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).
Lincoln was calling out the troops 10 years after he died? Neat trick. But what about the confederate call for 100,000 troops issued by their congress on March 6, 1861?
Speaking of manure, H. Donald Winkler? So do you agree with him that the whole Lincoln assasination was orchestrated by the Jefferson Davis regime? Was I right in pointing out elsewhere that your tinfoil beanie was a bit too tight?
Where does the Constitution state that only Congress can change the size of the military?
FYI: The Marine Corps is a department of the Navy. (The old joke is: Marines need someone to dance with when they're not fighting)
I don't suppose the framers would have foresaw the need for an Air force, but then those that would have amended the Constitution to make it explicit wouldn't have been necessarily wrong to do so as you imply.
Mr. Trumbull, from the committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the two houses on the bill (H. R. 591) to indemnify the President and other persons for suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and acts done in pursuance thereof, submitted the following report: .... [Emphasis added]
Which they had to know was immediately in contravention of existing law:
ARTICLE 1.
SECTION 9.
..... No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
The Marine Corps is considered a separate branch of the military. They have their own representative on the Joint Chiefs, their budget is no longer a part of the Navy budget, they are in all respects independent. Something not sanctioned by the Constitution.
I don't suppose the framers would have foresaw the need for an Air force, but then those that would have amended the Constitution to make it explicit wouldn't have been necessarily wrong to do so as you imply.
Of course not. My point has been to refute those who claim that only explicit powers are granted the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the government. The framers of the Constitution were men of insight. They allowed for the fact that the Constitution had to be broad enough to allow for unforseen future circumstances, which is why the Air Force and Marines can be allowed for under the instructions to provide for the common defense included in the Preamble. Yet sothron fanatics, who see nothing wrong with this, have a cow over other implicit powers that they don't happen to agree with.
He didn't say anything. He just scoffed and blew snot and tried to change the rules. I'll deal with his stupid little box-cutter job in due course.
At my leisure, not his.
He runs with Foner and McPherson, who are. Or will you now expostulate with me, and insist that Neely is only a fellow traveler?
The Commandant of the Marine Corps answers to the Chief of Naval Operations, and both of them to SECNAV.
You err.
Oh, I don't know. Having Ben Butler in the White House from 1865 to 1869 would have had a certain.....clarifying effect on what the war was all about.
And here's another interesting thought: would the other commands have capitulated, knowing Butler was now in charge, after Lincoln's assassination?
That's a lot to think about.
Erratum: I have occasionally posted upthread, here or elsewhere, about a Texas Confederate outfit I referred to as "Waugh's Legion": the actual name was Waul's. It was a 6,000-man combined-arms formation with organic horse, infantry, and artillery elements.
The Commendant of the Marine Corps and the Chief of Naval Operations are peers on the Joint Chiefs. And what about the Air Force?
And Foner and McPherson are Marxist on your say-so? Anyone who doesn't swallow the sothron position hook, line, and sinker has to be a Marxist? Well, that certainly clears that up.
The Courts and Judges of the States have concurrent jurisdiction with the Courts and Judges of the Confederate States in the issuing of writs of habeas corpus, and in the enquiring into the causes of detention, even where such detention is by an officer or agent of the Confederate States.The courts of this State, as well as the individual Judges, have jurisdiction to issue writs of habeas corpus and to have the return made to them in term time and, as a court, to consider and determine of the causes of detention.
This was from: State review of habeas corpus
Also, I found the following in The Weekly Mississippian (Jackson, Mississippi) of Aug 21, 1861:
The Confederate States' CourtsThe Confederate States Supreme Court, says the Richmond Examiner, will hold no session until it shall be organized under the provisions of the Permanent Constitution. Under the Constitution of the Provisional Government, it was provided that the Supreme Court shall consist of all the District Judges, and shall sit at such times and places as Congress shall appoint. Under the Permanent Constitution, however, the Supreme Court has not been established; and during the existing hiatus in our judiciary system, the clerks of the District Courts are empowered to issue writs of error, with the same force and effect as issued out of the Supreme Court, and returnable on the second Monday of its first term after its establishment.
Did Jefferson Davis overrule or ignore Confederate courts on habeas corpus cases?
Not at all. They won the case in the circuit court. Tell me, walt. Would you ever appeal against your own WIN in court?
As of March 1861 some of the senators who had offered to be intermediaries, such as Robert MT Hunter, had not seceded at all. Lincoln still refused him.
President Lincoln continued the policy of the Buchanan administration.
False. The Buchanan administration had negotiated informal ceasefire situations as several of the forts such as Fort Pickens. Lincoln completely disregarded them and went about making war on his own.
That is false. Throughout the war cases that would have likely been material for a national supreme court went to the respective state supreme courts.
Correct, but Lincoln didn't have that power. Again I ask, if Lincoln had the power to suspend habeas corpus in 1861, why did Congress feel they had to authorize him to do so in 1863?
They knew an invasion was coming and acted in preparation. Southerners waited in close anticipation to hear what Lincoln's inaugural would say. They anticipated either a continuation of the relatively passive Buchanan administration (Buchanan himself believed that secession was wrong but also that he was largely powerless to do much against it) OR a new policy of greater activism and aggression. Lincoln gave them the latter when he pledged he would use force to collect the revenues. The southerners immediately telegraphed to Montgomery the message "inaugural means war" and directed them to prepare for an aggressive act against the south by Lincoln.
No. Their communist politics have been exposed many times here. Foner even has a nickname in academia known as "Eric the Red." McPherson, as has been shown, has an ongoing professional relationship with a communist political party that dates back several years and involves extensive publication of his work through their mediums.
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