Posted on 03/11/2026 8:25:32 AM PDT by TBP
Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as their agent, hedging it in by a doctrine of enumerated powers. Since the compact between the states was voluntary, secession was considered an option by public leaders in every section of the Union during Hie antebellum period. Given this tradition—deeply rooted in the Declaration of Independence—a great statesman in 1860 would have negotiated a settlement with the disaffected states, even if it meant the withdrawal of some from the Union. But Lincoln refused even to accept Confederate commissioners, much less negotiate with them. Most of the Union could have been kept together. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas voted to remain in the Union even after the Confederacy was formed; they reversed themselves only when Lincoln decided on a war of coercion. A great statesman does not seduce his people into a needless war; he keeps them out of it.
When the Soviet Union dissolved by peaceful secession, it was only 70 years old—the same age as the United States when it dissolved in 1860. Did Gorbachev fail as a statesman because he negotiated a peaceful dissolution of the U.S.S.R.? Likewise, if all states west of the Mississippi were to secede tomorrow, would we praise, as a great statesman, a president who refused to negotiate and launched total war against the civilian population merely to preserve the Union? The number of Southerners who died as a result of Lincoln’s invasion was greater than the total of all Americans killed by Hitler and Tojo. By the end of the war, nearly one half of the white male population of military age was either dead or mutilated. No country in World War II suffered casualties of that magnitude.
Not only would Lincoln not receive Confederate commissioners, he refused, for three crucial months, to call Congress. Alone, he illegally raised money, illegally raised troops, and started the war. To crush Northern opposition, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus for the duration of the war and rounded up some 20,000 political prisoners. (Mussolini arrested some 12,000 but convicted only 1,624.) When the chief justice of the Supreme Court declared the suspension blatantly unconstitutional and ordered the prisoners released, Lincoln ordered his arrest. This American Caesar shut down over 300 newspapers, arrested editors, and smashed presses. He broke up state legislatures; arrested Democratic candidates who urged an armistice; and used the military to elect Republicans (including himself, in 1864, by a margin of around 38,000 popular votes). He illegally created a “state” in West Virginia and imported a large army of foreign mercenaries. B.H. Liddell Hart traces the origin of modern total war to Lincoln’s decision to direct war against the civilian population. Sherman acknowledged that, by the rides of war taught at West Point, he was guilty of war crimes punishable by death. But who was to enforce those rules?
These actions are justified by nationalist historians as the energetic and extraordinary efforts of a great helmsman rising to the painful duty of preserving an indivisible Union. But Lincoln had inherited no such Union from the Framers. Rather, like Bismarck, he created one with a policy of blood and iron. What we call the “Civil War” was in fact America’s French Revolution, and Lincoln was the first Jacobin president. He claimed legitimacy for his actions with a “conservative” rhetoric, rooted in an historically false theory of the Constitution which held that the states had never been sovereign. The Union created the states, he said, not the states the Union. In time, this corrupt and corrupting doctrine would suck nearly every reserved power of the states into the central government. Lincoln seared into the American mind an ideological style of politics which, through a sort of alchemy, transmuted a federative “union” of states into a French revolutionary “nation” launched on an unending global mission of achieving equality. Lincoln’s corrupt constitutionalism and his ideological style of politics have, over time, led to the hollowing out of traditional American society and the obscene concentration of power in the central government that the Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent.
A genuinely American conservatism, then, must adopt the project of preserving and restoring the decentralized federative polity of the Framers rooted in state and local sovereignty. The central government has no constitutional authority to do most of what it does today. The first question posed by an authentic American conservative polities is not whether a policy is good or bad, but what agency (the states or the central government—if either) has the authority to enact it. This is the principle of subsidiarity: that as much as possible should be done by the smallest political unit.
The Democratic and Republican parties are Lincolnian parties. Neither honestly questions the limits of federal authority to do this or that. In 1861, the central government broke free from what Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution,” and we have, consequently, inherited a fractured historical memory. There are now two Americanisms: pre-Lincolnian and post-Lincolnian. The latter is Jacobinism by other means. Only the former can lay claim to being the primordial American conservatism.
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many on the left and on the right have called him Hitler
I choose not to decide, but that is still a choice
Lincoln was a rabid statist.
Not conservative.
For example we can cite ex parte Merryman in which he suspended the writ of habeas corpus unconstitutionally and signed an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice when he ruled Merryman's detention unlawful.
We can cite the fact that 3 states expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession when they ratified the constitution and Lincoln himself championed unilateral secession in a speech in the US Congress when he was a congressman.
We can cite that it was Lincoln who imposed income taxes (unconstitutionally), centralized all power in imperial Washington and made the states little more than administrative conveniences instead of constitutional actors in their own right......AND YET get ready for a wave of blind nationalists drunk on the propaganda spoonfed to them in the government schools to attack you and hurl all kinds of personal insults at you. We all know its coming.
In fact, the so called “Honest Abe” was a tyrant.
Exactly.
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.
Southerners knew exactly what they were fighting for - and against. Here are some more examples:
Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.,/p>
It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties. Major General Patrick Cleburne 1864
Often cited for his cornerstone speech, Leftists in Academia are not nearly as quick to cite what he thought Northern motivations for the war were nor what their aims were:
"If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity." -Alexander Stephens
I’ve never noticed Lincoln being discussed or presented as a conservative, his fame and greatness has always been related to the Civil War and slavery, not much about his general politics.
I doubt that any average person knows much of anything about his general politics.
it was “these united States” -
Under his rule it became “The United States”.
2 very different things.
For many, the “war of northern aggression” has not yet ended.
I agree with this original post that Lincoln, the north, started the Civil War. However, I disagree with the modern southern belief of the Lost Cause.
Perhaps this year as we celebrate the 250th of the Declaration of Independence, which states the reasons we left England, it might be insightful to reach each Confederate state's declaration of secession. They state the reasons the Confederate states tried to leave the U.S.
As I posted on FR in the past (with links to each state's secession declaration):
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South Carolina's secession declaration mentions "slave", "slaveholding", etc. 18 times. Seems like slavery was a pretty important motivation to them.
Mississippi 7 times.
Florida 14 times.
Alabama 1 time.
Georgia 35 times.
Louisiana 0 times.
Texas 1 time.
Virginia 1 time.
Arkansas 28 times.
North Carolina 2 times.
Tennessee 0 times.
Add that all up and the confederate states mentioned slavery a whopping 107 times in the secession declarations.
-----------------------
Seems pretty clear to me that one of the main reasons, if not THE reason, for secession was slavery. My summary isn't based on one person's diary or one person's statement. I base it on the official secession declaration documents of the confederate states.
Back to the original post on this thread: IMHO the Confederate states had a right to secede if they wanted to, for whatever reason they wanted to. What's often not discussed is that peaceful secession at the time wasn't the norm. List of secessions in the prior century in the area:
1770's early 80's: US had to fight for independence from England.
1790's: Haiti had to fight for independence from France.
1810's: Mexico had to fight for independence from Spain.
1830's: Texas had to fight for independence from Mexico. (Other parts of Mexico tried but were unsuccessful.)
1860's: The Confederate states had to fight for independence from the U.S. (and were unsuccessful).
Not saying that was right, either legally or morally. But it was the norm for secessions to not be peaceful.
the most important thing to take away from this is that in fact the old yankee north did dominate the US for a century or more. but those states are today’s blue states which are rapidly losing power and influence relative to the rest of the country.
Lincoln was in the tradition of Henry Clay and Alexander Hamilton, who favored what was essentially state capitalism, with governments being used to support industry through support of internal improvements like canals, public roads, and railroads. Clay and Hamilton, like Lincoln, supported high tariffs to support domestic manufacturing. The immediate cause of the cotton states seceding was the anticipation that the Republican government would impose tariffs that would drive up the costs of manufactured goods. Had Lincoln not called for 75,000 militia to suppress the secession, the upper Southern states such as Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina would not have seceded.
Agreed
Agreed
Loser thread.
Nuts to the article.
If it is a given, that the facts presented are true within the article. Wouldn’t any Patriotic Citizen of a random State, would feel the need to assassinate Lincoln, and be a hero?
Yes, we have been brainwashed, and turned from a prosperous and free nation, into a slightly different version of the USSR. There is no going back, the demonic forces that truly exist on this planet have control. The ONLY freedom we have is personal. Everything else is a gift from our “sovereign”, who is part of a group we can rarely see.
The entire world is a stage, and we are all just actors upon it.
Not a single competent head of state in the US who would have allowed such a thing to happen, either before or after Lincoln (Pierce and Buchanan being in the "incompetent" category). Even Andrew Jackson, a thorough-going defender of state's rights and anti-Federalism, said that he would personally shoot anyone who talks about seceding from the Union. If Lincoln just let the union fall apart in the name of "state's rights", Lincoln would have been remembered as the worst President in US history, because the US as such would no longer exist.
I don't really are if Lincoln was a conservative or not (though one could make the case that his pro-business, pro-industry policies represented the right of his day while the agrarians were the political radicals), nor do I give a damn about whether we "freed the slaves". I do care about preserving the union against an armed insurrection, which was a just cause.
Yes, of course that is true.
Not sure what bearing that has on the OP argument about the intended structure of the Federal Constitution.
You mentioned the Haitian revolution in your post. The Founders and their successors in Congress and the States were intimately familiar with Santo Domingo-Haiti, and it was a major motivator for legislative acts, court decisions, and social policy until the Lincoln administration solved the enslavement problem once and for all.
Plus every Democrat denies that, as a GOP guy, he ended slavery.
As to being called a statist or tyrant, apparently commenters refuse to face the fact that he was in a war and dealing with an ACTUAL insurrection. Rules change. That they changed back is a mark of how powerful the US is.
Nice to read an article of truth about Lincoln. Another man we are required to bow down to and worship as some sort of mythical savior of the country be killing a percentage of it. If it were about slavery, it would have been cheaper for the federal government to purchase every slave’s freedom and let the South embrace the Industrial Revolution that would have made slaves too expensive to keep. Lincoln just showed that the federal government will kill you and destroy anything that gets in its way for the quest of absolute power. It wasn’t about slavery. The Fort Sumpter attack was stupid but the debates are too long for a simple post.
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