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

Chronicles Magazine ^ | January 2001 | Donald W. Livingston

[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).

[StriperSniper]

Bump for later.

[lentulusgracchus]

Paleocons singing praises of Gorbachev - I'm not surprised...

Gorbo gave the USSR a huge shove in the right direction, and then dissolved it and disbanded much of its military and political establishment. Yes, the commissars stole everything that wasn't nailed down on their way out the door: but they couldn't dress up their massive defalcations in Marxist theory, and they stand naked before the judgment of history and their countrymen as embezzlers of their national patrimony and criminals of the first water.

By dissolving the grotesque Soviet empire, Gorbachev did the world a huge favor. His intentions were to refresh, reform, and regenerate the Soviet state, but his acknowledgment that something called principles exists outside the grasp of Marxist-Leninist regime theoreticians (like the late Mikhail Suslov) set a clear benchmark of truth that showed up the whole mass of Marxist theory and Marxist-Leninist political practice as a palpable, walking lie and cost the Soviet regime the last of the Russian people's fealty. Gorbachev could not have done a better job of taking the Soviet empire apart if he'd been Ronald Reagan himself.

Unless you think I err......?

[lentulusgracchus]

You mean the history books all have it wrong and the federal troops manning Ft. Sumter actually opened fire on the city of Charleston first?

Do a search on nolu chan's posts to the other thread you started on the ACW and "Neoconfederates"; he has recently been beavering away on the subject of the confrontation over Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens, bringing historical material and posting it back and forth to rustbucket, 4ConservativeJustices, and other posters. Go have a read and catch up on your own thread a little bit, and then tell us what you think.

Yes, this is a homework assignment. The good news is, if you accept it and go take a look, you'll know a lot more when you're done.

[lentulusgracchus]

Lincoln was a typical descendant of the Puritans who moved from New England: self-righteous and, well, puritanical.

Actually, he was an Anglo-Celt (Scots-Irish is the older term) from Kentucky; there is another thread debating his origins, which speculates that he may have been illegitimate, his mother reputedly having had an affair of some duration with another man, and his father Thomas Lincoln actually sterile. I don't endorse any POV on that thread since I don't know enough, but it makes a) an interesting read, and b) it shows that he was an Appalachian Scots-Irishman on both sides of his family -- no matter which of two men he was descended from.

Therefore, ethnographically, Lincoln had more in common with the kind of men who made up the enlisted ranks of the Confederate States Army and the Union regiments from West Virginia -- and the Kentuckians who fought on both sides. He had more "relatives" in the South and the CSA than he did in the Union army and government.

William Herndon tried to interview Lincoln about his origins for IIRC political backgrounding purposes and, eventually, what turned out later to be his biography; but he said that Lincoln was very, very guarded about parts of his family history, and Herndon found parts of the Lincoln family bible's genealogy pages to have been filleted. There is a strong hint of a mystery in Herndon's retelling -- but then, people complain about Herndon.

[lentulusgracchus]

Post up a little more about Cassius Clay; I saw his name dropped on another thread just yesterday. The Blairs' names tend to get tossed around as a known quantity: they were Lincoln relatives and partisans from IIRC Missouri, but Clay is a new (to me) name. Lincoln had some interesting, and very useful, political friends whom he called on a lot in the intrigue-filled first two months of his administration: people like Ward Lamon, Thurlow Weed, Clay, the Blairs, and Gustavus Fox. He used Seward a lot, too -- Seward of the hot-stove reputation.

[lentulusgracchus]

Actually, IIRC, the 'union predating the states' was later Hitler's interpretation of Abe's view.

No, there was support in American legal dictionaries and law writings of the 1840's and 1850's -- do a Freep-search on references to Sergeant, or just search on rustbucket and nolu chan. They posted up some goodies in another thread.

[lentulusgracchus]

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 practice, even in his first inaugural address,.....

I think you know we disagree about Lincoln's political program. I think he had it in mind for a long time to solve the "slavery question" his way, if he were elected President, and to impose a Whig agenda, by precipitating a crisis which would greatly enlarge his radius of action as the Executive in an emergency and allow him to maneuver outside the bounds of the Constitution.

I've posted up before, so you know I think it, that Lincoln's positions in 1858-1860 were completely political and purely for public consumption, that he had outlined his real program only to the happy few who attended the Republican convention of 1856, in the famous anti-slavery speech that nobody wrote down or took minutes on (I think at Lincoln's request). I think his 1856 speech delineated a political program that was far enough in advance of then-current public opinion to dazzle his closest supporters and make him, within the party, The Man on the subject of ending slavery.

I think he came into office with a program of precipitating a crisis and then driving the crisis to a satisfactory (from his POV) solution. I doubt seriously whether his negotiations during the interregnum were genuine attempts to keep the South in the Union, because he knew he could do ever so much more politically with the South out of the Union and out of the Congress, and that his policy was always a war policy, whose implementation began immediately on his taking office, as shown by the documents turfed up by nolu chan and rustbucket on the other thread.

[WhiskeyPapa]

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.

This is not true.

The --People-- have maintained the Union. It belongs to them, not the states. The big four court cases-- Cohens, McCullough, Martin and Chisholm from early in the nation's life make this plain. In all of those cases, the nature of the government is emphasized:

"Here we see the people acting as the sovereigns of the whole country; and in the language of sovereignty, establishing a Constitution by which it was their will, that the state governments should be bound, and to which the State Constitutions should be made to conform. Every State Constitution is a compact made by and between the citizens of a state to govern themeselves in a certain manner; and the Constitution of the United States is likewise a compact made by the people of the United States to govern themselves as to general objects, in a certain manner.

By this great compact however, many prerogatives were transferred to the national Government, such as those of making war and peace, contracting alliances, coining money, etc."

--Chief Justice John Jay, Chisholm v. Georgia 1793

"In the case now to be determined, the defendant, a sovereign state, denies the obligation of a law enacted by the legislature of the Union...In discussing this question, the counsel for the state of Maryland deemed it of some importance, in the construction of the Constitution, to consider that instrument as not emanating from the people, but as the act of sovereign and independent states. It would be difficult to maintain this position....

--John Marshall, majority opinon McCullough v. Maryland 1819

"That the United States form, for many, and for most important purposes, a single nation, has not yet been denied. In war, we are one people. In making peace, we are one people. In all commercial regulations, we are one and the same people. In many other respects, the American people are one; and the government which is alone capable of controlling and managing their interests in all these respects, is the government of the Union. It is their government and in that character, they have no other. America has chosen to be, in many respects, and in many purposes, a nation; and for all these purposes, her government is complete; to all these objects it is competent. The people have declared that in the exercise of all powers given for these objects, it is supreme. It can, then, in effecting these objects, legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory.

The constitution and laws of a state, so far as they are repugnant to the constitution and laws of of the United States are absolutely void. These states are constituent parts of the United States; they are members of one great empiure--for some purposes sovereign, for some purposes subordinate."

--Chief Justice John Marshall, writing the majority opinion, Cohens v. Virginia 1821

"The constitution of the United States was ordained and established, not by the states in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the constitution declares, by "the people of the United States."

-Justice Story, Martin v, Hunter's Lessee, 1816

The sovereignty of the United States rests on the people, not the States.

To say anything else is Soviet style disinformation.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

In my view, Lincoln was wrong on every count except his opposition to slavery.

Was he wrong on this:

"And this issue embraces more than the fact of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy--a government of the people, by the same people--can or cannot, maintain its territorial integtrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, accroding to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily, without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth.

It forces us to ask: "Is there in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?" "Must a government, of neccessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existance?"

A. Lincoln, 7/4/61

[WhiskeyPapa]

Whose [sic] Walt?

Me.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

There was no "rebellion", since the South simply pulled out of the Union. This was recognized by New England in the 1830s, when they threatened secession. The North attacked the South, and the North suspended the Constitution.

The Supreme Court said otherwise. The majority opinion in The Prize Cases refers to the secessionists as traitors, and notes that the Militia Act of 1792 (as amended in 1795) clearly gives the president the power to put down insurrection and rebellion.

Walt

[lentulusgracchus]

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.

Disagreeing again, I think this was a "camel's nose" strategy -- of showing the rubes only the camel's nose at first, and only later, to quote gay activist Marshall Kirk on the gay "human rights" agenda, his unsightly derriere.

Race was a hot-button issue in the United States, and I think Lincoln, while he was after 1854 committed to destroying slavery and anything and anyone who supported it, nevertheless was highly aware of the likely response to the idea of massive emancipation throughout the South, much less a brutal war against other Americans to achieve it -- so he took it off the table, until he was ready to impose it.

He may have justified the Emancipation Proclamation in political and diplomatic terms, but I'm still persuaded that it was actually the goal, and not just a tool. The vector in Lincoln's trajectory that pointed toward the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments was too strong to be the byproduct of a Clintonian politics of expedience.

[lentulusgracchus]

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.

Meditate on that statement until you figure out how totally wrongside-out it is, then get back to us.

.....and flowered in Roosevelts big government 'new deal'; which was bought to power by a coalition between leftist labor & states rightist political interests.

The coalition was unnatural and ephemeral and dissolved almost immediately when FDR's political maintenance of it ceased with his death. The coalition was FDR's creature, as he recognized the need to keep the South in the Democratic Party, despite the Party's having been almost 100% taken over by urban ethnic liberals and socialists like himself in 1928, with the nomination of Al Smith -- a Tammany Hall urban Democrat, and Roosevelt's predecessor as governor of New York.

The needs, composition, and agenda of the Southern Democrats and the urban, Northern Democrats could not have been more different. Imagine a donkey and a cow split in two and one half of each carcass sewn to one half of the other, with the head of Bernard Baruch sewn on one end: that was the Democratic Party in the 1930's.

[WhiskeyPapa]

He may have justified the Emancipation Proclamation in political and diplomatic terms, but I'm still persuaded that it was actually the goal...

Ending human slavery is a pretty good goal.

Walt

[Non-Sequitur]

David W. Livingston is a professor of philosophy at Emory University

It's pretty clear he isn't an historian.

[WhiskeyPapa]

The Articles of Confederation & Perpetual Union use the term "perpetual" 5 times, the Constitution none.

The Constitution is "the supreme law of the land."

And the government under the Constitution -is- perpetual. At least, that is what Robert E. Lee said:

"The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom and forebearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for 'perpetual union' so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession."

Robert E. Lee, January 23, 1861

Walt

[norton]

When I lived there the Gazette aspired to be the Los Angeles Times but using words of fewer sylables.

[Paul C. Jesup]

From what I understand, when Lincoln first got to D.C. he worked under Senator Clay and that is where Abe got most of his pro-federal government, pro-tax and spend views.

[4CJ]

It was intended for 'perpetual union' so expressed in the preamble

Unfortunately Lee was referring to the Articles, not the Constitution.

[4CJ]

You can always tell a neo-Confederate — but you can't tell him much.

Please get it right - 'paleoconservative', not neoconservative. And if I read your answer correctly, it is your opinion that an armed invaded must kill your familiy before you may attempt any defense. I'm sure they must be proud and appreciate the value that you place upon them.