Posted on 09/06/2003 9:14:08 AM PDT by quidnunc
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 the 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 rules 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 politics 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.
David W. Livingston is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author of Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium (University of Chicago Press).
Unfortunately Lee was referring to the Articles, not the Constitution.
You know that's not true. Why on earth would the Articles matter in 1861? And Lee refers to the "safeguards" put in by the framers. Why would you tell a lie like that?
Walt
BINGO! Congress could have been assembled in days not months if the Lincoln had actually desired to wrap his actions in the veil of legality. Lincoln waited until the Congress, having REFUSED to use force against the seceded states, adjourned, and then proceeded with his plans - refusing to meet with the peace commisioners, lying to former Supreme Court Justice Campbell et al about Ft. Sumter.
The history-washing machine is on spin cycle again....
Yes, as we put this puzzle together, it's starting to look worse and worse for the Big Guy........do you suppose that all that white marble over all these years has actually covered up that much intriguing and Constitution-flouting? Or have other historians seen it, and simply turned away because the implications for what we're all taught to believe about America would have been too deadly?
Yes. We've had this conversation with your interlocutor before. Lee, at his secretary, simply got it wrong.
Next someone will be quoting the Preamble again to "prove" that the Constitution amalgamated the States.
Oh, I thought you were referring to Cassius Clay, a Lincoln contemporary, while you were referring to the Great Compromiser. Yes, Lincoln imbibed a lot of Clay's ideas and ideals. The Whigs' platform of national development was indeed the precursor of tax-and-spend.
Because it's the truth! Lee wrote (which I cited back to you), '[i]t was intended for 'perpetual union' so expressed in the preamble.'
The Constitution does NOT contain the word "perpetual", or any other word indicating permanence. The Articles of Confederation & Perpetual Union does:
To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting.One of those safeguards - the 10th Amendment, derived from Article II of the Articles which stated, '[e]ach state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.'Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
To say anything else is Soviet style disinformation.
Too late! Dammit......
Well of course. It's the 'responsibility' for living under such a wonderful Empire in that we should allow armed invaders full access to kill, maim, and destroy property at whim. Only afterwards may we question our oppressive government and then only how they want us to run our government in occupied lands. And if they're real nice they'll only keep troops in our lands for 10-15 years.
And for the record, I'm talking about the Confederacy (although it may seem strangely familiar given current events)
Please do read the SC Governor's address to his assembly and the correspondence between legistlature correspondence between the SC commissioners and the POTUS.
I'm sure the neocons are so thankful ;o)
Lee's letter refers to the Constitution by name.
Walt
The irony of conservative "south bashers" is that they do their cause no good. There are folks who seek to profit from creating rifts in the conservative voting base.
The South is the last conservative stronghold, the bible-belters, and patriots included. Why these conservatives seek to tarnish the proud history of the South is beyond me.
Check your history again, Stainless. The great plains states were voting Republican while y'all were drooling over Jimmy Carter. Your conservative credentials are recent by comparison.
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