The Litmus Test for American Conservatism (The paloeconservative view of Abe Lincoln.)

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).

we southrons could also argue that the properties reclaimed by southerners were OURS as much as the damnyankees, inasmuchas ALL of the taxpayers paid for the properties.

Yes, but it is a fallacious argument as 2/3rds of the people who paid for the properties were from the North, and they paid 86% of the tab on them. You can't sell your property and then reclaim it keeping while keeping the money without becoming a common thief.

Later legilsation gave the federal governmet clear title. The feds wouldn't agree to construct the fort without clear title.

You've seen many times the text I used.

But you still spout your disinformation.

Walt

You can't sell your property and then reclaim it keeping while keeping the money without becoming a common thief.

A little reflection will tell any honest person that the secessionists were no better than common thieves. That they are put forward as honorable is the big lie of ACW history.

Walt

Slavery was not an infringement, it was the complete suppression of almost all rights for an entire class of people, without just cause or resulting from the commission of any crime.

Don't get me wrong, Gianni. I'm not one of those "castigate America" because she once engaged in slavery. It was the accepted norm at the time. It happened. Let the crybabies and reparations whiners take their fight to places where slavery is STILL practiced, if they truly give a darn about the issue. But they won't, or course. For a great many, it's about the money, not the principle.

That being said, slavery is never right or just, particularly in an society that demanded its own freedom from tyranny, citing inalienable rights as its source.

Taxes are a construct of the State, far different from inalienable Rights.

Although, in principle, I agree with you. We have veered far off the path of preserving Rights, by constantly chipping away at them through oppressive legislation. That is why I'm so adament about this issue; many people don't recognize the permanence of their rights, versus the transcience of government, and that lack of knowledge has cost us so very many freedoms! Too many young people today don't even know where their Rights stem from, they think "Rights" are gifts from Uncle Sam; when in fact, if our representative Republic and courts actually worked they way they should, it would be the opposite!

Later legilsation gave the federal governmet clear title.

Quote it.

The feds wouldn't agree to construct the fort without clear title.

That was Fort Sumter. I am talking about Moultrie, Johnson, and Pinckney, which were subject of the 1805 act's conditional transfer.

Yes, but it is a fallacious argument as 2/3rds of the people who paid for the properties were from the North, and they paid 86% of the tab on them.

No they didn't. All three of the forts that they siezed after Anderson moved into Sumter were constructed before the US army took command of any of them. Heck, Fort Johnson was built by the British back in 1708! Moultrie was in use during the revolution and Pinckney, standing on a long-recognized battery post, was completed by SC in the 1790's. They were all transfered conditionally to the feds in 1805 by the SC legislation. The transfer was without any compensation to SC for building them. The people of South Carolina owed the yankees NOTHING for those three forts when they took them. Yet they offered to pay anyway in hopes that it would bring about a peaceful settlement.

Let's not forget Thompson and FLoyd who stole 800,000 dollars from the Indian Trust Funds in the form of bearer bonds before Sumter, and Floyds transfer and sale of 135,000 rifles from the Sprinfield armory alone during 1860. By the time of Sumter, all of this was already commonly known. Floyd in particular had already been called before a grand jury, but skipped town instead of showing.

Then there was Howell Cobbs planning of the timing of secession so that he could collect the 150 million in prepayments from the North for the cotton crop of 1861, and Jefferson's Davis legislation in the early confederacy that made it 'legal' for the Confederacy to sieze these funds by any means.

Later legilsation gave the federal governmet clear title.
Quote it.

I already did.

You tried to deceive but you got caught.

Walt

That was Fort Sumter. I am talking about Moultrie, Johnson, and Pinckney, which were subject of the 1805 act's conditional transfer.

That's a lie. This is what you said:

"There is also the issue of how the federals came into ownership of the forts in Charleston to begin with. The South Carolina legislature had, over the previous decades, granted them permission by statute to occupy, maintain, and build upon the Charleston forts so long as they were kept in working condition and used for coastal defenses against foreign enemies."

Walt

This is what you said: "There is also the issue of how the federals came into ownership of the forts in Charleston to begin with. The South Carolina legislature had, over the previous decades, granted them permission by statute to occupy, maintain, and build upon the Charleston forts so long as they were kept in working condition and used for coastal defenses against foreign enemies."

Yeah. And I said it in reference to Forts Moultrie, Johnson, and Pinckney. That is why I used the plural of "forts" instead of the singular "fort," which would have been the case had I been talking about Sumter. As I have documented, Moultrie, Johnson, and Pinckney all predated the federal garrison of the region and belonged to south carolina. SC conditionally transferred them to the army in 1805 by legislative act requiring them to be maintained and garrisoned by the feds just as I said.

I already did.

No you didn't. You simply claimed this to be true while offering no evidence whatsoever for either Sumter or the 1805 forts.

if a supreme court was so VITAL to the new revolutionary government as your silly posts indicate you think it was to the new CSA, they didn't have to wait to set the USSC up until after the Constitution was written, the Contiential Congress could have done so by a simple act of that body.

What should have been important was compliance with the confederate constitution. As it turned out that was a matter of no importance to the Davis regime.

the TRUTH is that the absense of a CSA supreme court during the war is a BIG ISSUE to YOU and to NOBODY ELSE

You and the rest of the sothron horde harp endlessly on what you claim are violations of the Constitution by Lincoln, yet violations of the confederate constitution is not a big issue. Bit of a double standard, don't you think?

There is also the issue of how the federals came into ownership of the forts in Charleston to begin with.

That sounds inclusive of Ft. Sumter to me. Looks like you caught him slipping a card out of his sleeve again. Nice catch.

NOPE i don't, inasmuch as we were fighting a relentless & cruel horde of hatefilled/arrogant/merciless damnyankees AND at the same time trying to set up a new republic.

as for the war criminal/tyrant/cheap politician lincoln & his gang of thugs, i'm glad i don't have to try to defend their UNLAWFUL actions.the US government had been functioning for DECADES & the institutions of government could have/should have continued to function normally, except for the hatefilled/arrogant/self-righteous meddling of the lincoln clique.

that is the difference.

free dixie,sw

That sounds inclusive of Ft. Sumter to me. Looks like you caught him slipping a card out of his sleeve again. Nice catch.

Thanks. That is how these neo-confederates operate. No lie is too brazen if it advances the cause of "southern" heritage.

Walt

Fort building was a southern favorite when it came to government largesse. Slaves were hired out a three dollars a day, while they were effectively only paid about 7 dollars a year. But Forts were not the only sources of largesse, and the southern states had never paid their way then, and still haven't to this day.

Still, given that you think a 20 million dollar tax increase on top of a 500 million annual cost for the war was a devastating economic blow, it's easy to see how you could have developed another silly notion here.

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