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).
I caution you on your wording. Congress did not authorize him to do so, but rather indemnified him for having done so.
The difference may be slight, but whenever I'm inexact in my phraseology (sp?), I'm made to pay for it later.
What an odd statement?!
Were free men not drafted into service such that few might prove their ability to rule others?
And was never established, in spite of the fact that the confederate constitution clearly required it.
Did Jefferson Davis overrule or ignore Confederate courts on habeas corpus cases?
His minions did.
That is true. Because there was no appeal from those courts. There were potentially 13 versions of what was constitutional and what was not. No wait...there was only one source for what was constitutional...the man who said, "the true and only test is to enquire whether the law is intended to ancd calculated to carry out the object...If the answer be in the affirmative, the law is constitutional"...Jefferson Davis himself. So what did they need a supreme court for? They had him.
State & local governments are independant under our constitutional principles, not sovereign. They are bound to honor our individual rights, and to check & balance excessive federal powers. They have failed. ... Just as it is true that our central federal government is honor bound to to check & balance excessive state/local powers. They have failed. -tpaine 28
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. -tpaine 59
What constitutional restrictions have the states righters ignored? -rb-
Lots, - but their support for the CA prohibitions on 'assault weapons' gets me the most. There are dozens of self described conservatives on FR who ~insist~ that CA has a 'right' to so 'regulate' guns. -- IE, -- that our BOR's do not apply to a state. Incredible. - In effect they are constitutional scofflaws, and are proud of it... -tpaine 135
You responded to 59 thusly:
Meditate on that statement until you figure out how totally wrongside-out it is, then get back to us. -LG 93
Then you tried to gang up on him behind his back
Troll alert PING.........The history-washing machine is on spin cycle again.... -LG 103
Then you make this comment as it regards 59
This is the objectionable, antihistorical statement. -LG 267
And finish up by writing a windy states rights synopsis in which you bring up Jim Crow laws, which support rather than rebut his statements.
Now, to quote a well known Freeper on this thread
-- he brought the goods. You can't just sweep it under the rug like that. Refute, or stipulate to what he's saying. Slothful induction will get you nowhere on this board.
State & local governments are independant under our constitutional principles, not sovereign. They are bound to honor our individual rights, and to check & balance excessive federal powers. They have failed. ... Just as it is true that our central federal government is honor bound to to check & balance excessive state/local powers. They have failed. -tpaine 28
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. -tpaine 59
What constitutional restrictions have the states righters ignored? -rb-
Lots, - but their support for the CA prohibitions on 'assault weapons' gets me the most. There are dozens of self described conservatives on FR who ~insist~ that CA has a 'right' to so 'regulate' guns. -- IE, -- that our BOR's do not apply to a state. Incredible. - In effect they are constitutional scofflaws, and are proud of it... -tpaine 135
You responded to 59 thusly:
Meditate on that statement until you figure out how totally wrongside-out it is, then get back to us. -LG 93
Then you tried to gang up on him behind his back
Troll alert PING.........The history-washing machine is on spin cycle again.... -LG 103
Then you make this comment as it regards 59
This is the objectionable, antihistorical statement. -LG 267
And finish up by writing a windy states rights synopsis in which you bring up Jim Crow laws, which support rather than rebut his statements.
Now, to quote a well known Freeper on this thread
-- he brought the goods. You can't just sweep it under the rug like that. Refute, or stipulate to what he's saying. Slothful induction will get you nowhere on this board.
I'm not sure. Absent a ruling by the Supreme Court there was no reason for them to do so. Lincoln may well have had the authority to suspend it.
Sure. An invasion of Fort Sumter, Fort Pickens, and any other federal facility that caught Davis's fancy. There was no threat involved in Lincoln's inaugural address. He said that he would hold on to federal facilities, nothing more and nothing less. He promised that there would be no hostilities without the south being the aggressors. He was right.
Sure they have. Anyone who doesn't drink the confederat koolaid just has to be a Marxist. As you are fond of telling us.
You post thousands of cut and paste words in an attempt to support your opinion of facts. You demonstrate nothing but you loathing of Lincoln, and want us to believe you're an honest analyst. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here is part of the wording of the 1863 act:
"AN ACT relating to habeas corpus, and regulating judicial proceedings in certain cases. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That, during the present rebellion, the President of the United States, whenever, in his judgment, the public safety may require it, is authorized to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in any case throughout the United States, or any part thereof."
Lots, - but their support for the CA prohibitions on 'assault weapons' gets me the most. There are dozens of self described conservatives on FR who ~insist~ that CA has a 'right' to so 'regulate' guns.
Seems as though you're lumping a large body of diverse political opinion and philosophy under the name of states' rights-ers.
My understanding of the phrase all powerful state in tpaine's original statement was a reference to the federal government. That is almost always the context in which that phrase is used. The organizational structure of our republic prevents it's use in reference to state government, as those opposed could just vote with their feet (oddly, this was tried once at the federal level - and as a result we all find ourselves here today)!
I was taken aback when later it was explained that all powerful state was not in reference to federal power. The notion of an all powerful government at the state level is not reasonable, as certain powers are delegated away from the states by our federal constitution.
-- IE, -- that our BOR's do not apply to a state. Incredible. - In effect they are constitutional scofflaws, and are proud of it... -tpaine 135
States' rights advocates are not alone in their opinion that the BOR applies limits only to federal power. There are many who believe this, and they are not totally unjustified - that is to say, I have not seen a convincing argument that the opposite is true. The BOR is, after all, amending a document ordained and established for the United States of America.
Much additional contrary evidence exists. To continue your example, 46 states (I believe that # is correct still) have explicit protection of the RKBA in their own state constititions. It is evident that such a clause could have been included in the original 13, had they been established and ratified prior to the appendage of the BOR to the constitution, but how to explain the others when there is an explicit constitutional clause forbidding them to act?
NC posted the entire bill here. It contains several clauses, one of which authorizes the president to suspend the writ, two provide indemnity against prosecution for prior acts. I don't know whether or not that implies the congress knew they could not retroactively authorize his actions or not. Maybe it's just thier way of insuring all bases are covered to preempt judicial review.
16. The habeas corpus can be suspended only by authority of the legislature. The constitution of the United States provides, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when, in cases of invasion and rebellion, the public safety may require it. Whether this writ ought to be suspended depends on political considerations, of which the legislature, is to decide. 4 Cranch, 101. The proclamation of a military chief, declaring martial law, cannot, therefore, suspend the operation of the law. 1 Harr. Cond. Rep. Lo. 157, 159 3 Mart. Lo. R. 531.
Do you deny the radical left wing politics of either McPherson or Foner? If so please make your case. Mine has already been made with ample evidence from each in the form of either an espousal of their marxist politics or their formal and extensive affiliation with a communist political party. If you dispute any of that please state why. If you do not then you should at least be honest enough to concede the facts of their politics.
Nonsense. America was by no means the first attempt at self government nor will it be the last. All of this "experiment in democracy" nonsense is a load of bull offered to dupes such as yourself by the vilest of knaves seeking personal gain off of their ability to decieve you. Nor would self government have collapsed and dissappeared from the world if it had split into two adhering countries rather than one.
The simple fact of the matter is that Lincoln's little war not only failed to ensure that men could govern themselves but in fact amply demonstrated the state usurping that very right from the governed! So if anything it hastened the so-called "experiment in democracy's" demise by violating its central tenet of consent.
"Notwithstanding all the proclamations we have made to mankind, within the last ninety years, that our government rests on consent, and that that was the rightful basis on which any government could rest, the late war has practically demonstrated that our government rests upon force --- as much so as any government that ever existed. The North has thus virtually said to the world: It was all very well to prate of consent, so long as the objects to be accomplished were to liberate ourselves from our connexion with England, and also to coax a scattered and jealous people into a great national union; but now that those purposes have been accomplished, and the power of the North has become consolidated, it is sufficient for us --- as for all governments --- simply to say: Our power is our right." - Lysander Spooner, 1867
They were the highest courts in their respective states and existed as they should have. The appeal process had already worked its course by the time that the case got to its given state's high court. To appeal it further would require the typical leftist tactic of losing a case then running off crying to big daddy federal government to make it all better by superseding the authority of the mean old states.
There were potentially 13 versions of what was constitutional and what was not.
And on a case by case basis in the respective states where the ruling was that is perfectly permissible. Or do you think that a ruling in Virginia should bind a person in Alabama? Cause if you do you might as well attempt to enforce Virginia's code of statutes in the borders of Alabama as well.
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