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Conflict is inevitable. Nature enters into conflict as a part of its natural design. The fundamental elements of chemistry conflict. The weather is a product of competing forces. The flora and fauna conflict, more often than not, violently, and there are winners and losers. The world as we know it is the outcome of conflicts from the past, and the future is made by the conflicts of today.

The potential for conflict is infinite, but the responses to conflict are not. There can be a war, with a winner or loser. There can be a negotiation, with the competitors deciding the negotiated outcome is better than the cost and risk of a war. There can be appeasement, where one side gives in to avoid a war. And there can be deterrence, where one or both sides see the conflict, but decline to move forward to open war because the cost is too great.

In this short series, we shall look at examples of each of the outcomes of human conflict.

War

President Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was thrust into the deadliest war in American history from the day he took office. His election was the precipitating event that caused the Southern states to begin dropping out of the Union, and so by the time Lincoln was sworn in, the country he was elected to lead no longer existed. He faced a choice from the first day; appease by doing nothing, negotiate by offering a slavery settlement acceptable to the Southern leadership, or war. Deterrence was lost by the time he arrived.

It had been the thought of the various governors of the Southern states that succession would be opposed, and then eventually, accepted. It was not illogical for them to think such a thing, and had another candidate won the highly contested 1860 election, perhaps their calculations would have proved correct. In fact, had the Southern Democrat John Breckinridge prevailed, there would likely have been no war at all, and the issue of slavery would have been pushed back, possibly to be resolved via some legal mechanism that had yet to present itself. Also on the ballot was Lincoln’s old debating partner, Stephan Douglas, who was the Democrat from Illinois. The Northern and Southern Democrats split their own vote and a third-party candidate, John Bell, divided the vote further and that paved the way for the Lincoln win.

Lincoln had served in the Illinois state legislature and had done one term previously in the Federal legislature, but he had never served as an executive officer, and he was not a seasoned military veteran. He had one overriding passion that was well known, which was his opposition to slavery, and he also had a personal history of loss. By the time he reached adulthood, he had suffered through many deaths in his family. Lincoln was a stoic, solitary man who had absorbed the losses around him quietly, and the nation put him in charge at the historical moment the slavery issue reached a boil.

No one could have known the exact cost in death and destruction the Civil War would bring when it started, but the calculations that Southern leadership made regarding the United State’s willingness to endure deaths were wrong. In Lincoln, the United States had an executive leader that was willing to see hundreds of thousands of other men die to ‘save the union’ which also meant the end of slavery.

After the war, Lincoln was elevated to the level of a secular saint, in part because the Untied States did, in fact, win the war, and Lincoln himself was made a battlefield casualty by assassination days after the Southern surrender. We’ve collectively decided that the Civil War battlefields are ‘hallowed ground’ which was the way Lincoln described the blood-soaked landscape in Gettysburg, and that the war was a necessary trial by fire that cleaned the nation of the ‘original sin’ of slavery.

Another view is that it was an incredibly costly war that led to the deaths of at least 650,000 men, virtually none of whom owned any slaves. Lincoln pressed forward despite the costs in blood to others. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which was the first legal effort to end slavery, but there was no plan for what these millions of slaves, who were economically ill prepared for emancipation, would do next. The chaos the war unleashed on the Southern states was unprecedented, and Lincoln was not around to see what would happen next. He got what he wanted from the battle, which was to preserve the union of the states and see every state rid of slavery, but if there was a way short of war to get the same result, Lincoln didn’t find it, or even seek it.

His rhetoric elevated him to the level of a spiritual leader before and during the war, but like any spiritual leader, his stated goals demanded martyrs to be made a reality. War works, war settles, and war defines, but wars are costly to those that fight them and those that live in the lands where they are fought. Every leader that would participate in a war should weigh carefully those costs and make the wars that must come as short and conclusive as possible. Lincoln did end the Civil War as quickly as possible, but we scarcely think now if he could have avoided war entirely. That was a path not taken, and there are millions of missing descendants in the United States who never came to be because their male ancestors fell on the battlefields and weren’t even given a burial. Most rotted and were eaten by wild animals. That is just a part of the deadly consequences of war.

So committed to the vision that Lincoln had, and to the justice of the cause, here we four presidents reading the Gettysburg Address:

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