Posted on 02/18/2005 11:27:18 PM PST by churchillbuff
The key to understanding Lincoln's philosophy of statesmanship is that he always sought the meeting point between what was right in theory and what could be achieved in practice. By Dinesh D'Souza
Most Americans -- including most historians -- regard Abraham Lincoln as the nation's greatest president. But in recent years powerful movements have gathered, both on the political right and the left, to condemn Lincoln as a flawed and even wicked man.
For both camps, the debunking of Lincoln usually begins with an exposé of the "Lincoln myth," which is well described in William Lee Miller's 2002 book Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography. How odd it is, Miller writes, that an "unschooled" politician "from the raw frontier villages of Illinois and Indiana" could become such a great president. "He was the myth made real," Miller writes, "rising from an actual Kentucky cabin made of actual Kentucky logs all the way to the actual White House."
Lincoln's critics have done us all a service by showing that the actual author of the myth is Abraham Lincoln himself. It was Lincoln who, over the years, carefully crafted the public image of himself as Log Cabin Lincoln, Honest Abe and the rest of it. Asked to describe his early life, Lincoln answered, "the short and simple annals of the poor," referring to Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Lincoln disclaimed great aspirations for himself, noting that if people did not vote for him, he would return to obscurity, for he was, after all, used to disappointments.
These pieties, however, are inconsistent with what Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, said about him: "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." Admittedly in the ancient world ambition was often viewed as a great vice. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Brutus submits his reason for joining the conspiracy against Caesar: his fear that Caesar had grown too ambitious. But as founding father and future president James Madison noted in The Federalist, the American system was consciously designed to attract ambitious men. Such ambition was presumed natural to a politician and favorable to democracy as long as it sought personal distinction by promoting the public good through constitutional means.
What unites the right-wing and left-wing attacks on Lincoln, of course, is that they deny that Lincoln respected the law and that he was concerned with the welfare of all. The right-wing school -- made up largely of Southerners and some libertarians -- holds that Lincoln was a self-serving tyrant who rode roughshod over civil liberties, such as the right to habeas corpus. Lincoln is also accused of greatly expanding the size of the federal government. Some libertarians even charge -- and this is not intended as a compliment -- that Lincoln was the true founder of the welfare state. His right-wing critics say that despite his show of humility, Lincoln was a megalomaniacal man who was willing to destroy half the country to serve his Caesarian ambitions. In an influential essay, the late Melvin E. Bradford, an outspoken conservative, excoriated Lincoln as a moral fanatic who, determined to enforce his Manichaean vision -- one that sees a cosmic struggle between good and evil -- on the country as a whole, ended up corrupting American politics and thus left a "lasting and terrible impact on the nation's destiny."
Although Bradford viewed Lincoln as a kind of manic abolitionist, many in the right-wing camp deny that the slavery issue was central to the Civil War. Rather, they insist, the war was driven primarily by economic motives. Essentially, the industrial North wanted to destroy the economic base of the South. Historian Charles Adams, in When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, published in 2000, contends that the causes leading up to the Civil War had virtually nothing to do with slavery.
This approach to rewriting history has been going on for more than a century. Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between 1868 and 1870 in which he hardly mentioned slavery, insisting that the war was an attempt to preserve constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority. But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war. In his "Cornerstone" speech, delivered in Savannah, Ga., on March 21, 1861, at the same time that the South was in the process of seceding, Stephens said that the American Revolution had been based on a premise that was "fundamentally wrong." That premise was, as Stephens defined it, "the assumption of equality of the races." Stephens insisted that instead: "Our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great and moral truth."
This speech is conspicuously absent from the right's revisionist history. And so are the countless affirmations of black inferiority and the "positive good" of slavery -- from John C. Calhoun's attacks on the Declaration of Independence to South Carolina Senator James H. Hammond's insistence that "the rock of Gibraltar does not stand so firm on its basis as our slave system." It is true, of course, that many whites who fought on the Southern side in the Civil War did not own slaves. But, as Calhoun himself pointed out in one speech, they too derived an important benefit from slavery: "With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals." Calhoun's point is that the South had conferred on all whites a kind of aristocracy of birth, so that even the most wretched and degenerate white man was determined in advance to be better and more socially elevated than the most intelligent and capable black man. That's why the poor whites fought -- to protect that privilege.
Contrary to Bradford's high-pitched accusations, Lincoln approached the issue of slavery with prudence and moderation. This is not to say that he waffled on the morality of slavery. "You think slavery is right, and ought to be extended," Lincoln wrote Stephens on the eve of the war, "while we think it is wrong, and ought to be restricted." As Lincoln clearly asserts, it was not his intention to get rid of slavery in the Southern states. Lincoln conceded that the American founders had agreed to tolerate slavery in the Southern states, and he confessed that he had no wish and no power to interfere with it there. The only issue -- and it was an issue on which Lincoln would not bend -- was whether the federal government could restrict slavery in the new territories. This was the issue of the presidential campaign of 1860; this was the issue that determined secession and war.
Lincoln argued that the South had no right to secede -- that the Southern states had entered the Union as the result of a permanent compact with the Northern states. That Union was based on the principle of majority rule, with constitutional rights carefully delineated for the minority. Lincoln insisted that since he had been legitimately elected, and since the power to regulate slavery in the territories was nowhere proscribed in the Constitution, Southern secession amounted to nothing more than one group's decision to leave the country because it did not like the results of a presidential election, and no constitutional democracy could function under such an absurd rule. Of course the Southerners objected that they should not be forced to live under a regime that they considered tyrannical, but Lincoln countered that any decision to dissolve the original compact could only occur with the consent of all the parties involved. Once again, it makes no sense to have such agreements when any group can unilaterally withdraw from them and go its own way.
The rest of the libertarian and right-wing case against Lincoln is equally without merit. Yes, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested Southern sympathizers, but let us not forget that the nation was in a desperate war in which its very survival was at stake. Discussing habeas corpus, Lincoln insisted that it made no sense for him to protect this one constitutional right and allow the very Union established by the Constitution, the very framework for the protection of all rights, to be obliterated. Of course the federal government expanded during the Civil War, as it expanded during the Revolutionary War, and during World War II. Governments need to be strong to fight wars. The evidence for the right-wing insistence that Lincoln was the founder of the modern welfare state stems from the establishment, begun during his administration, of a pension program for Union veterans and support for their widows and orphans. Those were, however, programs aimed at a specific, albeit large, part of the population. The welfare state came to America in the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt should be credited, or blamed, for that. He institutionalized it, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon expanded it.
The left-wing group of Lincoln critics, composed of liberal scholars and social activists, is harshly critical of Lincoln on the grounds that he was a racist who did not really care about ending slavery. Their indictment of Lincoln is that he did not oppose slavery outright, only the extension of it, that he opposed laws permitting intermarriage and even opposed social and political equality between the races. If the right-wingers disdain Lincoln for being too aggressively antislavery, the left-wingers scorn him for not being antislavery enough. Both groups, however, agree that Lincoln was a self-promoting hypocrite who said one thing while doing another.
Some of Lincoln's defenders have sought to vindicate him from these attacks by contending that he was a "man of his time." This will not do, because there were several persons of that time, notably the social-reformer Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who forthrightly and unambiguously attacked slavery and called for immediate and complete abolition. In one of his speeches, Sumner said that while there are many issues on which political men can and should compromise, slavery is not such an issue: "This will not admit of compromise. To be wrong on this is to be wholly wrong. It is our duty to defend freedom, unreservedly, and careless of the consequences."
Lincoln's modern liberal critics are, whether they know it or not, the philosophical descendants of Sumner. One cannot understand Lincoln without understanding why he agreed with Sumner's goals while consistently opposing the strategy of the abolitionists. The abolitionists, Lincoln thought, approached the restricting or ending of slavery with self-righteous moral display. They wanted to be in the right and -- as Sumner himself says -- damn the consequences. In Lincoln's view, abolition was a noble sentiment, but abolitionist tactics, such as burning the Constitution and advocating violence, were not the way to reach their goal.
We can answer the liberal critics by showing them why Lincoln's understanding of slavery, and his strategy for defeating it, was superior to that of Sumner and his modern-day followers. Lincoln knew that the statesman, unlike the moralist, cannot be content with making the case against slavery. He must find a way to implement his principles to the degree that circumstances permit. The key to understanding Lincoln is that he always sought the meeting point between what was right in theory and what could be achieved in practice. He always sought the common denominator between what was good to do and what the people would go along with. In a democratic society this is the only legitimate way to advance a moral agenda.
Consider the consummate skill with which Lincoln deflected the prejudices of his supporters without yielding to them. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the race for the Illinois Senate, Stephen Douglas repeatedly accused Lincoln of believing that blacks and whites were intellectually equal, of endorsing full political rights for blacks, and of supporting "amalgamation" or intermarriage between the races. If these charges could be sustained, or if large numbers of people believed them to be true, then Lincoln's career was over. Even in the free state of Illinois -- as throughout the North -- there was widespread opposition to full political and social equality for blacks.
Lincoln handled this difficult situation by using a series of artfully conditional responses. "Certainly the Negro is not our equal in color -- perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man. In pointing out that more has been given to you, you cannot be justified in taking away the little which has been given to him. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy." Notice that Lincoln only barely recognizes the prevailing prejudice. He never acknowledges black inferiority; he merely concedes the possibility. And the thrust of his argument is that even if blacks were inferior, that is not a warrant for taking away their rights.
Facing the charge of racial amalgamation, Lincoln said, "I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife." Lincoln is not saying that he wants, or does not want, a black woman for his wife. He is neither supporting nor opposing racial intermarriage. He is simply saying that from his antislavery position it does not follow that he endorses racial amalgamation. Elsewhere Lincoln turned antiblack prejudices against Douglas by saying that slavery was the institution that had produced the greatest racial intermixing and the largest number of mulattoes.
Lincoln was exercising the same prudent statesmanship when he wrote to New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley asserting: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." The letter was written on August 22, 1862, almost a year and a half after the Civil War broke out, when the South was gaining momentum and the outcome was far from certain. From the time of secession, Lincoln was desperately eager to prevent border states such as Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri from seceding. These states had slavery, and Lincoln knew that if the issue of the war was cast openly as the issue of slavery, his chances of keeping the border states in the Union were slim. And if all the border states seceded, Lincoln was convinced, and rightly so, that the cause of the Union was gravely imperiled.
Moreover, Lincoln was acutely aware that many people in the North were vehemently antiblack and saw themselves as fighting to save their country rather than to free slaves. Lincoln framed the case against the Confederacy in terms of saving the Union in order to maintain his coalition -- a coalition whose victory was essential to the antislavery cause. And ultimately it was because of Lincoln that slavery came to an end. That is why the right wing can never forgive him.
In my view, Lincoln was the true "philosophical statesman," one who was truly good and truly wise. Standing in front of his critics, Lincoln is a colossus, and all of the Lilliputian arrows hurled at him bounce harmlessly to the ground. It is hard to put any other president -- not even George Washington -- in the same category as Abraham Lincoln. He is simply the greatest practitioner of democratic statesmanship that America and the world have yet produced.
Any way you slice it - Lincoln stunk as a president.
Nah. In that example the UN = federal government. We do conduct missions with the UN. Again, if you were in the forces today, and the US attempted withdrawal from the UN and a UN officer ordered you to fire on US troops, what would you do?
The UN isn't in a position to issue orders to US troops.
Article I, Section 10 and Article IV, Section 3.
Let's go through this sentence by sentence.
Section. 10.
Clause 1:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Nothing in here about secession
Clause 2:
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
Still nothing about Secession
Clause 3: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
Nothing about secession in here either.
Section 3
Clause 1:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union;
Applies to new states, Nothing here about Secession
but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State;
Again, new state, nothing about Secession.
nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States,
Again, new state, nothing about Secession.
without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
Still nothing about Secession
Clause 2:
The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States;
This covers property belonging to the US. The states did not, and do not belong to the Federal Government.
and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.
Again, still nothing concerning Secession.
Those were the only clauses in those areas. Am I missing something or is there something in there hidden that I don't see. Nothing in that article or section refers to a state not having the right to seceded.
Not missing, ignoring. Article IV, Section 3 states that the approval of a majority of the other states is required before a state can be admitted to the Union. This is achieved through a majority vote in both houses of Congress. Congressional approval is also needed for states to combine, thus removing a state from the Union, or for states to split into two or more states. Implicit in this is the need for the approval of the other states for leaving altogether. Yet you would have us believe that that is the one change in status not requiring congressional approval.
Article I, Section 10 lays out a whole host of powers forbidden to states completely. They can't enter into agreements with other states, can't coin money, pass bills of attainder or ex post facto law, etc. It goes on to list other powers forbidden to the states without the approval of the other states, again through a vote in both houses of Congress. One common thread in these powers forbidden to the states is that exercising them unilaterally could have a negative impact on other states. Yet you would have us believe that the one power that the states can exercise unilaterally is to walk out completely, regardless of the impact this may have on the other states, without those states have a say in the matter.
The idea that powers, explicit and implicit, are granted to the United States or denied the states is not a new concept. They were recognized by the very first Supreme Court. And they make more sense to me than your arguement does.
The most important problem is your class warfare arrogance argument based on your ignorance of the real culture of the pre-antebellum South. There were wealthy farmers in the South, as well as wealthy manufactureres in the North. There were massive homes in Biloxi and Mobile as well as in New York, Boston, and Providence. That coupled with the belief the practice of slavery justified killing anyone – innocent or guilty – essentially made the invasion of the South an act of righteousness for a new morality. And that is expressed by your comment "all men are created equal", a comment not in the US Constitution, and not a legal justification for any action of the government.
"And are you saying that the government was in the slave trade business or are you trying to say that private Northern concerns were in the international slave trade business?"
Private Northern concerns were in the slave trading business while the US government, legally bound to stop the trade, largely overlooked it for 45 years.
"In any case, what was the point in saying that 'Lincoln's new job would pay a salary financed by money raised from the sale of slave produced goods?' ".
To point out to you that a moral imperative, so fundamental to your arguments, did not exist for Lincoln or belong to the government as you so readily believe and accept.
The US Constitution was written by moral men with concepts of morality as underpinnings of the document. They never envisioned, nor wrote law, to allow one section of the country to impose their concept of morality on the other.
Sir, you are quite correct. The right of secession is not prohibited to the states. There is no power delegated to the federal government to prohibit secession. There is no power delegated to authorize the use of force against a state seceding. The 10th amendment has a meaning, and it means that what powers the federal government possess are delegated, and what is not delegated by the states to the federal government, nor prohibited by the Constitution to be exercised, are reserved to the states.
Despite all the puff and protestations you see emanating from certain posters, all they can come up with is 'implicit' powers, or a protest against unilateral exercise. Yet again, nothing in the Constitution prohibits unilateral action by a state.
And all your puff and posturing aside, you have no more to definitively make your case, either. It is your opininion that unilateral secession is not prohibited. The Supreme Court has disagreed with you.
Please explain how the "truth" makes me sick. Don't take my word for it, read the "Slave Narratives"
Read my posts in this thread, and you will get your answer.
Lincoln was a tyrant. "Thus be it ever to Tyrants!"
We agree....My contention is that he was messing with a Sovereign nation, and was wrong to do so.
Lookout Brother....according to "Petronski the Terrible, the Liberator of Oppressed Slaves" you are SICK...:)
(SARCASM)
When did he state that?
Try Reading his Post # 234:
Most telling, Lincoln tells EXACTLY why there WILL be a war:
"The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, ..."
I've read Lincoln's first inaugural. I've even read the parts that you didn't bother to quote. My question is when did Lincoln state that the reason for the blockade was to collect tariff revenue?
WEll, what do YOU consider "duties & imports"?
Seems the same to me.
You would be wrong... it was perfectly Constitutional, and Lincoln had no part in it. Read some West Virginia history.
When it was obvious that the secessionists would carry the day in Richmond, nearly all members from the Western counties of Virginia, and a few from the eastern, walked out of the legislature refusing to participate and formed their own rump legislature in Alexandria. That legislature was recognized by Congress and Representatives were given seats in Congress. The Alexandria legislature gave it's approval to forming a new state since regardless of the outcome of the war, the vast majority of people in the western counties wanted to be away from the tidewater aristocrats who dominated Richmond and had always treated the west as second-class citizens. Congress accepted the petition for statehood in 1863.
It followed the Constitutional requirements to the letter.
You approve of the assassination of Lincoln?
Very bad form. It is polite to ping those mentioned in a post.
I've already posted my problems with the slave narratives. I hope you can find my post.
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