The Litmus Test for American Conservatism (The paloeconservative view of Abe Lincoln.)

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).

I've thought many things about 'Honest' Abe, but never that he was a conservative.

That point can't be made often enough. He stood in the tradition of Hamilton, Jay, and the other counterrevolutionaries who wanted to reestablish Georgian government, without George III himself, in America, so that in that sense he could be understood to be "conservative" in the sense that Frederick the Great, Thomas Hobbes, and Cardinal Torquemada were. But when we talk about conservatives, we're talking about Jeffersonians, Antifederalists, and modern, Goldwaterite conservatives -- all of whom are 18th-century liberals, and followers of John Locke and the writers of the Enlightenment.

So the easy way to remember it: conservatives, children of the Enlightenment. Liberals, enthusiasts of feudalism (absolute power, revocable property, nonexistent rights), despotism (as in, "enlightened despot" -- which is what they call Louis XIV and Frederick), and illimitable government power (Hobbes's "Leviathan"), the "power to do good".

Lincoln stood with the Hamiltonian reactionaries, and his line descends politically to today's "big-government conservatives" (now there's an oxymoron), liberal statists, and Rockefeller Republicans ("me-too'ers", topsiders, white-shoe/Wall Street Republicans, plantation liberals, yacht-clubbers, gold-plated b*stards, RINO's).

I don't consider him all that much of a Statesman either; he got pretty d*mn near a million Americans killed in a war that a Statesman probably could have avoided.

I've been boring people upthread with my opinion that Lincoln sought the war deliberately, because he knew he could more easily get around the Constitution during the alarums of a war, and get the cooperation of a rump Congress.

Say what? In 1952 Stevenson carried Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia...and nothing else.

Eisenhower was the first Republican to win states out of the former "solid south." Texas' Democrat party even endorsed him. So just as I said, Eisenhower marked the beginning of the south's split and transition to the GOP. Democrats pretty much swept the south in 1960

No they didn't. Kennedy won a majority, but lost several key southern states. That is hardly a "sweep" by any standard. Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky all went for Nixon while Mississippi and half of Alabama's electors went for Harry Byrd as a continuation of the dixiecrat vote. Texas also probably would have gone for Nixon except for the now-infamous voter fraud.

and 1964

No sweep there either. In fact the south provided the ONLY block of votes for Goldwater outside his home state of Arizona. In addition to that, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina were the ONLY states in the nation that voted Republican. The non-leftist regions of Florida (i.e. the area north of the infamous recount counties) also voted for Goldwater Not even the most conservative of your beloved plains states joined them. In fact you could say that every single one of the states that Goldwater won was a state or territory in the confederacy - the nation's conservative stronghold. EVERYWHERE else went with the leftist Johnson that year.

and 1976.

Funny how you left out 68 and 72!

It's more like 1980 before the south began trending Republican

No. 1980 generally marks the fulfillment of the south's transition to the GOP - as in giving a majority to the Republican and sustaining that trend in subsequent elections. decades after the Great Plains states.

Looks to me as if the great plains abandoned the GOP's most conservative candidate in the last half-century. Yet Dixie didn't. In fact he won every single county in Mississippi and Alabama - a complete sweep of both of those states. Not even his home state of Arizona did that. And for the record, want to know how many counties on the trashy side of the hudson voted for Goldwater? One. A rural county in New Hampshire. LBJ swept every other county in that entire 7 state region plus NJ and all but 3 counties in PA.

So welcome to the show, y'all. Better late than never.

Our arrival at the show has been continuously building since the 1950's. It has increased to unanimous attendence at the present. Meanwhile, yankeeland has been departing at similar rates over the same period and even the plains states, with their dozen electoral votes, have boycotted some performances entirely such as 1964. But not Dixie. We've had a presence at every one of them and as of today make up the largest segment of the audience. Forget that fact and the Republican Party will never win a national election again.

"Sometimes you neo-confederates don't stop and think."

For a boy born in Iowa and raised in New England, I think I'll enjoy the epithet "Neo-Confederate" until I'm found out. It is as misplaced and erroneous as the rest of your reply so I'll award you points for consistancy anyway.

The fact that Marshall,(not one of the founders by the way) was early in the power grab by the feds is old news. His pronouncements about the supremacy of the federal government served only to elevate his own stature.

Regarding your earlier comment about the rebellion "collapsing". The "Rebellion" as you term the legitimate interest those states had in withdrawing from a union that no longer served their purposes did not collapse, it was invaded and destroyed by force of arms in an action not sanctioned by the terms of entry into the union. The people of those states had the right to withdraw from the union and several of them spelled it out explicitly in the documents by which the agreed to enter the union.

You neo-statists who favor the overbearing federal government over its people will never understand what the founders meant by freedom.

Can you name someone in one of those states that was imprisoned for "years"?

Lambert Milligan for one. He was never charged in a civil court, was held for years, and was sentenced to be executed by an unconstitutional tribunal acting under the "authority" of Lincoln's tyrannical suspension of Habeas Corpus in Northern States. He was just one of thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans arrested, "tried" by an illegal military tribunal and then imprisoned, all without ever having set foot in a courtroom to receive their right to due process as guaranteed by the Constitution. You might remember Mr. Milligan from Ex Parte Milligan fame.

Even the famous Merryman was released after 49 days. And he -was- indicted for treason, he did raise troops for the insurgency, and he was later a serving officer in the insurgent army...

If the evidence existed then they could easily have had him arrested and tried using the existing court system, but they didn't, choosing instead to arrest and hold him using unconstitutional means, a fact that speaks volumes. Yes, he was eventually turned over to civilian authorites and indicted, but only because of the immense attention being paid to his situation, even by the governments of the world. In regards to Mr. Merryman, Lincoln's hand was forced. Isn't it amusing that THE CHARGES AGAINST HIM WERE LATER DROPPED. You forgot to mention or even suggest that part, hmmmmmmmm.

You would deny the government the most reasonable measures for its own defense.

Hmmmmmm, I think the Supreme Court must have had people like you in mind when it said this:

"But, it is insisted that the safety of the country in time of war demands that this broad claim for martial law shall be sustained. If this were true, it could be well said that a country, preserved at the sacrifice of all the cardinal principles of liberty, is not worth the cost of preservation." - Ex Parte Milligan

Good thing for the rest of us that the Constitution and the Supreme Court says that you and your opinion on this matter are wrong. Liberty wins again, and you lose.

In fact, the government declared a general amnesty early in 1862, and almost all the people arrested earlier were released.

LOL, you really should study this more. The "amnesty" came about at the urging of Stanton, who had taken over the War Department. His concern was not the fact of the arrests, but only that they had been made while the "security" functions were being dished out by the Secretary of State. Conjunctive with the "amnesty" for the arrests made under the authority of the Secretary of State was the transfer of the "security" powers to the Secretary of War, Stanton. He not only continued the arrests, he INCREASED them, in breadth and scope. Stop trying to deceive the lurkers, waltrot.

Your distortion is easily exposed.

LOL, as usual, it is you who is being exposed as the distortionist.

President Lincoln addressed concerns about martial law/habeas corpus in June, 1863:...

The Supreme Court addressed concerns about martial law/habeas corpus in 1866:

"It is claimed that martial law covers with its broad mantle the proceedings of this military commission. The proposition is this: that in a time of war the commander of an armed force (if in his opinion the exigencies of the country demand it, and of which he is to judge), has the power, within the lines of his military district, to suspend all civil rights and their remedies, and subject citizens as well as soldiers to the rule of his will; and in the exercise of his lawful authority cannot be restrained, except by his superior officer or the President of the United States...The statement of this proposition shows its importance; for, if true, republican government is a failure, and there is an end of liberty regulated by law. Martial law, established on such a basis, destroys every guarantee of the Constitution, and effectually renders the "military independent of and superior to the civil power" -- the attempt to do which by the King of Great Britain was deemed by our fathers such an offence, that they assigned it to the world as one of the causes which impelled them to declare their independence. Civil liberty and this kind of martial law cannot endure together; the antagonism is irreconcilable; and, in the conflict, one or the other must perish." - Ex Parte Milligan
President Lincoln had the right to suspend habeas corpus.
No, he didn't, and the Supreme Court made it absolutely clear that he had no right to do so. His suspension of Habeas Corpus in the Northern States and the subsequent arrests and imprisonments by his military tribunals were unconstitutional, period:

"Every trial involves the exercise of judicial power; and from what source did the military commission that tried him derive their authority? Certainly no part of the judicial power of the country was conferred on them; because the Constitution expressly vests it "in one supreme court and such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish," and it is not pretended that the commission was a court ordained and established by Congress. They cannot justify on the mandate of the President; because he is controlled by law, and has his appropriate sphere of duty, which is to execute, not to make, the laws" - Ex Parte Milligan

Only a bunch of carping losers ever say anythnig else.
LOL.

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