Democracy, Civil War, Fort Sumter and Lincoln

Democracy is not just given, it is fought for with blood and loss of life, and often it eludes the most sincere during long years. Democracy is also not simply an American Constitution, or a British Parliament, or a European coalition with a president and assembly.

Democracy is the will of the people of a region or country to govern themselves as they see fit. As long as they permit a free press, the right to petition the government, and a fair court system, democracy will grow and flourish.

I think of democracy today, the 12^th of April 2011, because 150 years ago, on the 12^th of April 1861, the American Civil war begin with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, a block and granite fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The Yankee defenders finally had to evacuate the Fort, and it remained in Confederate hands, despite many northern attempts to re-take it, until the Union's General Sherman took Savannah, Georgia, south of Charleston and began his famous march north, late in the Civil War. Today, Fort Sumter is a national monument and park visited by many Americans each year.

In itself, perhaps Fort Sumter is insignificant, but to Americans it represents the beginning of a long and bloody fight between “brothers” to save the Union from dissolving into small regional governments with no oath of loyalty to the United States. Fort Sumter also represents the Confederacy’s attempt to continue the institution of slavery, even by war against the United States, if need be.

So, when young and nascent democrats, in North Africa or the Middle East, despair, when they feel that they will never win the right to govern themselves, they should remember Fort Sumter, and the brutal five years of civil war that America suffered, including the assassination of President Lincoln, to finally establish the Constitution as America’s governing document, to subdue slavery and those who supported it, and to make the Declaration of Independence and its Bill of Rights a reality for all Americans - north and south, black and white.  

The Civil War cost America more lives than all its other wars combined.

The South, that became the Confederacy, underestimated the resolve of the North to end slavery and to hold the Union together, whatever the cost. President Lincoln was elected on exactly that platform. In his first Inaugural Address on the 4^th of March 1861, just a month before the Battle of Fort Sumter, he said :

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war....You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it.” Lincoln ended his first Inaugural address with a plea for national unity and a peaceful settlement of the questions separating the North and South : “We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.” The South had already seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy when Lincoln spoke. His pleas for peace were ignored and the Union had to be secured on the battlefields of Shiloh, Gettysburg and many others. Finally, the long and vicious war came to an end when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House on the 9th of April 1865, just a week before President Lincoln was shot on the 14th of April.