[don-o]

Long, well balanced article. I went to the end for the snip I posted

[DiogenesLamp]

It is misleading people. The purpose of the Civil War was not to free the slaves. It was to stop renegade states from becoming an independent nation.

[Don Corleone]

Lincoln was the first President to openly ignore the Constitution while in office with his denial of Habeus Corpus. It had to start somewhere and I guess Lincoln was the man.

[DiogenesLamp]

From the Article:

Whereas Jefferson only proclaimed that all men were created equal, Lincoln ensured it was so by enshrining that fact on the battlefield.

Again, this is a bait and switch. Lincoln did not commit troops to the battlefield to end slavery. Lincoln committed troops to the battlefield to end the cause of Independence for Southern States. Up until at least August 22 of 1862, Lincoln was willing to keep slavery if the Southern States would stop fighting Dominance from Washington D.C.

Nearly a year and a half after the war had begun, Lincoln was still not fighting to end slavery, he was fighting to end Independence.

"Ending slavery" got added on as justification for the bloodshed long after the fact.

[Bratch]

"Oh, look! A Civil War thread!"

[rockrr]

You’re right don-o, it is a well balanced article. Now I’ll read the posts to see how well FReepers can twist things up ;’)

[Publius]

Federalist/Anti-Federalist ping. This is a balanced and thought provoking article.

[TBP]

The Imaginative Conservative is a terrific site, run by Kirkians with Hillsdale connections. Well worth reading.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln and Calhoun, the natural question is, "What/who is emblematic of the Democrat Party?"

[celmak]

It was not so much a North verses South as it was a DemoRAT verses everyone else war.

[Tau Food]

several branches of conservatism, including some (though certainly not all, or even most) agrarians, traditionalists, libertarians, and other vestiges of the Old Right, deem Lincoln a tyrant and his war as an abomination of constitutional governance, and venerate the South as the paragon of American liberty.

Why would anyone who wants to advance the cause of "liberty" advance the cause of a culture predicated upon slavery?

[x]

"When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s," wrote Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic, "they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun ... The party of Lincoln ... has become the party of Calhoun."

Sam Tanenhaus isn't really an authority on much of anything. He's not a stupid man, but he wants to make himself smaller than he could be by becoming a narrow political publicist, saying what advances his cause, rather than provoking serious thought.

Russell Kirk "admired" Calhoun intellectually as a theorist. So does Lani Guinier. But I'm not sure either would consider him an "exemplar" for the views they profess. There are plenty of people around the world who have developed ingenious political models that we can study, but that doesn't mean we would adopt the model or that we value the thinker highly outside the purely intellectual realm.

The take-away from the article is that libertarianism is theoretical and may not have much to do with the real-world political choices people have to make. Rather like John C. Calhoun, libertarians can spin out all kinds of caveats and distinctions that are of limited relevance to what's going on in the outside world.

[uncitizen]

Bkmk

[StoneWall Brigade]

Ping

[Zionist Conspirator]

A good and very interesting article.

I must admit that I'm no fan of John C. Calhoun, even if he did start out as a nationalist and was a Whig at one time.

I get sick and tired of the Lincoln bashing some conservatives engage in even as they extol the Republican party as the "historic house" of American conservatism. It's also hypocritical for fans of George Papadopoulos, Rafael Trujillo, and similar characters to call Abraham Lincoln a "tyrant."

If the South had not seceded nothing would have happened. Lincoln was not elected to implement "big government" but to thwart the extension of slavery from where it already existed to areas where it did not. At the time it looked as though slavery was going to spread to every state and territory in the Union, and the Slavocrats certainly were no supporters of "states' rights" with their Fugitive Slave Law. People who praise the Old South as a paragon of decentralism are either ignorant or dishonest. The mere fact that a non-extentionist had been elected to the White House set off a childish hissy fit in which seven states seceded before the man had ever even taken office.

Conservatives today tend to forget that Lincoln was simply an heir of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists (which included our first two Presidents). It was the proponents of implied powers who were the original conservatives, while the strict constructionists were assumed to be Jacobinical atheists who were ready to confiscate and burn Bibles at a moment's notice. It really is amazing how ignorant of history some conservatives can be.

It's also forgotten that many Northerners supported the Confederacy and many Southerners supported the Union men. Southern Unionists are the forgotten heroes of American history. And I should know, since I'm descended from some of them.