...not to mention accurate.
And it's not exactly fair to charge others with not responding to your arguments when you don't provide Masugi's article.
I would happily provide it if I could, but it's only in the NR print edition. I looked for it on their website and all they have is a short intro on one of those "check out what's in this week's issue" type pages. Accordingly, I did the next best thing by excerpting Masugi's arguments in detail. If yo read his piece, you will likely find that I presented them fairly and accurately.
Masugi is right in pointing out DiLorenzo's neglect of Confederate abuses and violations of civil rights.
If it were a book about the Confederacy, he would be. But it was a book about Lincoln, not the Confederacy. Whether or not he should have included it aside, you are still missing the real point - Masugi's "rebuttal" of DiLorenzo on the issue of Lincoln's abuses was more of a non-rebuttal. He did not address anything DiLorenzo charged against Lincoln and instead responded with a Clintonesque "they did it too" line. The fallacious nature of his argumentation should be readily apparent to any halfway intelligent reader.
It's also not the case that Masugi indulges in a "straw man" construction in explaining DiLorenzo's concentration on Lincoln's Whig principles. It is not a "straw man." It seems to be a pretty logical and clear explanation of a logical method: Lincoln's motivation couldn't be X or Y, therefore it must be Z.
And that is his straw man. You restated Masugi's presentation of the argument accurately, but that is precisely the problem. Masugi attributes the "not X or Y and therefore Z by default" argument to DiLorenzo, asserting it to be the basis for his Whig economics commentary. This is a straw man as it is not the argument used by DiLorenzo in his book to reach the Whig economics issue. To the contrary, DiLorenzo's book reaches the economic issue by detailing Lincoln's political support for tariffs etc. through his career. DiLorenzo devotes extensive space to making the case that these political beliefs heavily influenced Lincoln's decision of war, yet Masugi purports this case to have been a default conclusion after other alternatives were rendered untenable in DiLorenzo's mind. That is a classic straw man - attribute a weaker argument with similar conclusions to one's opponent and attack it in the place of his actual argument.
Good for him, but you don't tell us what was so objectionable or unprecedented about the conduct of the war.
DiLorenzo's book does so though. He writes extensively on the subject, citing such things as Sherman's execution orders against civilians, the burning of cities and towns...in general, the intentional waging of warfare against civilians.
Atrocities were certainly not more common in the war than in other wars, at least on the Union side.
Irrelevant. The morality of a war's conduct is independent of its relative position along side other wars. In suggesting otherwise, you are retreating yet again into the philosophically unsound relativist "they all do it" position.
Moreover such a war to free the slaves would have been severely condemned by Southerners and their sympathizers.
You are missing the point entirely. The motivation of emancipation is a just one independent of its political pragmatism, and that is the issue at hand in a justly waged war war. And somehow, I don't quite believe Tom DiLorenzo would have signed on for such a war.
Such speculation is provocative but substantially bankrupt argumentation. It is a non-issue whether DiLorenzo would have signed on living at the time, as he did not live at that time and could not live at that time if he wanted to. At most, he can state and argue the qualifiers of what would have been necessary to constitute a just war or to make an unjust war just. DiLorenzo did just that in his book.
Since you haven't provided Masugi's article, I can't comment on the rest.
If you wish to read it, you may do so in this week's National Review print edition. Most newsstands will provide you with a copy for a couple of dollars.
Jaffa does have his cult, but Rockwellism is yet more cultic, and Rockwell has determined to elevate DiLorenzo to a similar status.
You seem exhibit an inability to move beyond the tu quoque line tonight, which is unfortunate as it provides an extremely weak form of argumentation for your side. This is, what, the third time you've pulled the "they all do it" or "they do it too" line in this post? Surely you see the fallacy in this - responding to an argument with "they do it too" is itself a non response due to its failure to address anything substantial about the argument to which it purports to respond. At best it serves as a diversion away from the original argument and nothing more, hence its weakness.
But for better or worse, he does view things philosophically, and also doesn't lose sight of practicalities and the historical context. He certainly does see farther and deeper than a dime-store polemicist like DiLorenzo.
I'll have to disagree with you there, at least as far as things go with Jaffa in recent times. He seems to have fallen into an historical trap that permits Lincoln to attain near-infallability. It's the whole "Lincoln can do no wrong" mentality and it has led Jaffa in recent times, not to mention his followers, to deny clear cut simple factual shortcomings on Lincoln's part.
A perfect case was Lincoln's clear inconsistency on the racial superiority issue during his debates with Douglas. In two consecutive debates, Lincoln took inescapably contradictory positions to appeal to his audiences. Douglas called him upon it at the next debate, causing Lincoln to squirm for a while before he obscured the inconsistency by burying it in political spin. I've seen the Jaffaites face this incident time and time again and have asked some about it myself. Every time, rather than conceding the plain language inconsistency and debate shortcoming of Lincoln, they retreat into an absurdly reduced and unworkable argument of semantics, all of it designed to show that Lincoln really wasn't being inconsistent. Why? Because it has become harder for them to admit that Lincoln could have erred than to pretend he didn't through propped up yet utterly nonsensical fantasy arguments.
The same situation appears with them every time the habeas corpus suspension is brought up as well. With the mention of that issue and Lincoln in a sentence together, persons who on any given day would espouse a politically conservative strict constructionist if not downright literalist reading of the Constitution suddenly embrace among the most tortured word contortions imaginable to further the line that Lincoln was not acting unconstitutionally when he suspended habeas corpus. Why? Because again, it has become harder for them to admit that Lincoln erred than to pretend he didn't through propped up fantasy arguments.
Speculation about how someone else thinks can't be proven or disproven, but it's probably inevitable in writing a review and it's much more of a side issue, not something to be singled out for attack. It's not that Masugi substitutes a weaker argument for a stronger, but that he tries to understand how DiLorenzo proceeded. He may or may not have grasped things, I don't think that means he's trying to put the thumbscrews to the man.
Your argument seems to be that because DiLorenzo has data about much Lincoln's Whiggery that is somehow prima facie evidence of Lincoln's motivation for fighting the war. But we have much data about all of Lincoln's, or Polk's or McKinley's or Wilson's or FDR's or LBJ's or GWB's belief about a wide variety of issues, and it's not automatically clear that, for example, Polk's opinions on religion, or GWB's views on social issues, or Wilson's racial views or FDR's economic policies determined their decisions to go to war. This has to be determined by looking at the actual course of events that led to war.
DiLorenzo carefully picks documents out of a much larger collection to "prove" his point. The random letter to a tariff supporter is given importance far beyond what its context warrants. A speech on how the functions of government will go on is erroneously read as representing a thirst for ever more tariff revenue. From all I've seen, Di Lorenzo's performance is pretty disgraceful.
The whole argument that a war to liberate the slaves would have been regarded as a legitimate war by DiLorenzo is a dubious redherring he throws in. Given his support for secession and state's rights, I suspect he like others in his camp would find such a war equally reprehensible, not just at the time, but even today, were he honest. And though the war did eventually become one for liberation of the slaves, that doesn't cause DiLorenzo to moderate his attacks. As with Hummel, it's a way of doffing one's cap to contemporary political correctness while defending causes that outrage today's PC consciousness. Such a war would exemplify all the "Jacobinism" and executive power that he accuses Lincoln of. I can't see into the man's soul, but there is an odor of hypocrisy about DiLorenzo's argument.
The problem with applying just war theory to history is that political leaders can't apply the brakes to wars once they begin. Passions are too high and circumstances too unstable and perilous to simply go home at a point when moral balances change. The war was just in its inception. Whether or not Lincoln had the right to force the rebel states back under elected federal authority he clearly did have the right to combat and prevent their efforts to promote rebellion in other states and put them under Confederate control. Once this objective was secured, the war became a war of liberation, an objective that DiLorenzo asserts was justified.
There is a gray area between "war crimes" and legitimate and accepted means of winning a war which may not be particularly nice or kind. DiLorenzo and his kind are too quick to assume that actions committed by Union forces fall into the former and not the latter category.
Your quote by Augustine is very pretty, but I wish you would stand back a minute and try read it through critical eyes. He seems to be saying the reasons for war and the things that happen in war are all "rightly condemned in war." Wasn't every war fought in an "unpacific spirit?" Doesn't "the fever of revolt, the lust of power" sum up the spirit of the early Confederacy? "The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance" had taken hold in the guerrilla wars of Missouri and Kansas and would have gone on even had Lincoln remained passive and appeasing towards the Confederacy. Lincoln was clearly no angel or saint, nor would any of America's wartime leaders fit that mold. Augustine may have the yardstick for getting into heaven, but it's most unrealistic in judging wartime leaders. Like has to be compared with like, and the circumstances which a Lincoln faced were very different from those faced by Chester Arthur or Calvin Coolidge.
I am readily prepared to admit that Lincoln made mistakes. And I do admit that he was a product of our political system and some of his earlier utterances reflect the striving to win elections, rather than the highest moral purpose, but I don't see what's gained by ignoring the context of the times and the perilous situation of the nation in the 1860s to deliver up a condemnation of a dead man. To properly assess Lincoln's actions during the war, we have to understand that it was a war, a civil war, a situation in which both sides took extraordinary measures. Not to have done so meant defeat and humilation.
American libertarian history is a simplistic tale of shining heroes and evil villains. It's a stirring story, but people living in less fortunate countries understand that things aren't so simple. There are times when order breaks down and chaos and the struggle for power engulf society, and measures must be taken to restore the legitimate authority of the laws. When both sides indulge in such measures, it seems perverse to condemn only one side, particularly if it is the side of legitimate constitutional authority. If we ever face such a situation again, you may understand better what was involved.