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).
Fallacy of distraction. Changing the subject. Conceding for the sake of argument (for about eight seconds) that your statement is correct, how does that exonerate Abraham Lincoln of the charge of having started the war?
Agreeing to fact is hardly a concession.
...how does that exonerate Abraham Lincoln of the charge of having started the war?
No need to exonerate President Lincoln for something that Jefferson Davis did.
Your statement explains the New Red Historians' South-bashing. The South is eeeevil! Southern conservatives are Hitchcock caricatures in slouch hats with snaggly teeth, like the ethnic-caricature critter-man in Jeepers Creepers.
I considered your feelings very carefully before I edited it for sensitivity, into the form that you have so ably cut-and-pasted.
You should have seen it before I edited it!
Try posts 83, 87, 102, and 104. Also the "Neoconfederates" thread referenced in 83.
Oh, I agree. But his roasting soul might appreciate exoneration from what he did, i.e. starting the war.
True statement as far as it goes, but it doesn't go as far as Neely's wonkery. But we'll see.
In his first inagural address, President Lincoln agreed to support a constitutional amendment to protect the domestic institutions of the states, and he agreed not to send obnoxious officials into the south. In point of fact, President Lincoln bent over backwards to avoid the war. Insurgent forces had fired on Old Glory well before he took office. Yours is just another attempt to flip an inconvertable fact of history into something else entirely.
Walt
If you're a historian, you have to be careful to wait to see how things come out first. If he ultimately fails , then you can award him style points, like Machiavelli did Cesare Borgia, but in the end you have to ding him. If he wins, of course, all his flaws are washed clean -- along with his hands -- and you can raise your voice in orisons of praise without fear of effective contradiction.
He wins, he's great. He loses, he's a bum. National Hockey League or The History Channel, the rules are pretty much the same.
Yeah, I read them. Just the same old opinion restated over and over again. In short, same old sh*t, different day. Lincoln made it clear that he was resupplying the fort, something he was well within his rights to do seeing as how it was a federal facility. He made it clear that if the resupply effort wasn't opposed then no new troops and munitions would be introduced, thus keeping the status quo. Yet Davis chose to fire anyway, and initiate a war in the process.
Do you have a special link to God so that you know exactly where Jeff Davis wound up? A burning bush, something like that? How else would you know that Jeff's soul was roasting?
So what did Neely state that you have shown to be wrong?
*Ignored post
248 posted on 09/11/2003 9:22 AM CDT by [*] (Ignored Poster)
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We refuted you on the 'no judiciary' charge not long ago.
CSA judiciary appointments
CSA District Court ruling upholding civilian rights
thatdewd's list of CSA District Court records
Non-Sequitur's concession to thatdewd
Non-Sequitur's concession to rustbucket
Nope. Read nolu chan's and rustbucket's retrievals, here:
Posts 1783, 1794 &ff, on the subject of whether Lincoln actually started the Civil War.
LOL-- I'll tell you, just as soon as you finish reading War and Peace seven times and then write me a 500-page book report. I should be done reading and fact-checking Neely's 3000 pages of Clintonoid wonkery by then!
Homework assignment refused. Old ploy. Write me when you get to St. Louis.
What, is our friend not playing fair again?
We'll have to mark him down a bit again in "Plays Well with Others".
Well, I wasn't discussing Jeff Davis's soul, but now that you mention it, we can surely hope that he doesn't have too close a view of where Abe's is roasting.
Try reading Neely once instead. It's less than 200 pages of actual reading, not 3000, and backed up by about 25 pages of footnotes. No pictures, however, so I guess that knocks it off your reading list. Why read it when blanket criticism is so much easier?
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