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).
Strange that the slave trade flourished Ancient Rome then.
Weird view, - you a communitarian?
No I am not. It is just that the welfare whores are nothing more the slaves to the state and the politians who 'harvest' their votes.
The concept of an 'all powerful state', one that can ignore our constitutions restrictions, has always been a product of the states rights movement in america. The socialistic politics of the early 1900's grew from that seed, -- and flowered in Roosevelts big government 'new deal'; which was bought to power by a coalition between leftist labor & states rightist political interests.
Technically, it was Clay who gave Abe the 'seed' and it was Abe who planted it.
I believe he actually believed the Union came before the Constitution, which supports the actions to usurp it.
You can see the wood stand that held Lincoln's casket for his viewing at the Capitol if you know where to go. I believe it's in a hallway off the side of the gift shop, in a roped off area, down the stairs. A security guard can escort you, though I'm sure security is much tighter these days.
Lincoln might have opposed the spread of slavery latter in life, but he supported a Constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed slavery to continue forever; and on numerous occasions stated that he had no desire to interfere with the prcatice, even in his first inaugural address,
'I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.'His Emancipation Proclamation was a "war measure", intended to deprive the incite slave revolts in the Confederacy, to deprive the Confederacy of soldiers/laborers, and to prevent England or other foreign coutries from siding with the Confederacy. It attempted to free only slaves in the areas not under union control, even slaves in Washington DC were untouched.
All the South ever wanted to to be left alone, they sent delegates to negotiate renumeration for seized properties and other disputed items on several occasions which Lincoln rebuffed, even lying to former Supreme Court Justice Campbell. Lincoln continued this deception and lie in 1863 when he wrote to James Conklin, '
Now allow me to assure you, that no word or intimation, from that rebel army, or from any of the men controlling it, in relation to any peace compromise, has ever come to my knowledge or belief.'
Confederate President Davis, the Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate military, had sent commisioners Roman, Forsyth, and Crawford to Washington in 1861, 'for the purpose of negotiating friendly relations between that government and the Confederate States of America, and for the settlement of all questions of disagreement between the two governments upon principles of right, justice, equity, and good faith.'
In order for your actions to be justified, does the armed invader have to kill your family before you can defend them? Just wondering.
The Articles of Confederation & Perpetual Union use the term "perpetual" 5 times, the Constitution none. When 9 states (less than the 13 legally required by the Articles) ratified, a new government was formed that did NOT incorporate the Articles nor state that it was perpetual. The 5 other states were not united, existing separate from this new union; the states of North Carolina and Rhode Island & Providence Plantations wouldn't consider ratification until a bill of rights had been added.
You can always tell a neo-Confederate — but you can't tell him much.
Actually, IIRC, the 'union predating the states' was later Hitler's interpretation of Abe's view.
KaBOOM! Those who claim the two are somehow ideologically related are, well, all wet.
Hope I'm not the only one who darned near fell out of my chair laughing.
Good friggn' question. Gorbo did not "negotiate" the end of the Soviet Union. It collapsed around him despite his best efforts to keep it alive.
If your political solution to the North-South controversies of the 1850's were jammed up by constitutional prohibitions -- such as against waging war on a State -- then you'd have to, in the immortal words of William Jefferson Clinton, find a way around the Constitution, wouldn't you?
As shown by other posters on another thread, Lincoln had support for his view from prominent Hamiltonians like John Jay and John Marshall. These Hamiltonian Supreme Court justices never accepted the People's rejection of their idea of national amalgamation and dissolution of the residual, and ultimate, sovereignty of the States. They handed down numerous weasel-worded Supreme Court decisions dealing with sovereignty and Supremacy Clause issues not from a constitutional basis, but based on (and enunciating as dicta) Hamiltonian theories of where sovereignty lay, and the nature of the People.
Lincoln was also supported by contemporary (to him) law writers like Thomas (?) Sergeant (cited in prominent law dictionaries of the day), who enunciated the Hamiltonian snow job as if it were the law of the land, when it wasn't and never had been.
Did Gorbachev fail as a statesman because he negotiated a peaceful dissolution of the U.S.S.R.?
I suspect historians of a closeted enthusiasm for teleology, which in turn is just an upscale version of the kind of agonist-worship cultivated and celebrated in the World Wrestling Federation. Cesare Borgia would have been accounted a greater leader by Machiavelli if he had killed everyone in Italy, rather than allow himself to be overreached by his enemies.
Therefore the definition of a "great leader", as acclaimed by historians, tends to gravitate toward winners, rather than toward good men, principled men, or even great men.
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