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Lord Acton, Confederate Sympathizer
Crisis Magazine ^ | JANUARY 24, 2019 | JERRY D. SALYER

Posted on 02/21/2020 1:29:59 PM PST by Pelham

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to provoke vigorous debate than does this famous dictum’s author, Cambridge history lecturer J.E.E. Dalberg-Acton, 1st Lord Acton, Catholic godfather of classical liberalism..

..his interaction with a local Catholic revival prompted him to investigate more deeply the historical basis for Anglo-Saxon political tradition. In his view, this tradition had flowered most fully and wonderfully through the independence of the former British colonies of North America..

if we take for granted that Acton would be infatuated with twenty-first century Americanism we might think again, for, as much as Acton thought of Jefferson and Adams, out of all American political theorists he reserved the highest praise for a man now deemed anathema: John C. Calhoun. To Acton, it was Calhoun rather than Daniel Webster who “was the real defender of the Union,” for Calhoun’s theory of nullification represented “the very perfection of political truth.” What Acton found compelling was Calhoun’s idea that in the modern age the distinctions between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are less significant than the distinction between centralized regimes, which stifle communities and individuals, and decentralized regimes, which accord considerable agency to various quasi-sovereign actors.

it is worth adding that Acton also deplored slavery, and that in the coexistence of these two seemingly incompatible sentiments we find ourselves brought up against one of the many unexamined assumptions of contemporary America. Not only is it logically possible to find slavery objectionable without regarding Southern political culture with unmitigated hostility, it is possible to oppose slavery while positively admiring Southern political culture—or at least while preferring said culture over the one which prevailed among New England Puritans.

(Excerpt) Read more at crisismagazine.com ...


TOPICS: History; Miscellaneous; Religion; Society
KEYWORDS: catholic; confederacy; liberty; lordacton
“In almost every nation and every clime,” Acton writes frankly in his lecture “The Civil War In America,”

the time has come for the extinction of servitude. The same problem has sooner or later been forced on many governments, and all have bestowed on it their greatest legislative skill, lest in healing the evils of forced but certain labour, they should produce incurable evils of another kind. They attempted at least to moderate the effects of sudden unconditional change, to save those whom they despoiled from ruin, and those whom they liberated from destitution. But in the United States no such design seems to have presided over the work of emancipation. It has been an act of war, not of statesmanship or humanity. They have treated the slave-owner as an enemy, and have used the slave as an instrument for his destruction.

1 posted on 02/21/2020 1:29:59 PM PST by Pelham
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To: wardaddy; miss marmelstein; Kalamata; jeffersondem; Salamander; JohnBrowdie; lapsus calami; ...

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” ping


2 posted on 02/21/2020 1:32:22 PM PST by Pelham (RIP California, killed by massive immigration)
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To: Pelham
Bologna,
 4 November, 1866

....Without presuming to decide the purely legal question, on which it seems evident to me from Madison’s and Hamilton’s papers that the Fathers of the Constitution were not agreed, I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy.

The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics.

Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo...

~ Your faithful servant 
John Dalberg Acton1

3 posted on 02/21/2020 1:41:29 PM PST by Pelham (RIP California, killed by massive immigration)
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To: Pelham

Most Brits still are Confederate sympathizers. They love visiting our battlefields.


4 posted on 02/21/2020 2:14:04 PM PST by miss marmelstein (Prayers for Rush)
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To: Pelham

And Jefferson Davis is proof positive that Lord Acton was correct.


5 posted on 02/21/2020 3:06:02 PM PST by DoodleDawg
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To: Pelham

***the time has come for the extinction of servitude. ***

Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. Yet almost fifty years later slave gangs were raiding the US for American Indians to sell as slaves in Mexico.


6 posted on 02/21/2020 3:23:43 PM PST by Ruy Dias de Bivar
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To: Pelham

The Correspondence between Lord Acton and Robert E. Lee after the war was also most enlightening for those who subscribe to the “all about slavery” fallacy.

Lord Acton:
“...I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

Robert E. Lee
“...I have not the time to enter upon a discussion, which was commenced by the founders of the constitution and has been continued to the present day. I can only say that while I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it....”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/09/no_author/famed-libertarian-writes-robert-e-lee/


7 posted on 02/21/2020 6:11:06 PM PST by FLT-bird
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To: FLT-bird

We tend to look at Lincoln and the Civil War in isolation, but in fact it was part of a movement towards powerful consolidated central government that was sweeping the globe.

Garibaldi, Bismarck and Lincoln were the three rulers who perfected the all powerful central government model. Any ideas of independence amongst their possessions would be crushed.

Garibaldi presided over the Risorgimento in Italy, consolidating the different states on the peninsula into one Kingdom. Like with Germany it started during the failed revolutions of 1848, the same revolutions that sent the ‘48ers to the United States, where they helped found the Republican Party.

Lincoln was an admirer of Garibaldi, and went so far as to offer Garibaldi the command of the Union Army after its defeat at Bull Run. He had better luck with the German ‘48er revolutionaries who were already here in the U.S. and who made up a big portion of the GOP. A number of them held high ranks in the Union Army and in Lincoln’s government. Lincoln was an early globalist, so to speak.

In 1862 Bismarck forcibly began uniting the German states under Prussian rule with “blood and iron”, the same method he watched Lincoln using on recalcitrant American states that thought they had a right of independence. It didn’t take long for the unified Germany to go to war with France, in 1870, something that helped set up an even bigger war 40 years later, that would tear apart European civilization.


8 posted on 02/21/2020 7:30:22 PM PST by Pelham (RIP California, killed by massive immigration)
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To: Pelham

Its difficult to compare the situations. Garibaldi and Bismarck unified (really reunified) their nation-states. Even when Germany was reunified, it still had fairly powerful state’s rights. It wasn’t just a case of Prussia swallowing the rest.

The 48ers were pure trash for the most part. Basically nobody in Germany wanted them and for good reason. They were proto commies. This is what Lord Palmerston was getting at:

“The Southerners are English gentlemen whereas the North is a mere dumping ground for the refuse of Europe” Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister 1860-65


9 posted on 02/21/2020 8:01:37 PM PST by FLT-bird
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To: Pelham
While slavery may have been one of the sparks which initiated the conflagration, Acton did not deem it the pivotal issue.

Maybe Acton should have talked to the Southern leadership who launched the rebellion? They considered it THE issue.

10 posted on 02/22/2020 4:18:07 AM PST by DoodleDawg
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To: Pelham
From the editors' preface to Acton's The History of Freedom and Other Essays:

Provided that freedom was left to men to do their duty, Acton was not greatly careful of mere rights. He had no belief in the natural equality of men, and no dislike of the subordination of classes on the score of birth. His ideal of freedom as of the Church was in some respects that of the earlier Middle Ages. He did not object to serfdom, provided that it safeguarded the elementary rights of the serf to serve God as well as man. In the great struggle in America, he had no sympathy with the North, which seemed to him to make majority rule the only measure of right: and he wrote, if not in favour, at least in palliation, of slavery. It may be doubted how far he would have used the same language in later life, but his reasons were in accord with all his general views. Slavery might be rendered harmless by the State, and some form of compulsion might be the only way of dealing with child-races, indeed, it might be merely a form of education no more morally blameworthy than the legal disabilities of minors.

Some education ...

11 posted on 02/22/2020 12:05:15 PM PST by x
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To: x
Returning to Acton’s essay about the Civil War and its aftermath, we find even more astonishing, darker remarks:

"The spurious liberty of the United States is twice cursed, for it deceives those whom it attracts and those whom it repels. By exhibiting the spectacle of a people claiming to be free but whose love of freedom means hatred of inequality, jealousy of limitations to power, and reliance on the State as an instrument to mould as well as to control society, it calls on its admirers to hate aristocracy and teaches its adversaries to fear the people. The North has used the doctrines of Democracy to destroy self-government."

12 posted on 02/22/2020 12:20:25 PM PST by Pelham (RIP California, killed by massive immigration)
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To: Pelham

Some people have the idea that if the Civil War had never happened or if the South had won then history would essentially have stopped and everybody would be happy. But there was still the underlying conflict between slave and free, Black and White. Also the conflict between aristocratic upper class types who shared Acton’s views and more democratic, less privileged Southerners who resented the domination of the big slaveowners. Add to that, the unsettled atmosphere that would come from breaking up the country into two or more countries, and there was plenty of room for conflict and mischief.


13 posted on 02/22/2020 1:00:50 PM PST by x
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To: x

Probably so. Many writers, including Churchill, have speculated on how history would have changed had the Confederacy become independent.

On a slightly different note I ran across a Congressional speech containing this; see if you recognize it:

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable,—most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

“Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement.

“Such minority, was precisely the case, of the tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.”


14 posted on 02/22/2020 1:27:33 PM PST by Pelham (RIP California, killed by massive immigration)
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To: DoodleDawg

completely wrong


15 posted on 02/22/2020 4:17:40 PM PST by gdc61 (LOL not.)
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To: Pelham
Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement.

So, the slaves of Mississippi had a right to rise up and put down the white minority, right?

16 posted on 02/25/2020 9:29:11 AM PST by Bubba Ho-Tep ("The rat always knows when he's in with weasels."--Tom Waits)
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To: Bubba Ho-Tep

Sounds like it. Don’t know if Acton addressed that or not.


17 posted on 02/25/2020 1:41:58 PM PST by Pelham (RIP California, killed by massive immigration)
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To: Pelham

That wasn’t Acton you were quoting.


18 posted on 02/25/2020 2:33:53 PM PST by Bubba Ho-Tep ("The rat always knows when he's in with weasels."--Tom Waits)
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To: Bubba Ho-Tep

“That wasn’t Acton you were quoting.”

Ah, you’re right. That’s Lincoln when he was a Congressman, opposing the Mexican-American War.


19 posted on 02/25/2020 3:08:33 PM PST by Pelham (RIP California, killed by massive immigration)
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To: Pelham

So, in your opinion, did slaves have a God-given right to rise up and strike down the white minority?


20 posted on 02/25/2020 3:34:20 PM PST by Bubba Ho-Tep ("The rat always knows when he's in with weasels."--Tom Waits)
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