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).
"Anderson had in substance been told he could go over to Sumter whenever he thought best."
-- "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton
Walt
No such statement appears in # 836, the post to which I was responding. Liar.
Walt
When the regime fired on Fort Sumter.
It is the Militia Act of 1795. The Act of 1795 REPEALED the Act of 1792.
And be it further enacted, That the act, intitled "Act to provide for calling forth the militia, to execute the laws of Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions," passed the second day of May one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two, shall be, and the same is hereby repealed.
APPROVED, February 28, 1795.
The violation of the armistice was, "an Executive act, unknown at the time to any but those engaged therein, including General Scott, the Secretary of State, and the President." - General Montgomery Meigs
|Page 368|
OFFICIAL RECORDS: Series 1, vol 1, Part 1, page 368
U. S. TRANSPORT ATLANTIC,
[New York,] April 6, 1861-2 1/2 p. m.
Honorable WM. H. SEWARD, Secretary of State:
DEAR SIR:
By great exertions, within less than six days from the time the subject was broached in the office of the President, a war steamer sails from this port; and the Atlantic, built under contract to be at the service of the United States in case of war, will follow this afternoon with 500 troops, of which one company is sappers and miners, one a mounted battery. The Illinois will follow on Monday with the stores which the Atlantic could not hold.
While the mere throwing of a few men into Fort Pickens may seem a small operation, the opening of a campaign is a great one.
Unless this moment is supported by ample supplies and followed up by the Navy it will be a failure. This is the beginning of the war which every statesman and soldier has foreseen since the passage of the South Carolina ordinance of secession. You will find the Army and the navy clogged at the head with men, excellent patriotic men, men who were soldiers and sailors forty years ago, but who now merely keep active men out of the places in which they could serve the country.
If you call out volunteers you have no general to command. The general born, not made, is yet to be found who is to govern the great army which is to save the country, if saved it can be. Colonel Keyes has shown intelligence, zeal, activity, and I look for a high future for him.
England took six months to get a soldier to the Crimea. We were from May to September in getting General Taylor before Monterey. Let us be supported; we got to serve our country, and our country should not neglect us or leave us to be strangled in tape, however red.
Respectfully,
M. C. MEIGS.
U. S. TROOP-SHIP ATLANTIC,
Lat. 32^13', Long. 74^49'15'', April 10, 1861.
|Page 441|
OFFICIAL RECORDS: Series 1, vol 1, Part 1, page 441
Washington, D. C., February 27, 1865.
Bvt. Brigadier General E. D. TOWNSEND,
Assistant Adjutant-General, War Department:
MY DEAR GENERAL:
The Navy Department has no copy of the instructions to D. D. Porter and other naval officers under which they co-operated with the expedition of April, 1861, to re-enforce Fort Pickens.
The President has none, and they have applied to me. My copies, I think, I placed in Hartsuff's hands. He was adjutant of the expedition.
Please forward the inclosed note to him, and if you have copies let me have for the Navy Department a copy of the President's order to Porter and to other naval officers. Also of the order to Colonel Brown, which required all naval officers to aid him.
General Scott knew of the expedition and its orders; and you were acting confidentially with him and may have had custody of those orders, which were kept secret even from the Secretaries of War and Navy, I believe.
Yours, truly,
M. C. MEIGS,
Quartermaster-General, Brevet Major-General.
|Page 368|
OFFICIAL RECORDS: Series 1, vol 1, Part 1, page 368
APRIL 3, 1861.
Honorable WM. H. SEWARD, Secretary of State:
DEAR SIR: We except to touch at Key West, and will be able to set things in order there and give the first check to the secession movement by firmly establishing the authority of the United States in that most ungrateful island and city. Thence we propose to send dispatches under cover to you. The officers will write to their friends, understanding that the package will not be broken until after the public has notice through the newspapers of our success or defeat. Our object is yet unknown on board, and if I read the papers of the eve of our departure aright our secret is still a secret in New York. No communication with the shore, however, will be allowed.
* * *
The dispatch and the secrecy with which this expedition has been fitted out will strike terror into the ranks of rebellion. All New York saw, all the United States knew, that the Atlantic was filling with stores and troops. But now this nameless vessel, her name is painted out, speeds out of the track of commerce to an unknown destination. Mysterious, unseen, where will the powerful bolt fall?
* * *
I am, most respectfully, your obedient servant,
M. C. MEIG,
Captain of Engineers.
Not according to President Buchanan or Secretary of War Floyd.
an officer of the United States, acting, as we (you) are assured not only without but against your (my) orders, has dismantled one fort and occupied another, thus altering to a most important extent the condition of affairs under which we (you) came.
the officer in command of the forts has received orders to act strictly on the defensive.
It is well known that it was my determination, and this I freely expressed, not to re-enforce the forts in the harbor, and thus produce a collision, until they had been actually attacked, or until I had certain evidence that they were about to be attacked.
The world knows that I have never sent any re-enforcements to the forts in Charleston Harbor and I have certainly never authorized any change to be made "in their relative military status."
You are carefully to avoid every act which would needlessly tend to provoke aggression; and for that reason you are not, without evident and imminent necessity, to take up any position which could be construed into the assumption of a hostile attitude. But you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts, but an attack on or attempt to take possession of either one of them will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar defensive steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.
D. C. BUELL,
Assistant Adjutant-General.
FORT MOULTRIE, S. C., December 11, 1860.
Under these circumstances it is clear that Major Anderson acted upon his own responsibility, and without authority, unless, indeed, he had "tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act" on the part of the authorities of South Carolina, which as not yet been alleged. Still, he is a brave and honorable officer, and justice requires that he should not be condemned without a fair hearing.
Be this as it may, when I learned that Major Anderson had left Fort Moultrie, and proceeded to Fort Sumter, my first prompting were to command him to return to his former position, and there await the contingencies presented in his instructions.
the officer there in command of all the forts thought proper, without instructions, to change his position from one of them to another
With the facts we have stated, and in the face of the crowning and conclusive fact that your Secretary of War had resigned his seat in the Cabinet upon the publicly-avowed ground that the action of Major Anderson had violated the pledged faith of the Government, and that unless the pledge was instantly redeemed he was dishonored, denial was impossible. You did not deny it; you do not deny it now
- South Carolina Reps to Buchanan
The news of Major Anderson's coup produced a sudden and unexpected change in the President's policy. While declaring that his withdrawal from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter was "without orders, and contrary to orders," he yet refused for twelve hours to take any action in the matter. For twelve hours, therefore, without any excuse, he refused to redeem his plighted word.
- South Carolina Reps to Buchanan
|Page 3|
OFFICIAL RECORDS: Series 1, vol 1, part 1, page 3
[Telegram.]
WAR DEPARTMENT,
Adjutant-General's Office, December 27, 1860.
Major ANDERSON, Fort Moultrie:
Intelligence has reached here this morning that you have abandoned Fort Moultrie, spiked your guns, burned the carriages, and gone to Fort Sumter. It is not believed, because there is no order for any such movement. Explain the meaning of this report.
J. B. FLOYD,
Secretary of War.
- Secretary of War Floyd to Anderson: You did WHAT!!???
Springfield, Ills. Dec. 24, 1860
Hon. Lyman Trumbull
My dear Sir
I expect to be able to offer Mr. Blain a place in the cabinet; but I cannot, as yet, be committed on the matter, to any extent whatever.
Dispatches have come here two days in succession, that the forts in South Carolina, will be surrendered by the order, or consent at least, of the President.
I can scarcely believe this; but if it prove true, I will, if our friends at Washington concur, announce publicly at once that they are to be retaken after the inauguration. This will give the Union men a rallying cry, and preparation will proceed somewhat on their side, as well as on the other. Yours as ever
A. Lincoln
- The Living Lincoln,Angle and Miers, p. 369.
[nc] The words of a maniac or someone who desperately seeks to provoke war.
Once upon a time, yawn, an incredulous Secretary of War Floyd inquired of Major Anderson, "Intelligence has reached here this morning that you have abandoned Fort Moultrie, spiked your guns, burned the carriages, and gone to Fort Sumter. It is not believed, because there is no order for any such movement." Yawn. I do declare, if Floyd issued those orders, he must have had a memory worse than Hillary Clinton at a deposition.
an officer of the United States, acting, as we (you) are assured not only without but against your (my) orders, has dismantled one fort and occupied another, thus altering to a most important extent the condition of affairs under which we (you) came.
the officer in command of the forts has received orders to act strictly on the defensive.
It is well known that it was my determination, and this I freely expressed, not to re-enforce the forts in the harbor, and thus produce a collision, until they had been actually attacked, or until I had certain evidence that they were about to be attacked.
The world knows that I have never sent any re-enforcements to the forts in Charleston Harbor and I have certainly never authorized any change to be made "in their relative military status."
You are carefully to avoid every act which would needlessly tend to provoke aggression; and for that reason you are not, without evident and imminent necessity, to take up any position which could be construed into the assumption of a hostile attitude. But you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts, but an attack on or attempt to take possession of either one of them will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar defensive steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.
D. C. BUELL,
Assistant Adjutant-General.
FORT MOULTRIE, S. C., December 11, 1860.
Under these circumstances it is clear that Major Anderson acted upon his own responsibility, and without authority, unless, indeed, he had "tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act" on the part of the authorities of South Carolina, which as not yet been alleged. Still, he is a brave and honorable officer, and justice requires that he should not be condemned without a fair hearing.
Be this as it may, when I learned that Major Anderson had left Fort Moultrie, and proceeded to Fort Sumter, my first prompting were to command him to return to his former position, and there await the contingencies presented in his instructions.
the officer there in command of all the forts thought proper, without instructions, to change his position from one of them to another
With the facts we have stated, and in the face of the crowning and conclusive fact that your Secretary of War had resigned his seat in the Cabinet upon the publicly-avowed ground that the action of Major Anderson had violated the pledged faith of the Government, and that unless the pledge was instantly redeemed he was dishonored, denial was impossible. You did not deny it; you do not deny it now
- South Carolina Reps to Buchanan
The news of Major Anderson's coup produced a sudden and unexpected change in the President's policy. While declaring that his withdrawal from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter was "without orders, and contrary to orders," he yet refused for twelve hours to take any action in the matter. For twelve hours, therefore, without any excuse, he refused to redeem his plighted word.
- South Carolina Reps to Buchanan
|Page 3|
OFFICIAL RECORDS: Series 1, vol 1, part 1, page 3
[Telegram.]
WAR DEPARTMENT,
Adjutant-General's Office, December 27, 1860.
Major ANDERSON, Fort Moultrie:
Intelligence has reached here this morning that you have abandoned Fort Moultrie, spiked your guns, burned the carriages, and gone to Fort Sumter. It is not believed, because there is no order for any such movement. Explain the meaning of this report.
J. B. FLOYD,
Secretary of War.
- Secretary of War Floyd to Anderson: You did WHAT!!???
Springfield, Ills. Dec. 24, 1860
Hon. Lyman Trumbull
My dear Sir
I expect to be able to offer Mr. Blaine a place in the cabinet; but I cannot, as yet, be committed on the matter, to any extent whatever.
Dispatches have come here two days in succession, that the forts in South Carolina, will be surrendered by the order, or consent at least, of the President.
I can scarcely believe this; but if it prove true, I will, if our friends at Washington concur, announce publicly at once that they are to be retaken after the inauguration. This will give the Union men a rallying cry, and preparation will proceed somewhat on their side, as well as on the other. Yours as ever
A. Lincoln
- The Living Lincoln,Angle and Miers, p. 369.
[nc] The words of a maniac or someone who desperately seeks to provoke war.
I do believe that statement deserves some sort of award.
What armistice was that?
That's what you are suggesting. Your claim that trade would flow south seems to indicate something more than the small percentage of imports destined for southern markets. Why should that happen?
Blither all you like. This is what you said in #836:
Too bad he did not. If he had forced the northern states to obey the Supreme Law, there would have been no reason for the southern states to secede.
Now I know why you have so much trouble with history. You cannot understand what you read. You need to work on that, kid.
Idiot.
Ignorant little kid.
You need professional help, sonny.
You're an idiot, as you showed in #836. Then you compounded and cemented your idiocy by suggesting you didn't mean President Lincoln.
Grow up.
Read a book.
Stop and think next time. Seven states had published secession documents before President Lincoln even took the oath of office.
Idiot.
Walt
Why would I mean "Lincoln" when I did not write "Lincoln" - when the the South Carolina declaration of secession, WHICH I QUOTED EARLIER, clearly states:
On the 4th day of March next, this party [the party of Lincoln] will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
You have no argument, so your only recourse is to make things up out of thin air.
Stop and think next time. Seven states had published secession documents before President Lincoln even took the oath of office.
Duh. And it reads, "For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government."
Like I said, kid, if THE PRESIDENT had enforced the laws of the Union, there would have been no need for South Carolina (or the other states) to secede.
Don't worry though, you're still the Cut and Paste Chimp of this forum.
I forgot to mention that, on March 2, 1861, a constitutional amendment was proposed that would have outlawed secession. Would Congress have proposed an amendment outlawing secession if they believed it to already be unlawful?
Also, after the war the majority Republican Party instructed the southern states, as a condition of being readmitted to the union, to rewrite their constitutions outlawing secession. It appears the Republican Party did not believe secession to be unconstitutional.
[pf] Too bad he did not. If he had forced the northern states to obey the Supreme Law, there would have been no reason for the southern states to secede. 836
OK, who are you referring to with this statement, if not Lincoln?
According to the South Carolina declaration, "For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government". The answer to your question is, all presidents that served during those 25 years. Lincoln's announcement that he had no intention of enforcing the law when he took office, but rather to subvert it in favor of his political party's ideology, was, to be brief, the final straw.
You can read the entire South Carolina declaration at the Avalon Project at Yale Law School.
You need to mention that you made that up.
Walt
In fact, President Lincoln said just the opposite.
"I add, too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause—as cheerfully to one section as to another."
A. Lincoln, 3/3/61
I have seen some neo-rebs who were misinformed, and I have seen neo-rebs that would tell any kind of lie, but I have never seen one who was ignorant, would tell any kind of lie, and was as persistent as you are.
Walt
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