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).
FYI, there is a reference to Waul's Legion in Lone Star Blue and Gray by Wooster: "Waul's Legion, organized near Brenham in the summer of 1863 and commanded by Colonel Thomas N. Waul, had a sizable number of Germans, as did also companies B and F of Terry's Rangers."
That was the extent of the Waul reference. The author was using it and other similar units (e.g., various companies from the First, Fourth, and Seventh Texas Cavalries) to make the point that, "Although many Texas Germans opposed secession, large numbers of Germans served in Confederate units from Texas."
False.
No it's not.
These events transpired on 12/30/60:
"That night, after the long argument had ended, Black made up his mind to to resign from the cabinet unless Major Anderson was given proper support, and his threat (supported, it was said, by Stanton and Postmaster General Holt) seems to have been decisive. The President finally made up his mind. He would deal no more with the South Carolina commissioners and he would not order the soldiers to leave Fort Sumter. Whatever might come of it, the administration henceforward would resist secession."
-- "The Coming Fury" p. 165 by Bruce Catton.
Walt
"There is little that I can add to letters and telegrams previously dispatched. We never had a chance to make Lincoln an offer of any kind. You can't negotiate with a man who says you don't exist."
The central barrier to a peaceful solution in 1861 was Abraham Lincoln himself. That much is an indisputable historical fact.
There were earlier warnings as well. The New Orleans Bulletin back in January 1861 said:
That the policy of Lincoln will be war, there can now be little doubt. We are permitted to say that one of our most prominent and influential citizens has, within a day or two, received a letter from a point and source in Illinois entitling it to implicit confidence, giving strong intimation that the South can expect nothing but war from the Black Republican elect. It becomes the Southern States then, at once, to make the most vigorous preparations for defense.
I think Buchanan had a number of cabinet members resign near the end of his term. A letter in The Daily Mississippian published January 16th, 1861, says:
Secretary Thompson to-day resigned to the President his commission as Secretary of the Interior, on the ground that after the order to reinforce Major Anderson was countermanded on the 31st of December, there was a distinct understanding that no troops should be ordered South without the subject being considered and decided on by the Cabinet. At the Cabinet meeting on the 2nd, inst. the matter was again debated, but not determined. Notwithstanding these facts, the Secretary of War, without the knowledge of Secretary Thompson, sent 250 troops in the Star of the West to reinforce Major Anderson. Not learning this till this morning, he forthwith resigned.
was identical to President Lincoln's; send a ship with men and supplies.
Walt
Nonsense. It was the slave power's intransigence that brought the war. Their slavery was -guaranteed- by President Lincoln. It just wouldn't be allowed to expand.
"Abolitionists, in America, mean those who do not keep within the Constitution; the Republican party neither aim nor profess to aim at this object. ... If they have not taken arms against slavery, they have against its extension. And they know ... that this amounts to the same thing. The day when slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its doom. The slave owners know this, and it is the cause of their fury."
-- John Stuart Mill
Walt
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, page 130
Abraham Lincoln
July 6, 1852
HONORS TO HENRY CLAY
Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay's views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.
Personally, I like the quote of William S. Baring, University of Florida historian who attacked "veterans of the 'Lincoln was murdered' hypothesis." Now that is your kind of tin foil guy. Perhaps Ray Neff made him hyperventilate.
I kind of like Ray Neff who discovered the hearing about the codicil to the Last Will and Testament of Lafayette C. Baker.
Eric Foner, your kind of guy. Here is what Ann Coulter had to say about him.
Liberals attack their country and then go into diarrhea panic if anyone criticizes them. Days after 9-11, as the corpses of thousands of our fellow countrymen lay in smoldering heaps in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University said, "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." On the basis of exhaustive research, apparently the events of September 11, including the wanton slaughter of three thousand Americans, were worse than Bush's rhetoric -- frightening and disturbing though it may be.Treason, Ann Coulter, 2003, page 6.
Foner claimed to be the victim of Mccarthyite tactics for not being lavished with praise for his idiotic remark. A report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni -- founded by Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman -- cited Foner's remark as an example of how universities were failing America. This was, Foner said, "analogous to McCarthyism."
Treason, Ann Coulter, 2003, page 7.
In April 2002, a favorite of the liberal intellectual set, Irish poet Tom Paulin, told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram that "Brooklyn-born Jews" in the West Bank "should be shot dead." This wasn't a colorful polemic: "Brooklyn-born Jews" in the West Bank really were being shot dead. He continued in the same vein, saying of the "Brooklyn-born Jews": I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." The next semester, this Oxford don and BBC commentator was a visiting professor at Columbia University. (Perhaps he and Columbia professor Eric Foner would finally be able to get to the bottom of the puzzle about whether the 9-11 terrorist attack was worse than rhetoric emanazting from the Bush white House.)
Treason, Ann Coulter, 2003, page 287.
No it wasn't. War was by no reasonable means a NECESSARY consequence of secession. It was a necessary consequence of beligerent military provocation, the expansion and exacerbation of military provocation, and the refusal of the provocateur to utilize ANY other means of resolution beyond war. Lincoln fit all three of those things.
"When I read [John Stuart] Mill I am always reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes's words to the katydid: 'Thou sayst an undisputed thing in such a solemn way.'" - Lysander Spooner
No. Buchanan sent a single civilian vessle with men and supplies on a run that was supposed to quietly dock at Sumter and drop off its supplies without further disturbence. The secret mission was discovered by a newspaper reporter, causing the ship to be met and turned back with great embarrassment. Realizing his error while simultaneously desiring not to provoke a war, Buchanan did not send any further expeditions.
Lincoln by contrast and acting with full hindsight of Buchanan's failed expedition, dispatched the navy fleet with explicit instructions to fight their way in and start a war while doing so.
33% average tariff rate? Average rate of all rates, but not overall average rate paid per dollar. Miserable scholorship and amateurish analysis on your part, driven by uncontrollable fantasy. Again, how is you overlook the war the traitors started and it's fiscal demands on the noble patriots of American ideals and values?
As for southern domination of CONGRESS, it was in the Senate. You seem to have absolutely understanding of our Constitution. Get a copy and read it my lad. You should do it before you start to shave for the first time. In my country, bills don't pass Congress without the approval of the Senate. What country do you actually live in?
As for the difference between revenue and protectionist tariffs, your argument is that same one a wife uses to complain to her husband about which dollars in the joint savings account are hers. Terribly childish thing to bring forward, but no doubt merely accreditable to your obviously few years on the planet little one.
You keep citing the HOuse votes and ignore the Senate votes. Leave a sign out front and the light on, would you. What a laugh!
Calhoun advocated the most severe protectionists tariffs in out history of that era, and set the pattern for setting protectionist tariffs not just on particular industries, but on single products, most notably those in demand for slaves, such as wool baby blankets. It's true he bitched and moaned incessantly about tariffs later on, but that was simply the whore calling the wife a bitch as the goal of his tariffs, which were to build southern industry, totally failed while achieving that goal for free labor in an enlightened society in the North.
Of course the traitorous southerners voted against attempting to balance the budget before the war. That was part of the plan to undermine the Constitution and the lawful government. Did you ever consider reading US history instead of fiction and fantasy? Try it once. You are surely young enough to have time to do it, little one.
Cotton exports were a major part of US exports, but US exports were not the backbone of the economy by any means. Cotton was probably the only crop the decrepit and outrageously wasteful labor sytsem of the south could make any money at, and it did it by raping the land and leaving it in ruins. In addition, each years crop under that incompetent labor sytsem required huge loans, and over half the so called wealth coming back had to be paid back to the North from whence it was borrowed by the wasteful in inefficient plantations systems. Sure, cotton volume kept increasing, but once you take off the costs of the overheads, and look at the market prices in 1860 due to the cotton glut in Europe, the south was still an economic cripple. You see, my lad, you can trump up any foolish pretenses you want with insufficient data and a lack of understanding, but that doesn't make you fictions truth.
Southern trade contribution? In terms of GNP it never ran anywhere near the national average. The north consistantly provided 4 times as much with only twice the number of people. Even from 1787, the south was the dull laggard who couldn't produce, and it only got worse. All the census materials are indisputable on this, but it is true that you must learn to read, write and do the math, otherwise your continued efforts will always reflect your tender years. You don't want to be an old man mistaken for an imature child when you grow up, do you?
No they were not. A protectionist tariff by definition falls on the high side of the revenue apex. Revenue tariffs fall on the low end. The tariff in place as of 1857 was predominantly on the low end.
Admitting that is like admitting one has to breathe air
Not at all. Claiming that is however akin to claiming that all forms of the income tax are progressive. They are comparable because they are both gratuitous claims and, in factual content, are both wrong.
Morrill did reintroduce the old tariff levels, at the beginning of that session, South Carolina lawfully seceded, and by the end of it the seceded states turned traitor and the war began.
Your timeline is so far off as to become laughable. The Morrill tariff was introduced way back in the beginning of 1860. It was taken up in 36th Congress' first session and passed the House of Representatives on May 10, 1860. It was also taken up in debate but shortly before congress recessed for the summer, Sen. Robert M. T. Hunter was able to delay action on it until after they reconvened in December through a parliamentary manuever. The election of 1860 was fought during the summer and fall of 1860 and determined in Lincoln's favor that november. Throughout the campaign a major and reoccurring issue was whether or not the president would help pass and then sign the Morrill bill that the senate had not voted on yet. Lincoln was firmly in favor of passing it.
Congress reconvened in the first week of December 1860 and stayed in session until inauguration day on March 4, 1861. The senate also went into a special session through March 28. South Carolina was the first state to secede and did so in late December 1860. The next wave of five states came between mid-January and February 1861. The seventh came on March 2, 1861. The remainder seceded after Fort Sumter (which was April 12-13).
The Morrill bill came up in the senate around the first week of February 1861. On February 15 Lincoln publicly gave his endorsement to it and pledged that it would be his primary legislative agenda if the Senate did not pass it by inauguration day. The Morrill bill was debated on the floor for the rest of the month, then passed about 3 or 4 days before the inauguration.
ALL THAT IN SUMMARY: The Morrill bill was already drafted and passed half way through congress six months BEFORE they even knew who would be the next president and over seven months BEFORE a single state seceded. It was passed into law BEFORE that new president was inaugurated and had been law for over a month BEFORE the first battle of the war.
The idea that somehow the Congress was at fault for raising taxes to fight a war is truly bizarre
Congress did not raise taxes to fight a war. They did not even know there was going to be a war when the Morrill bill was introduced over a YEAR before that war. They did not know who was going to be president either when that bill was introduced 3/4ths of a YEAR before the election. particularly as the Confederacy did far more than simply raise taxes.
The confederacy did not raise taxes and in fact its tariff rate at about 13.5% was about a third of the Morrill act's rate.
33% average tariff rate? Average rate of all rates, but not overall average rate paid per dollar.
BZZZT! Wrong. The Average Tariff Rate is an economic calculation. It's formula is a ration of the value of duties collected to the total value of taxable imports. The figures are normally accurate within a plus or minus of about 2% points (some degree of fluctuation exists because they didn't always keep exact numbers for the total value of imports that came in). Among the academic world there are generally two recognized standard sources for pre-1900 average rate calculations and both are identical within a percent or two of each other. The first is the US Bureau of the Census historical statistics publication. The second is Frank Taussig's Tariff History of the United States (Taussig was the head of the economics department at Harvard).
Miserable scholorship and amateurish analysis on your part, driven by uncontrollable fantasy.
Boy, when it comes to making a fool of yourself you sure know how to hit the bullseye! Not only were your absurd assumptions about my statistics WRONG, they are also in conflict with the industry standards among professional economists. Ask any one of them where to go for pre-1900 tariff stats and they will tell you either Taussig or the Census Bureau. Now, are you through embarrassing yourself yet or shall we continue?
Again, how is you overlook the war the traitors started and it's fiscal demands on the noble patriots of American ideals and values?
Excluding from consideration the rhetorical garbage that dominates that question, it is quite easy. It is a simple fact of history that the Morrill bill was written well over a YEAR before there was any war in the first place.
As for southern domination of CONGRESS, it was in the Senate.
Evidently you are not through embarrassing yourself. To claim that the senate was dominated by the south in 1860 is similarly false. As I pointed out to you, the Senate President Pro Tempore (more than a figurehead back then) right before Lincoln's election was from Indiana. Want a numerical breakdown of the senate as of December 1, 1860 as well? Here goes:
32 members from the NORTH
22 members from the SOUTH
4 members from the WEST COAST
8 members from the four border states (MD, DE, MO, KY)
In slave states versus free states:
36 members from FREE states
30 members from SLAVE states
As a side note that soon increased to a 38-30 split after Kansas joined the union in January.
You seem to have absolutely understanding of our Constitution. Get a copy and read it my lad. You should do it before you start to shave for the first time. In my country, bills don't pass Congress without the approval of the Senate. What country do you actually live in?
Feel better spewing all that out? I ask because I cannot see how you could gain anything from the embarrassment to which you are subjecting yourself. By my calculation (which I posted in detail to Ditto the other day) the Senate could have passed the Morrill act on a VP tiebreaker as early as March 4, 1861 when the Kansas senatorial terms officially began. That would take 31 republicans, 3 northern democrats or northern constitutional unionists, and VP Hamlin - an obtainable goal as soon as that special session of the senate began.
As for the difference between revenue and protectionist tariffs, your argument is that same one a wife uses to complain to her husband about which dollars in the joint savings account are hers.
Now that's an odd and ignorant statement for you to make. I summarized the difference between the two as it is described in a graduate level economics textbook.
You keep citing the HOuse votes and ignore the Senate votes.
You are fibbing again. I described the senate vote in great detail to Ditto the other day on this same thread. I also described the senate breakdown just now to you and it was NOT under southern control as you dishonestly claim.
Calhoun advocated the most severe protectionists tariffs in out history of that era
...and within a few years saw the error of his way. From the 1820's to his death Calhoun was the undisputed leader of the free traders in America.
and set the pattern for setting protectionist tariffs not just on particular industries, but on single products
False. That tactic was set in 1789 when the first congress enacted a protective tariff on six specified New England manufactures. It was expanded upon and highly publicized two years later in 1791 when Alexander Hamilton proposed specific and particular tariffs on single products in his infamous Report on Manufactures. At the time a young Calhoun flirted with the protectionist beliefs that he adamantly rejected in his maturity, product specification was old news by about 25 years.
Anyhow, time is short so I will save you from having to face your own further embarrassment until later this evening. My word of constructive advice remains though. When you get to school on Monday morning go ask teacher if you can borrow a book on trade economics. In case that is too complicated also hear that one of the conservative think tanks does a series of children's books. They convey basic lessons and concepts of economics in the form of fables and children's stories, so that may be more attuned to your learning level.
It was if free men were to show they could govern themselves.
Walt
Then you agree that the slave power tried to break the Union to protect slavery.
Walt
A strict constitutionalist would agree, but cite the amendment process as proof, not the existence of extraconstitutional bodies of government.
which is why the Air Force and Marines can be allowed for under the instructions to provide for the common defense
Agreed, but it would be tough to argue with someone who wanted to amend the constitution to explicitly allow for the formation of the Air Force, given that the Army and Navy are explicitly called for in the constitution. Had the document ended with a provision for defense, I suppose that would leave the arbitraryness of it's composition at the whim of congress.
While the Marine Corps may have their own representative on the joint chiefs, and a separate budget from the US Navy, it is my understanding that they are still accountable to the Navy brass and subject to the rules and regulations of the US Navy. They are not a separate body in many ways, and most of the infrastructure and "overhead" (if you will) is shared. Dad is the one who would really know, I'm just regurgitating second-hand. I'll talk to him tomorrow and see what he has to say, this kind of stuff is pretty interesting to me.
I do have some difficulty with the notion that government powers are arbitrarily broad, even in certain cases such as national defense. I have long tried to grasp the understanding of government that allows for anything goes with 51%, save review of the court, which can arbitrarily stretch the constitution to fit when political winds deem it necessary. I ran into this before on a WOD thread, where someone insisted that amendment 19 was passed not becuase the government did not already have the power to enact prohibition, but because an amendment would be more difficult to overturn than a statute. If that is the case, then we're dealing with majority rule and our republic has much to fear.
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