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).
those people were criminals, whose loyalty to the union was not in question, but who had planned terrorist acts against citizens of the state of TX.
sorry, but as usual you're wrong, scalawag.
free dixie,sw
the CSA was far less a police state than the USA was in 1861-65. after all we didn't have DEATH CAMPS to abuse, torture & murder innocent civilans & POWs. (i know you think the THOUSANDS of murdered POWs and civilians, like the 92 martyrs of MY family are myth, but the OFFICIAL records speak for themselves.)
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free the south,sw
in point of fact, lincoln couldn't have cared less if the slaves were EVER freed.
he said so himself.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
No. The southern tariff on imported cotton manufactures was 15%. I looked up the southern tariff schedule, BTW. It taxed 431 import articles. 12 of those articles were at 25% - the highest rate in the confederate tariff. The remainder were 10% and 15% with an average overall rate of 13.3%. That made the confederate tariff one of the lowest for any nation in the world at the time. It was also lower than the 1857 US tariff, which had been considered the friendliest free-trade tariff in half a century. Here's the link for the data. It's a .pdf so I can't cut and paste, but go to the table on the last page and read the figures on what the south actually imported and how the Confederates set their tariffs. They were every bit as protectionist as the US tariffs of 1857 were.
I beg to differ. There are 'left' and 'right' libertarian philosophies that differ greatly. Your problem is your confusion with the use of the terms 'left' and 'right' wrt the major parties.
"The Government exists to preserve the free exercise of our Rights; ergo, individual Rights supercede the wishes of the State."
That is anarchy by definition. Clearly rational people made decisions in which majorities could regulate the behaviour of others. This is why child molesterers are in prison.
Why do you feel the need to deny its validity?
Because it's not true?
How does the above truism threaten your liberty, Gianni?
It doesn't, it's just not the way it works. Whether or not it should work that way is the matter of some debate.
VULGARITY & OBSCENITY have NO place on FR.
free dixie,sw
that is FACT.
free dixie,sw
It does little to explain it, especially when they knew that Morill would decrease revenues. Your repeated attempts to justify it with the deficit only make the situation more confusing.
Of course, the truth of the matter was that most of the 80 million was stolen by the south in one form or another. When you don't produce, you must depend on the kindness of strangers, and if not then you must steal like a thief in the night. How is this stealing better than a balanced budget and the concept of paying one's own way in the world. Do elaborate
Zealotry in action. Can I pull this back on topic by asking why it was that Lincoln refused all attempts to negotiate the debt?
Receiving the endorsement of the Walt should be a strong indicator that you're barking up the wrong tree.
that's REALLY fun to watch.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
he has, by my count, FEW here on FR.
but then MOST of the forum members are neither scalawags or fools.
free dixie,sw
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