of Great Lakes industrialists and Morgan banking interests to first trigger support for war, and later to broaden and deepen and perpetuate support of the war. Its also worth noting that the abolitionists and the northeastern wealth that funded the abolitionists do not appear in retrospect wholly altruistic in motivation, though at least the lepers with the most fingers. The northeastern wealth and ordinary workers were reputedly suffering significantly from their industries being eclipsed by the staggering population, rail, and industrial growth occurring further west along the Great Lakes. Whaling was in eclipse, too. Coal and iron production were moving from New York and New Jersey to western Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Northeastern wealth was thus caught between losing out to the dynamic industrial expansion on the Great Lakes, and to the massively expanding plantation economy being developed with New York loans in the South. Each year successful plantation owners, and would be plantation owners, went to New York to get the loans to buy still larger plots of land farther west (moving west from the old south on the seaboard to what historians now call the old southwest in Alabama and Mississippi, and then into the new Southwest of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona). Each year the newest plantations were being scaled up to achieve ever greater economies of scale and to hedge against soil exhaustion on the older smaller plantations farther east. The demand for slaves was rising. And the demand for rural rail road spurs to move cotton, camphene from turpentine plantations, and rice, to market, and slaves and supplies to the new plantations stimulated development of southern iron foundaries in Tennessee and Alabama, and a fledgling steam engine industry in Georgia. And the South’s Senators and the Great Lakes Senators reputedly sometimes allied to suppress economic activities in the northeast to benefit their own regions. And the rising millions of slaves in the south posed a looming industrial threat to the northeast and the Great Lakes industrialists, because sooner, or later, the South would begin to divert its slave labor into industrial production and thus become industrial competitors the North could not match without adopting slavery themselves; this point is something insufficiently explored in histories of slavery so far IMHO. This would have made the northerners as dependent on the New York City slave trade and related lending as the southerners had grown. New York City banks supplied the vast amounts of financing used by southern plantations, which were proto corporate industrial farming. Many of the New York City banks traced their roots to London’s banking entities. New York City, which started as a Dutch Colony, had by the time of the 1850s become a kind of British Hong Kong equivalent in North America. While Britain had lost USA as an incorporated colony on a map, it had regained her as a financial colony shaped and directed from its New York City bank lending.
In this context of changing control and rapid bursts of regional growth in the continental interior creating both huge winners and considerable economic dislocation out in the older seaboard regions of the young country: the appeal in the old northeast of abolition, and the funding of abolitionist movements, had both a moral and an economic dimension. Abolition was consistent with the northeast’s dominant protestant religious values. But abolition also struck a blow at lessening the economic and political advantages slavery was accruing to the South, and the disadvantages accruing to the northeast. Put another way, the northeast was against slavery for the same reason England’s working classes were against slavery. They saw slavery as holding down wages, and long term threatening employment itself. Upper classes in the old northeast appear divided on slavery somewhat the same as Great Britain’s upper classes were. New Englanders had little trouble with the merchant marine fleet owners profiting from carrying slaves, so long as they offloaded and on loaded them in NYC, out of sight out of mind, rather than in ports of New England. So: if you were in shipping, you might look favorably on slavery, but perhaps not if you were in the whaling and fishing industries, or manufacturing. It was, as we say today, complicated.
So: why has Cabbott’s book, which was published during the Civil War, at least in part, subsequently receded into the historical shadows (assuming that it has and we two are just not very well read in the field)?
My guess is that it is partly that we are not sufficiently well read. I have a hunch many Civil War scholars would have heard, or read of, this book, whether they relied on it much, or not.
But I suspect there is another part to the phenomenon, also.
My guess is that it has receded into the shadows the same way a more than superficial understanding of abolitionists and those that funded them have receded into the shadows of American history. The group of winners that were in control at the end of the Civil War, and remained largely in control for the remainder of the 19th and 20th Centuries, appear, in retrospect, to have decided that their own histories and not the abolitionist histories were to be canonized.
Further, I suspect there are probably more abolitionist histories of various aspects of the war that have fallen through the cracks and into the out of circulation stacks.
A case can be made that the old republic largely ended with the Civil War and that either a newly incorporated republic in 1868, or a private industrial oligarchy of sorts with some less specific date of inception, replaced it. This new republic, or private oligarchy, seems to have had little in common with the abolitionists that attained such a high profile shortly before and during the Civil War. Only a few short years after Lincoln’s assassination, basically after Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, Lincoln’s little 'r" republican and abolitionist vision of reconstruction ended abruptly, and it was swiftly and cruelly replaced with Jim Crow feudalism aka as share cropping with persons terrorised and informally institutionalized into a politically disenfranchised, quasi-slavery called share-cropping. The plantation owner was freed from the cost of supplying food and housing and health care for the slave, the slave was nominally free but effectively not, and without the power to effectively bargain for his share, or alternatively to engage in businesses that could cater to those in the economy that had wealth and money to spend. And it was being insured as a new economic order by–drum roll please–British insurance companies, and enforced by groups like Knights of the Golden Circle and the KKK. And while this was happening, some former Confederate government officials and Generals that had escaped abroad and been allowed to live and find work in either England, or the British common wealth, began slowly trickling back into Dixie and positions of honor.
The abolitionists did wield considerable power in the Senate for a time, but never really controlled the administration of the war effort , or the train building, or the iron and steel and oil production, once the war got under way with southern states seceding and Fort Sumpter getting occupied (thus enabling Lincoln to shell it and get the war on its way). The abolitionists could make politics complex and conflicted for the private industrial oligarchy, but they could not in the end every really be the ones driving the war machine and then the peace machine that likely dictated which histories got canonized.
Hypothesized result: the abolitionist histories got marginalized and it was dumb luck that I stumbled into it a century and a half later, when Project Guttenberg mindlessly copied all the volumes in university and city libaries with expired copyrights that it could and listed them in ways that search engines could pick up when I was looking for other things.
