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).
Wrong. Cotton was by far the largest southern AND American crop, but if IIRC tobacco was about 8-10% of the total export market in its own right. Those two were the main crops of the south accordingly and they were indisputably economic successes.
and it did it by raping the land and leaving it in ruins.
Cotton production ability was at its height in 1860 and showed no signs of any slowing down as the so-called "ruins" you describe would eventually necessitate. Thus it is perfectly reasonable to identify that claim as yet another gratuitous example of the flatus voci that eminate from your head, and in doing so to reject it accordingly.
As to the remainder of your tirade, I need only note that you have yet to supply any substantial rebuttal to the hard and indisputable economic fact that southern cotton alone provided 65% of the entire nation's exports in a given year. You have speculated upon reasons to diminish or dismiss this fact, yet offer no substance and no specifics to validate so much as a single one of them. That may work over at your Sally Struthers University GED-by-video class but not here. In the real world that time-honored rule of logical discourse applies: quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. You either have to substantiate your claims or you may expect to see them treated as meritless ramblings. So let me be the first to welcome you to the big leagues by making note of the fact that it is time for you to either put up or shut up.
I'm told that the following book will almost assuredly provide you with a comprehensible introduction into the realm of critical thinking at a reading level that surely cannot be too far ahead of your own:
http://www.lfb.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CH8495&variation=&aitem=1&mitem=11
In the case that it is too difficult for you though just drop me a freepmail and I will happily point you in the direction of a simpler text for your demonstrably simple mind.
and SILLY to boot.
ROTFL!
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
he both hated & feared "persons of colour", whether those persons were black, brown, asian, red or "muddy-coloured" (read "mixed bloods") people (like me for example).
lincoln was nothing more or less than a cheap, power-hungry politician of the KLINTOONesque sort.
that(sadly for damnyankees & eltists of the revisionist sort) is the un-varnished truth.
free dixie,sw
the attack on Ft Sumpter was a convienient date for the damnyankees to admit that we southrons had been at war with the damnyankees for at least 5 years.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
PLEASE explain then the words of GEN U.S. Grant(1876):
"Had the late war been to perserve the institution of chattal slavery, i would have offered my sword to the southland. the ONLY cause of the war was to PERSERVE the UNION." (emphasis mine.)
the ONLY LEGITIMATE CAUSE of the WBTS was dixie LIBERTY.
nothing else is TRUE; not then, not now.
free dixie,sw
i do NOT know of a single Indian, who likes that PC-term = native americans, which came out of the poison ivy league & self-righteous LEFT (unless you ONLY mean that the person was born in the Americas.)in the 1960s. not one!
free dixie,sw
The only joke here is that you think a tariff that was written around January of 1860, passed in the House in March of 1860, passed in the Senate in February of 1861 and signed into law a few days later was somehow designed as a response measure to a war that began in April 1861. Not only does your interpretation of the Morrill act defy history as it happened. It also defies the timeline itself!
But please do proceed - I find it highly amusing to observe the degree to which you are willing to embarass yourself rather than admitting your ignorance and error on the tariff issue.
thankfully, he is also not particuliarly bright or well-read.
what he does do well is post long, boring,frequently off-point passages of self-serving damnyankee drivel & propaganda (most of which he does NOT understand!)
the only DANGEROUS (to dixie freedom) pro-yankee voice on FR is NON-Sequiter (underestimate him at your peril.); the rest of the walt brigade are loons, dumb-bunnies & PC-fools.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
as yet another poster of SILLY, anti-southern NON-SENSE, you too serve the cause of dixie LIBERTY.
free dixie,sw
just Paleo-Confederates from old rebel familes, who have NOT forgotten how grand it was to breathe free dixie air.
free dixie,sw
what a mess to clean up!
free dixie,sw
i'd heard that the staff tossed you off the site.
free dixie,sw
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