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Lincoln Open Thread (but be careful)

The status of Lincoln in Conservative iconography has long been hotly disputed. To my way of thinking, it cannot but continue to be disputed, though one hopes that the heat of bitterness and acrimony will diminish. Lincoln is one of the most enigmatic and captivating of all historical figures. He blazes across the firmament of human history an impenetrably bright comet, its luminance tragically extinguished before anyone could get a good handle on its true inner character. I have heard it said that nothing is surer to boost the sales of any sort of book than the insertion of the word "Lincoln" in the title. Seems plausible. The man whose first and perhaps greatest talent was chopping wood (and I am not the sort of man to denigrate so ancient and sacred a talent as that) made use of the minimal instructional resources at hand to produce an intellect prodigious in practical political shrewdness, in farsighted statesmanship, in humor, in creative philosophical speculation, and above all in the art of rhetoric. How can this be? It is a question that will ring from sea to shining sea until this Republic is no more, and beyond.

The enigma of Abraham Lincoln, I submit, precludes us from dogmatizing as his final status for or against Conservatism. Men can and should present their views on the matter, but they should keep in mind the essential mystery of this statesman, and the sadly incomplete nature of his testimony to mankind. I myself have vacillated wildly over the years. I have written in the past of Lincoln as a kind of American Richelieu, "a consolidator and statesman of genius, an amalgam of despot and patriot, whose project by its very success wounded liberty, but who nonetheless commands admiration for his singular greatness in trying times." At other times I have written of my great sympathy for Harry Jaffa's protrayal of Lincoln.

The soundest claim of his Conservatism, in my view, takes cognizance of his remarkable expounding of Natural Law through both statesmanship and philosophy. Virtually no American established more forcefully the authority of a transcendent order of justice, to which men owe obedience as individuals and as communities, than Abraham Lincoln.

All the world is in revolt against Natural Law, and it is Lincoln's distinction to have anticipated certain strains of that revolt when they were in their infancy, and laid out an unparalleled edifice of thought and action to counteract them.

In any case, at the request of our illustrious Steve Burton, I present this post as a Lincoln Open Thread, with the caveat that dogmatic polemics, though common enough on Lincoln-related threads, are not welcome here. Let us keep to the sort of generosity and good will with one's opponents that Chesterton so often exemplified. Below the fold is a section of Willmoore Kendall's review of Crisis of the House Divided from National Review in 1959, which I present as further food for thought.

Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided is: 1) a political history of the United States through the years preceding the Civil War; 2) an analysis of the political thought of the spokesmen (Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas) for two of the alternative courses proposed during those years; and 3) a creative venture in political philosophy that -- unless the United States be as sick intellectually as some of us believe it to be -- will provoke the most profound and far-reaching debate of our generation about American politics.

Some of the book's readers (who this reviewer hopes will be legion) will no doubt wish that Jaffa had written his three books one at a time. Like Bergson, he is a subtle and seductive teacher of philosophy who, however, makes great intellectual demands upon his pupils. But what Jaffa proves, if he does not prove anything else, is that political history is inseparable from the history of political philosophy, and that neither can be grasped by the man who is not a political philosopher in his own right.

The man who refutes Jaffa's controversial theses (which are legion) will have to bring to his task all the skills Jaffa shows himself to possess, and to possess beyond any other member of his generation whom I have encountered on the printed page: the skills of the historian with an encyclopedic grasp of his materials, of the all-seeing textual analyst, of the creative political philosopher, and of the literary artist who has mastered the nuances and rhythms of the rich and beautiful language bequeathed to us by Milton, Shakespeare, Burke -- and Abraham Lincoln. (Of Lincoln's right to be mentioned in this context Jaffa leaves this reader -- the Gettysburg address, incidentally, entirely apart --in no doubt at all.)

The central problem of Crisis of the House Divided is the status in the American political tradition of the "all men are created equal" clause of the Declaration of Independence. For Jaffa this is the same problem as the status of Abraham Lincoln vis-a-vis the Signers of the Declaration and the Framers of the Constitution; which, again, is the same problem as that of the very possibility of self-government, that is, of democracy, as a realistic political alternative. These three problems, Jaffa brilliantly demonstrates, were Abraham Lincoln's own deepest preoccupations from the earliest moments of his career -- preoccupations, moreover, with which he wrestled not as the smart political strategist of recent Lincoln historiography (though Jaffa is willing for us to think of Lincoln as that too), but as a political philosopher of the first order of importance.

As for the "all men are created equal" clause, Jaffa's Lincoln (and Jaffa) sees it as the indispensable presupposition of the entire American political experience; either you accept it as the standard which that experience necessarily takes as its point of departure, or you deny the meaning of the entire American experience. As for the status of Abraham Lincoln vis-a-vis the Signers and Framers, Jaffa's Lincoln sees the great task of the nineteenth century as that of affirming the cherished accomplishment of the Fathers by transcending it. Concretely, this means to construe the equality clause as having an allegedly unavoidable meaning with which it was always pregnant, but which the Fathers apprehended only dimly. As for the possibility of self-government, Jaffa's Lincoln sees it as turning on the questions: What can be done about the Caesarist potential in the system elaborated by the Framers? What can be done to prevent the passions of a self-governing people from, in the long run, taking over from their reason, so that it ignores the duties correlative to the rights self-government is intended to secure?

Jaffa's Lincoln (and Jaffa) has a crystal-clear answer to these questions: Caesarism can be avoided, the takeover by passions at the expense of reason circumvented, only through the ministrations and ultimate self-immolation of an anti-Caesar, himself as indifferent to power and glory as Caesar is avid for it -- an anti-Caesar capable of transforming the fundamental affirmations of the Signers and Framers into a political religion that men can live by. And for Jaffa these three problems reduce themselves to the question -- tacit, but present on every page of the book -- whether the Civil War was, from the standpoint of natural right and the cause of self-government, the "unnecessary war" of the historians of the past fifty or sixty years, or a war that had to be fought in the interest of freedom for all mankind.

Comments (227)


"He blazes across the firmament of human history an impenetrably bright comet, its luminance tragically extinguished before anyone could get a good handle on its true inner character."

That luminescence of which you speak is quite easily explained: it's the burning of Atlanta. May he rest next to Sherman in the deepest pit of hell.

Glad you got it all figured out for us Allan.

And here we go . . .

My father (raised a share-cropper in the South) once told me that his mother "hated" Yankees (I knew that, though I trust she made an exception for me) ... and Democrats. In context, I think I can understand both hatreds.

"... I myself have vacillated wildly over the years. ..."

I don't see a contradiction in simultaneously holding both the views you give; I hold both those views, simultaneously.

That luminescence of which you speak is quite easily explained: it's the burning of Atlanta. May he rest next to Sherman in the deepest pit of hell.

If burning down some abandoned buildings gets you consigned to the deepest pit of hell, then one wonders what happens to you if you enslave your fellow man.

Sometimes you have to burn a city or two just to get folks to realize they can't own humans, especially if those folks cloak their shameless barbarity under the guise of states' rights.

States don't have rights. Persons do. States have obligations, like freeing slaves (especially when they've promised to free them).

You'll notice that the slave states didn't raise much complaint about federal involvement in the so-called "state's rights" issue of slavery when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. But they did invoke states' rights when the federal government said they could no longer own humans. Owning humans became a so-called states' rights issue. If owning humans really were a states' rights issue, as the South contended, then the northern states ought to have had the right not to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, which required them to return runaway slaves -- but the southern states made no such argument or concession either before or after emancipation.

It was the rankest hypocrisy, and Lincoln the conservative was correct to oppose it and to enforce both the Constitution and the God-given rights of human beings. The liberal usurpers, the revolutionaries in the issue of human rights and in the Constitutional obligations to which they had committed themselves at the founding, were the southern states.

Lincoln is the conservative, and not some of the 20th century southern agrarians who longed for ante-bellum glory and culture. Any glory or culture resting so heavily on owning humans is not a glory or culture worth resurrecting. Burn it down.

Of course, when you burn it down, everybody gets burned.

The quality of the commentary on this thread--from both sides--is roughly equal to what I run into at the University of South Carolina's football message board. Rank ignorance and flippancy up to the knees.

That's sort of what I was afraid of, Sage.

No, William, everybody didn't get burned, either in the literal burning of Atlanta to which I alluded initially or in the figurative burning of the wicked ante-bellum culture to which I alluded at the end of my remarks. But the union was saved; the slaves were freed; and the old south is no more -- all good things. Thanks be to Lincoln and his invocation of the enduring conservative principles of human dignity and of proper political governance, which made it possible. He invoked the American founding and the enduring principles upon which it was based, principles usurped or discarded by George III and the old south.

Sage, now that you've engaged in "rank ignorance and flippancy up to the knees," try making a case. Your comment is pitched at the level of what one finds on "South Carolina's football message board." Aim higher.

Like George W Bush I think that Lincon's intentions were good but his methods wrong, If St Thomas Aquinas is right then one must take that into account when presuming to judge the state of his imortal soul.

As a Southern-sympathizing Northerner (born and raised in Pa., lived there all my life except for two years in Dallas) I see Lincoln as a decidedly mixed bag, and leaning more towards the negative. While he might be considered a 'conservative' philosophically speaking, for reasons that both Frank & Paul delineate, I don't think he was politically conservative in any real sense. Like Jack says -- good motives, perhaps, but wrong methods.

In brief, I believe that the South was right about everything except slavery; that slavery was the prime motivation (but definitely not the only one, despite what modern liberals would have you believe) for secession, there is no doubt. That the war was initiated by the North over secession, and not over slavery, is also of no doubt. This simple distinction, one that liberals can't seem to get their head around, is IMO the key to the thing. Unfortunately, many conservatives, having uncritically bought into the liberal historiography of the war, don't seem to get it either.

Hence, when it comes to the Civil War, those conservative Lincoln-worshippers accept a historiography that's been constructed largely by their ideological opponents. By doing so they demonstrate that at very least in this area their conservatism is inconsistent.

"Lincoln is the conservative, and not some of the 20th century southern agrarians who longed for ante-bellum glory and culture. Any glory or culture resting so heavily on owning humans is not a glory or culture worth resurrecting. Burn it down."

In my experience, "conservatives" who talk like this haven't actually read the agrarians, or Southern conservatives in general. If they had, they wouldn't spout such drivel. Unfortunately they take the same view as many Leftists and Marxists, and use the same rhetoric, i.e., indignant spluttering combined with ridiculous oversimplification.


Mr. Bauman --

I am deeply skeptical of the view that assigns to the Confederate South a unique and indelible wickedness, thereby conferring an unassailable and almost divine justice to the Northern cause; just as I am deeply skeptical of the view that would set up Lincoln as a tyrant and aggressor. I suppose men like Allan would have us believe that Lincoln, as Chief Executive of the American Union, should have acquiesced in being suddenly and violently deprived of the Lower Mississippi, and the consequent impoverishment of the entire Midwest, upon the basis of constitutional theories he rejected wholesale.

But the Old South had no monopoly on wickedness. That its economy rested on a particularly hideous institution of human bondage is not in doubt. But there is some doubt, at least in my mind, whether burning cities to the ground was necessary to defeat that institution. And does our current abortion regime not rest on the same principle, that a certain class of human beings may be lawfully treated a property? Then should our cities burn as well?

Did the simple Virginians and other Southerners (and how many private soldiers in Confederate armies actually owned slaves?) who took up arms to repel an invading army cover themselves with dishonor? Was Grant's magnanimity at Appomattox Courthouse a thing to admire or despise? Has the long tradition of admiration for the three great Southern generals -- who disliked salvery and (the two that survived the war) set an example of acceptance of the North's victory at arms -- been a blight on our national honor?

Moreover, I do not agree that principles of constitutionalism espoused by the South (however disingenuously by those who cared only to maintain slavery) can be so easily brushed aside. Calhoun's concurrent majority doctrine is a fascinating one; and if professors can ask us to read and learn from the doctrines of men like Rousseau who in their own lives were moral cretins, surely we can learn from Southern theories. Nullification, for instance, is a doctrine that derives from Jefferson and Madison in their opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In short, it seems clear to me that there is a lot more nuance and complexity to the human drama of Secession and Civil War than the morality play presented by latter-day partisans on either side.

Paul,
Yes, when the south tries to dissolve the union in order to perpetuate the practice of owning humans, and when war is declared, cities might burn, which is not the same as the current state of affairs with regard to abortion. If we declared war on abortion, and if some states decided to leave the union in order to preserve their gruesome practice of killing the unborn, the situations would be parallel, and those who fought on the side of maintaining abortion would be doing tremendous evil.

Yes, southern soldiers did dishonorably by fighting, just as did Nazi soldiers. They should not have gone to war. They should not have fought. Their cause was wicked. That Grant was magnanimous to southern fighters was a good thing; what they fought for was not. That they fought for it was not. Many otherwise honorable men, like Lee, did great evil in going to war. I am sure there were honorable Nazi generals too. But they did evil by fighting.

You cannot fight a just war in defense of the alleged right of states to maintain the wicked institution of slavery. By fighting for it, you do evil. And if you are so committed to maintaining that evil that only a conquering army can convince you to stop it, you are more evil still.

But the south did not end slavery until they were forced to do it. It was ended by others on the field of battle. In ignominious defeat suffered while fighting for an evil cause, they protest their losses because a conquering army actually had to conquer them and had to do the things necessary for victory and for human liberation. If the southern states had ended slavery willingly earlier, as they ought, no war would have been needed.

"If we declared war on abortion, and if some states decided to leave the union in order to preserve their gruesome practice of killing the unborn, the situations would be parallel, and those who fought on the side of maintaining abortion would be doing tremendous evil."

So let us say that a certain state or region (California, New England) decided to secede over abortion. Does that then give us the right to carpet bomb their cities and kill and injure their civilians in order to force them back into the union?

Mr. Bauman, you really have swallowed the Northern "Treasure of Virtue" kool-aid on this one, in following that notable conservative Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (heh-heh) in comparing the South with the Nazis.

You cannot fight a just war in defense of the alleged right of states to maintain the wicked institution of slavery. By fighting for it, you do evil. And if you are so committed to maintaining that evil that only a conquering army can convince you to stop it, you are more evil still.

You assume that slavery was the only issue that the South fought over. That aside, slavery is not an inherently wicked institution. If it were, then God would have prohibited it under great penalty in the laws of Israel, rather than codifying parameters under which slavery was legal. It's merely the form that it took, which is a never-ending cycle which brings children into bondage and that gave owners the right to break up married couples that was evil, not the idea of slavery itself.

You also fail to take into consideration the fact that the means that were used to suppress the South were actually quite wicked. Wanton destruction of private property in a total war campaign was a favored tactic of the North to bring the South to its knees. The destruction was so bad that in hindsight it is completely obvious that Jim Crow grew out of the aftermath in no small part out of economic necessity because the North's barbaric approach destroyed so much private industry, resulting in extremely intense competition between freed blacks and poorer whites.

Furthermore, the North was not fighting a war to end slavery or anything of that sort, but rather to suppress the right of secession itself. It wasn't even until a few years into the war that it took a different turn, so the original justification for war was minimal. Certainly not enough to justify it in light of the fact that odds were strongly against the North winning the Civil War until Lee made a fatal error in sending Pickett's men on their infamous charge at Gettysburg.

If the Civil War were fought today over abortion, that might make more sense from a Just War Theory given the fact that murder is a far more heinous crime than slavery. That said, I don't think pro-lifers would have the stomach for the amount of casualties they would have to inflict to force the "pro-choice states" back into the Union as states without abortion.

Yes, when the south tries to dissolve the union in order to perpetuate the practice of owning humans

Next you'll be telling us that the colonies attempted to dissolve the British Empire with the Declaration of Independence, rather than merely seceding from the Empire.

You'll notice that the slave states didn't raise much complaint about federal involvement in the so-called "state's rights" issue of slavery when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. But they did invoke states' rights when the federal government said they could no longer own humans. Owning humans became a so-called states' rights issue. If owning humans really were a states' rights issue, as the South contended, then the northern states ought to have had the right not to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, which required them to return runaway slaves -- but the southern states made no such argument or concession either before or after emancipation.

They had a reasonable argument under the "full faith and credit clause" to have their property rights respected. Imagine today if half of the union said that your car was your property, and the other half said that if anyone hijacked it, it was theirs to keep. You may dislike the comparison of a human being to a car, but that's the equivalent scenario from the perspective of many southerners.

One of the biggest problems is that most people do not know history. They make blanket assertions that are too broad sweeping even if they are right. The say that the Old South was wicked is to employ liberal universalism in the most unabashed way. I, as a New Yorker, am not obliged to stop slavery or anything else from being practiced in South Carolina, for instance. To assert that the murder of so many people in war was a good merely because of the ends it achieved implies both an un-Christian ethic and a dehumanization of Southerners. Using Mike's point, I doubt anyone would go to war in another state to make sure abortion was stopped there. We do not even do that now and it is legal in all of our home states. Before we start condemning whole pockets of humanity we should lessen the distance between it and ourselves. The study of history allows for this.

Secondly, slavery, per se, is not condemned within the Christian tradition. One could say that the chattel slavery of the Slave Trade became wickedly monstrous and immoral without condemning the concept itself.

I, as a New Yorker, am not obliged to stop slavery or anything else from being practiced in South Carolina, for instance.

If you take Mike's argument to its natural conclusion, it justifies imperialism as the United States can use military force to stop any institution around the world which it finds objectionable. There is also no room for God's judgment in his argument that it was justified for anti-slavery states to invade pro-slavery states.

I think that, ethically speaking, the most important points are that: 1)Our natural obligations are particular and not abstract and 2) the effort to ameliorate all evils everywhere and always can lead to disastrous consequences (see Civil War).

Was there not great pressure on Lincoln to bring resolution to the crisis over the South*s economic mainstay, cotton? I had read somewhere that the collusion between the North and England in their desire to keep cotton prices artificially low was what had motivated the South to adopt a very defensive position, apart from the key aspect of slavery. It had also to do with exports of textiles vs. raw product so I am oversimplifying here. The South was being squeezed in an economic pincer move and felt highly threatened even with the supposed advantage of owning slaves.

"I, as a New Yorker, am not obliged to stop slavery or anything else from being practiced in South Carolina, for instance."

Translation:

"I am personally against slavery. But if someone, consistent with their own deeply help beliefs on this matter, and in consultation with their clergy and their God, think it is right, then who I am to judge?" Or, if we were to make it a bumpersticker:

"Don't like slavery, don't own one."

But, more to the point. What if the slave were to think like you about himself: "I, as a human being made in God's image, am not obligated to acquiesce to be treated as property by this white gentleman in South Carolina. Too bad the fella in New York can't see me as vested with the same dignity as he sees the abstraction called `South Carolina'. If only I were a state rather than a black human being would they think I have `rights'."

You'll notice that the slave states didn't raise much complaint about federal involvement in the so-called "state's rights" issue of slavery when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850.

Quite right. As Henry Adams put matters:

Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision — all triumphs of the slave power — did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.

Michael,

While genuinely sympathetic to your analysis, I think you paint the historical situation with too broad a brush. A couple of years ago I read Foote's three volume history of the Civil War and anyone who reads that magisterial work comes away with a deep appreciation for the personal qualities of virtue present especially in Lee and Stonewall Jackson (not to mention their superior tactical generalship). Had Jackson's own men not accidentally killed him at Chancellorville, I'm not sure the North would have prevailed. And while I think Sherman's march to the sea was justified, no doubt abuses took place and innocent people suffered. However, the real nastiness was taking place in Missouri and Kansas on both sides. In particular, the Lawrence Massacre was evil and tragic.

Paul,

My only comment to add is that one of Lincoln's most amazing abilities, IMO, is just how shrewd and careful he was in dealing with the Northern radicals -- folks forget that in many respects Lincoln was a compromise President who really did much to avoid war and/or keep the radicals from dictating wartime policy. I recommend Kearn's "Team of Rivals" as an excellent look at some of the key figures in the North and how Lincoln deftly maneuvered among them. One also comes away from reading such a book amazed at how pathetic today's politicians seem compared to the giants of the 19th Century.

Good comment Singer. Blackadder: where does that fine and useful Adams quotation come from?

Dr. Beckwith, that you would even consider commenting on something I said is an honor. I enjoy reading what you write and respect you greatly. Please allow me to disagree with you sharply.

You are mistaken in your translation. This is not some political parsing of words but 2000 years of Christian tradition. I am certainly not obligated to stop evil wherever it may be. Augustine saw that there are constraints on our power to help people and that we should recognize them and act accordingly. For instance, if I knew that my next door neighbor was going to get in his car and cheat on his wife, am I morally obliged to slash his tires or even drag him out through the window and constrain him in order to prevent him from doing so? I think that your understanding of my point is way off.

Politicians who say "Personally opposed but..." are shirking their duty to ensure the common good. But even with politicians, a local New York politician would be wrong to attempt to legislate for another state. We recognize that their are limits on his jurisdiction. Similarly, abortion is a grave and intrinsic evil, but I am not morally irresponsible because I am not in China subverting their government because of their monstrous abortion policies.

South Carolina is not an abstraction but an actual place with a history and a people unto itself. I am in no position to dictate what its laws may be or not be regardless of their moral implications. I have a question for you too. What if the New Yorker is an immigrant who has recently arrived in the United States and is completely unaware of the war that is about to break out. He also doesn't care much for the slavery issue because he, like most people, is primarily concerned with his family and friends and their well being. Is he morally irresponsible for not acting to end American slavery?

"I think that, ethically speaking, the most important points are that: 1)Our natural obligations are particular and not abstract and 2) the effort to ameliorate all evils everywhere and always can lead to disastrous consequences (see Civil War)."

It's no surprise that the biggest Lincoln fans among conservatives tend to be those who also favor an actively interventionist/expansionist foreign policy that seeks to spread democratic corporate capitalism.


Paul,

See here.

The quote is on page 270.

"It's no surprise that the biggest Lincoln fans among conservatives tend to be those who also favor an actively interventionist/expansionist foreign policy that seeks to spread democratic corporate capitalism."

Remember, the South was not a foreign power. It was part of the U.S. And the biggest corporate capitalists at the time were slave owners, with property that had souls.

But, to the point, I am neither an interventionist nor a preacher of the corporate gospel. I am a defender of free peoples and free markets, which may, on occasion, require that America offer support. But the decision to do so should be done carefully, prudentially, and consistent with our interests. Thus, for example, I would rather have an Iran with religious liberty and burgeoning small businesses than one that resembles France with an Islamo-Disney plopped in the middle of downtown Tehran.

Corporations are not intrinsically evil. But when they become welfare-babes sucking on the teet of government, then they run counter to free markets and free peoples. GM, for example, should have been given the Kevorkian-treatment. Sometimes the poop of failed corporations propped up by corrupt governments and unions must be allowed to fall to the ground so that a 1000 flowers of entrepreneurial ingenuity can bloom.

**You'll notice that the slave states didn't raise much complaint about federal involvement in the so-called "state's rights" issue of slavery when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850.**

There are reasons for that, but really, it's neither here nor there. I don't think anyone's trying to make the case that the South was blameless, or even totally consistent. Thing is, neither was the North. The point is that any arguments that attempt to paint one region or the other in an entirely good or bad light are off the mark, as neither side was noticeably consistent in its beliefs and actions.

As far as the Henry Adams quote goes, the first sentence is accurate, but the rest is iffy. See the work by such libertarian historians as Jeffrey R. Hummel and Joseph Stromberg as a counter to the myth of a "slave power."



Remember, the South was not a foreign power. It was part of the U.S.

Whether the US sends an army into Canada or Mexico, or one into the South, it is still sending an army into a land that doesn't want its presence there. That does give it imperialist/interventionist qualities, especially since it was to suppress secession. The federal government may have seen the South as just another part of the U.S., but the South didn't agree with that, much like how in 1776 the colonies didn't see themselves as British.

"Remember, the South was not a foreign power. It was part of the U.S."

True, but at that time remember that "the U.S." was a plural term, not a singular one, and one's state allegiance was seen by many, if not most, as primary.

In any case, Dr. Beckwith, your posts do not strike me as those of a Lincoln-cult acolyte, and I didn't have you in mind when I wrote what I did.


Lincoln attended only about 1 1/2 years of formal schooling. He liked to fight as a young man. He chose law very likely because he could continue fighting.

Someone who had gone through school and college might have tried to talk with the South instead of trying to provoke the South to fire first.

During the 1860 election, Lincoln also refused to answer questions, sort of like someone we know.

"The contest in the North was between Lincoln and Douglas, but only the latter took to the stump and gave speeches and interviews."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860#General_election

That was what provoked the fears of Lincoln. If he had given interviews like Douglas, then he would have had to reassure the South and that would have cost him votes. Lincoln got 39.8% of the vote in the presidential election. For Republican nomination he didn't even have a plurality in the first ballot.

Lincoln was appealing to hate to get elected. He was elected on a hate mandate. Thus if he had tried to negotiate with the South, his backers in the Republican Party would not have followed him. The Southrons had to a large extend left Congress when Lincoln took office, so they controlled Congress and could have impeached him easily, claiming by not invading the South he was not doing his duties.

Lincoln was no profile in courage at any point in all of this. He just did what would move him ahead and did nothing to ease the South's mind and to try to avoid separation or war.

Lincoln set the course for war in 1860 by his refusal to reassure the South or even go there during the campaign. He calculated that is what he needed to do to win, to win on the votes of hate in the North.

Lincoln was appealing to hate to get elected. He was elected on a hate mandate.

Aren't you sympathetic to the BNP?

Did Northerners generally recognize as legitimate the authority of Southern governments outside the expediency of the Union? Were they morally obliged to do so? Would it have been just to abandon millions of their erstwhile countrymen to the cruelty of those tyrants?

Edward the Lesser,

regarding a cheating neighbor, for the sake of peace and safety, most people would do nothing and say nothing. But if we really loved each other, any of us would break his nose. Government is established to prevent such crimes as adultery. TWO women! To hell with that. I don't even have one. Son of a bitch. What's this jerk's name? Where is he? TWO women! Gah! I'll pretend I didn't read that.

Besides, such perpetual and total slavery as practiced in the South was one of the greatest evils the world has ever witnessed, and is totally condemned by both divine and natural law. It violates the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth and tenth commandments, according to the Catholic telling.

That's right. The ethnic cleansing of native British by immigration is similar to the hate of crackers in the South. Its a mathematical theorem, the Wright Island Model, that immigration causes genetic replacement.

Regarding slavery, the natural law and Catholic teaching, it seems to me that some on this tread make the same mistakes that some protestants make when they find some comments among one or several of the Church fathers that conflict with Catholic teaching--the protestant arguer thinks that the individual statement of the Church father was the "REAL" teaching of the Church before "Roman" inovation. But it is not so.

Before St. Augustine and any other comments from the fathers which seem to support slavery, St. Paul says "There is no jew or greek, slave or free, but all are one in Jesus Christ". In his letter to Philemon he admonishes him to treat the runaway Onesimus as a brother. How can a Christian enslave a brother?! In the process of our Church's development of doctrine that slavery is a sin, this is our kernel.

Old Atlantic: I think you're misunderstanding the nature of antebellum presidential campaigns; outright campaigning by the nominee was generally regarded as unclassy. This was a remnant of the belief that candidates should "stand" rather than "run" for office. Douglas actually took much criticism for his personal campaigning and at one point attempted to deflect opposition by claiming that his campaign swing through New England was merely a visit to his Vermont resident mother! Bell and Breckinridge campaigned no more than Lincoln did. Both Lincoln and Douglas had certainly made extensive statements of their positions during their 1858 senatorial campaigns.

Creole Catholic, that quotation from Scripture does not condemn slavery anymore than it does being Greek or Jewish. Actually, slaves are enjoined to obey their masters. The difference is between slavery in and of itself and particular instances of slavery throughout history. Can they become abuse? Of course they can, but so can fatherhood. Feminists attempt to generalize about male and father behavior all the time based on particular instances of neglect or abuse. The jump to wholesale condemnation, however, is just that, a jump. No matter how politically incorrect it sounds it is still true.

America has a history of slavery that is obviously troubling. People were taken from their native lands and separated from their families. I completely understand why we would react to the very idea of slavery as abhorrent. Other places with different histories, though, may not be in the same situation. Although it is fictional, Samwise Gamgee is not merely Frodo's friend. He is a servant of the Bagginses and what might be called a slave in a qualified sense. Tolkien does not portray Frodo as an abusive master and actually draws out the possible virtues of the master-slave relationship.

He is a servant of the Bagginses and what might be called a slave in a qualified sense.

What...disgusting rubbish. Yeah, he calls him "Master Frodo," and there is clearly a class distinction and a master-servant relationship. But that doesn't mean Frodo could pursue him as chattel and have him dragged back and put in chains if he tried to run away. The comparison to southern slavery is sickening.

Although it is fictional, Samwise Gamgee is not merely Frodo's friend. He is a servant of the Bagginses and what might be called a slave in a qualified sense.

Alfred tends to refer to Batman as "Master Bruce." I guess that means Alfred is Batman's slave.

Lydia, your nasty tone returns again. You have completely misunderstood my point. I am saying everything you said in the first sentence and saying that it is unlike what you said in the second sentence. Tolkien refers to Sam as Frodo's servant in the Silmarillion. I am saying that there is a distinction between slavery per se and our particular horrid history of slavery. If you do not understand or you cannot disagree politely than do not be so arrogantly stupid as to call what I say "disgusting rubbish."

I never said that he is a servant because he calls Frodo "Master Frodo." I said that he is a servant because he is one as described by Tolkien and implied in their relationship in the book. Even Farmer Maggot has "house servants." The point is simply that it is not impossible to imagine a people that do not abuse the institution of slavery or servitude.

I never said that he is a servant because he calls Frodo "Master Frodo." I said that he is a servant because he is one as described by Tolkien

You didn't say he was a servant. You said he was "what might be called a slave in a qualified sense" and that Tolkien's portrayal "actually draws out the possible virtues of the master-slave relationship." As Bruce Wayne's butler, Alfred is most definitely his servant. But he's not a slave.

I am not distinguishing between the word 'servant' and 'slave.' The idea that the two are completely separate is probably due to the fact that slavery is the most damned word and thing in American history. I am not saying that is shouldn't be but I am saying that there is no difference between the two in the case I used.

And my point is that a phrase like "slavery or servitude" is neither more nor less than fog. If your whole point, Edward, is that there is a definite and sharp distinction between the two, then that point should be totally irrelevant to the North-South dispute and the subject of this thread. Because servitude wasn't what we had in the south. It was slavery. As in, being able to buy and sell people. Which is _sharply distinct_ from anything like the entirely British freeman-servant relationship Tolkien has in mind in his books. Nor was ours some sort of devolution or negative development. Slavery in the United States from the outset had meant the actual ownership of people. And yes, being able to buy and sell people is completely wrong as a "concept in itself," period.

"I am saying that there is a distinction between slavery per se and our particular horrid history of slavery."

Correct. One of the errors of the Southern slavery defenders was to equate their version of slavery (chattel slavery based on race) with other slaveries, including the Biblical one. On the other hand, quite a few abolitionists were prepared to chuck the Bible altogether if it could be shown to support slavery. In other words, as usual, the extremists on both sides made the most noise and tended to drown out the more balanced voices.


"Actually, slaves are enjoined to obey their masters. The difference is between slavery in and of itself and particular instances of slavery throughout history. Can they become abuse? Of course they can, but so can fatherhood. Feminists attempt to generalize about male and father behavior all the time based on particular instances of neglect or abuse. The jump to wholesale condemnation, however, is just that, a jump. No matter how politically incorrect it sounds it is still true."

I agree that the Bible does seem to permit the existence of slavery and that this is something with which Christians opposed to slavery have to reckon. I don't think, however, that the Bible ever treats the master-slave relationship as being of the exact same type as the husband-wife or the father-son relationship, even though there are passages where St. Paul mentions all three in the same breath.

The central act of the Old Testament, after all, is a mass liberation from slavery brought about by the direct intervention of God. In contrast, God never brought about a miraculous divorce or commanded a child to disobey his parents - and if He ever had done such a thing, our ideas about marriage and parenthood would have to change accordingly. (God permitted divorce in the Old Testament, it is true, but He never commanded it or approved of it, and since only the husband could initiate the divorce, it was in not the liberation of a legal inferior.) Marriage and fatherhood/motherhood are necessary for society to exist; slavery is not.

Wow. Lydia, I was not just typing for my own health. I was addressing a specific point that another commenter made. They quoted Scripture improperly and then dismissed the Church Fathers and I simply attempted to point out why that was wrong. I am not defending chattel slavery and to act as if I am is to completely misinterpret me.

To say that buying and selling people is intrinsically wrong is like saying that gluttony is wrong. you are right, but it doesn't exactly speak to eating, which was my point.

Regarding the North-South during the War Between the States, my initial comment was about ethics and obligations to other people.

This is a good explanation of what slavery in ancient Israel actually was.

Mr. Kabala, I think you would find Aquinas' writings regarding slavery to be an interesting read. He looks at many of the Scriptural and natural aspects of the practice from an ethical perspective.

Also, Aristotle sees the master slave relationship as essential to the social life of man as marriage.

To put Edward's point another way, we Americans tend to link the words 'slave' and 'slavery' with our particular form of the institution because of our history. In the bigger historical picture, however, including the Biblical one, those two concepts aren't necessarily linked. One can speak about slavery, and speak correctly, without at all referring to chattel and/or race-based slavery.

James Kabala | June 23, 2009 2:14 PM

Lincoln knew what was happening. He didn't go to Mars during 1860 and come back and then launch a war on the South without thinking about it previously. Seward was ahead of Lincoln on the first ballot at the RNC. Seward was more radical than Lincoln. Lincoln couldn't reassure the South without offending Seward's committed supporters, who were the party faithful.

"Republicans felt victory at hand, and used para-military campaign organizations like the Wide Awakes to rally their supporters (see American election campaigns in the 19th century for campaign techniques)."

These were all Seward supporters. Lincoln won by only 25,000 votes in New York. So he would have lost if he had reassured the South. Presumably there was vote stealing going on in New York City and the Seward men were the ones Lincoln was counting on for vote stealing. Remember, Lincoln had given a speech in NYC prior to the election, the Cooper Union Speech. He knew who attended.

It was also not the custom in prior elections to invade the losing side without any discussion. So the custom argument is weak for Lincoln.


"All the world is in revolt against Natural Law, and it is Lincoln's distinction to have anticipated certain strains of that revolt when they were in their infancy, and laid out an unparalleled edifice of thought and action to counteract them."

I wonder about this, Paul. Was not even Lincoln's appeal to natural law a mixed bag, wedded as it was to 'natural rights' theory? In a sense, didn't Lincoln's rights talk trump his law talk, thus opening the door (or pushing an already open door a good bit further) towards modern Americans' obsession with claiming their rights?

Likewise, didn't his prosecution of the war go even further? How can one region's understanding of rights be forced on another region at gunpoint, given the constitutional and historical complexities of the thing, and the former still be considered in the "right"?

I find myself wanting to like Lincoln (he is, of course, in many ways an admirable man) but there are too many negatives standing in the way. And what I find irksome about the conservatives in the Lincoln cult is their ignoring and/or downplaying of these negatives.

So much that is wrong in present-day American civics has its roots in Lincoln.

States don't have rights. Persons do.

The US Constitutions begs to differ with you.

The root of the question which Jaffa raised is this: Is the US founded on the Constitution, or the Declaration?

To my mind he never demonstrated successfully that we ought to embrace Declarationism.

Even assuming we do embrace Declarationism, the notion that the Declaration is properly distilled to a five word sentence fragment seems questionable.

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!" - Abraham Lincoln

such perpetual and total slavery as practiced in the South was one of the greatest evils the world has ever witnessed

That seems a bit overwrought. The world has, sadly, seen plenty of evil just as bad or a good deal worse. Slavery goes back to the dawn of history. The notion that slavery in America was unusually cruel is without foundation.

Not that it makes much difference now...But I'd like to apologize to Paul for opening comments on this thread in such a vitriolic manner. Indeed, I am no fan of Lincoln. But that is a far cry from (genuinely) wishing him a space in the 9th Canto. (And though it's even harder, I suppose that goes for Sherman as well...)

Most of all, I apologize for (possibly aiding in) derailing the primary point of the post. I've always found it curious that Lincoln is lumped into the conservative camp. That is, I'm not at all clear what recommends it, aside from (a) he "conserved" the Union (but that sidesteps the very issue in question, it seems to me), and (b) he was a Republican. Having read more than a few of his speeches (whether relating to the Civil War or otherwise)I have always come away with the impression that...well, Edmund Burke he ain't.

But then, this simply highlights Paul's (primary?) thesis, according to which Lincoln's position vis-a-vis history will probably always be disputed. (At least, there will always be those such as myself who loathe his lionization...even if we don't (quite) wish his soul eternal damnation.)

Paul - obviously, I just didn't fully appreciate what I was asking you to do, here.

I thank you for responding so generously.

Blackadder, great quote by Henry Adams. I particularly relished this morsel:

Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use.

Substitute for "slavery" in that passage any number of crotchets and hobbyhorses of Leftists from the French Revolution to the present, and one unmasks the naked absolutist lust for power and Gnostic utopianism behind the mask of relativism and "rights" the Leftist likes to hide behind.

I, as a New Yorker, am not obliged to stop slavery or anything else from being practiced in South Carolina, for instance.

As a native New Yorker myself, I would refer you to a fellow New Yorker and Founding Father on the duties of fellow citizens:

In a civil society it is the duty of each particular branch to promote not only the good of the whole community, but the good of every other particular branch. If one part endeavors to violate the rights of another, the rest ought to assist in preventing the injury. When they do not but remain neutral, they are deficient in their duty, and may be regarded, in some measure, as accomplices.

In this critical instance (in the lead up to the American Revolution), he was applying the principle to the relationship of the American colonies to the other parts of the British Empire (specifically, Great Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies), so it will not do to invoke South Carolina's status as a distinct sovereign entity in the American Empire to denigrate the duty, which, to be sure, is imperfect, but a duty nevertheless (which is stronger precisely because of the political tie).

The *reason* for the attempt to use the Bible to condone and justify US chattel slavery is precisely because it was the Bible (and Christian tradition) which supplied the language and concepts which condemned it.

Mr. Cella,

You asked whether Lincoln can be considered a conservative. Clearly, the only salient objections to this are "Lincoln is not a Conservative because p" and "Lincoln was a Liberal because p". You seem to have attracted a good deal of irrelevant discussion about whether Lincoln was a monster or whether slavery is always bad, but none of this speaks to your question.

First, I don't see the tag "Conservative" as describing not just a body of doctrine, but an essentially political doctrine that functions in a (more or less) representative government, and as such has to allow for a certain amount of inconsistency, change, and even contradiction in order to be large enough to be useful to a representative government. The same can be said for "Liberal". That being said, what Contemporary Americans mean by "a Liberal" is someone whose political roots are in the progressive movement that arose fourty years after Lincoln was killed. Now while Conservatism has a much less centralized ideology, Liberalism has a very solid one that is well documented and easy to follow.

I suggest it is easier to ask "was Lincoln a proto- progressive Liberal?" And the answer here is an emphatic and resounding no. Lincoln rejected the notions of progressive Liberalism to the core of his being. He rejected the idea that there was no fixed human nature, that a charismatic leader should react and mold the will of the herd, etc. This is the only way that Jaffa and the Claremont guys approach the problem (Jaffa would see Douglas, for example, as a proto-progressive). Lincoln may not be a conservative, they would argue, but he is the antidote to modern Liberalism.

oops

third word, second paragraph, cut out.

"The *reason* for the attempt to use the Bible to condone and justify US chattel slavery is precisely because it was the Bible (and Christian tradition) which supplied the language and concepts which condemned it."

That may be one of the reasons, but it's not "the" reason. Another factor is the multitude of Scriptural hermeneutical approaches that were in competition among American Christians during the Civil War era. Among slavery supporters were many conservative Protestants who were radical sola scripturists and inerrantists (today they'd be called fundamentalists), while the New England abolitionist crowd contained quite a few people who took a more liberal, freethinking approach to the Bible's authority. And of course, on both sides there were many whose views were somewhere in between. Neither side was monolithic in its theological argumentation re: its respective opinion(s).

Rob G, your refutation of what I said is incoherent, really. But, even if it were coherent, it wouldn't touch what I said.

"Lincoln may not be a conservative, they would argue, but he is the antidote to modern Liberalism."

Lincoln may not have been a proto-liberal in the sense you describe (the philosophical/ideological sense), but being a Whig, he was a proto-liberal in the political sense, in that he believed in the expansion of the power of the central government, the mutual skid-greasing of big business and big government, etc. Those conservatives who have a problem with managerial state capitalism have a problem with Lincoln. Those who don't -- not so much.

This is, of course, an oversimplification. But it's no less accurate for that, as far as it goes.


"Rob G, your refutation of what I said is incoherent, really. But, even if it were coherent, it wouldn't touch what I said."

First of all, read what I wrote again. I didn't attempt to refute what you said; I corrected it by adding to it.

As to its 'incoherence,' take it up with Mark Noll. It's the subject of his book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.

Besides, such perpetual and total slavery as practiced in the South was one of the greatest evils the world has ever witnessed, and is totally condemned by both divine and natural law.

As opposed to...

-The religious practices of many pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas.
-The religious practices of many pagan societies in the Middle East.
-The crimes of the totalitarian states of the 20th centuries.
-The Holocaust.
-The extermination of many Indian tribes.
-The Armenian genocide.
-The genocide of the Carthaginians.
-The destruction of the Zoroastrian civilization in Persia by the Muslims.
-The genocide in East Timor.
-The general practice of dhimmitude.
-The Roman Catholic Church's persecution of Protestants.
-The crusaders' assault on the Byzantines.

You're right. Chattel slavery really was, in all times and places, in the South, one of the worst things in history. Even when slaveowners didn't break up families or take sexual advantage of their slaves.

Rob G: Good questions in your June 23, 2009 5:44 PM comment. It is certainly possible to construe Lincoln's natural rights teaching as proto-Leftist. Liberals have been doing it for decades.

But my reading of Lincoln inclines me toward another view, one rather similar to what Mr. Chastek adumbrates in his recent comments. I am short on time, but the condensed version is:

Lincoln may be far from an orthodox Conservative, but he is even farther from being a Liberal.

I discussed this briefly here:

http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html#117027150612240483#117027150612240483

Allan, thank you for that. Our views of Lincoln are not in alignment, but perhaps our deepest disagreement would concern the greatness of his rhetoric. I do think he approaches Burke in that greatness. In any case, my primary point is that we keep the discussion open and fruitful, and avoid the attempt to dogmatize.

This list is one of many educational examples showing that there are a lot of things throughout history that were so sick and evil that they make chattel slavery look pleasant by comparison.

Lincoln rejected the notions of progressive Liberalism to the core of his being.

He certainly rejected the idea of equality between the races, at least initially.

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything." - Lincoln's fourth debate with Douglas

However, his idea of liberty was mostly informed by his pro-labor view of economics.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." - Lincoln's first annual message to Congress

Rob G,

Big Government, in our contemporary narrative, is a based in the Progressive idea that government must provide for a whole flock of rights that Lincoln would have thought every person should have earned by their own labor. This also speaks to Step2's point, which is neither an objection nor a support to anything I said. Lincoln never wavered from his belief that all men, regardless of race, are created equal to earn their own living and live their lives without the leave of any other man (a conservative idea, that). I make no claim that Lincoln was free from bigotry (although political expediency has to be taken into account) but what counts in distinguishing Lincoln from the Progressives was his belief in a fixed and timeless human nature.

This notion of a timeless human nature might well alienate Lincoln both from modern Conservatives and modern Liberals, but it alienates him from the Progressives more, as it attacks the very first notion of Progressivism, from which everything else follows.

Big Government, in our contemporary narrative, is a based in the Progressive idea that government must provide for a whole flock of rights that Lincoln would have thought every person should have earned by their own labor. This also speaks to Step2's point, which is neither an objection nor a support to anything I said. Lincoln never wavered from his belief that all men, regardless of race, are created equal to earn their own living and live their lives without the leave of any other man (a conservative idea, that).

That still is no defense for the means he used to end slavery. Stopping the Holocaust and avenging our losses at Pearl Harbor through war did not justify our attacks on Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lincoln is the reason we use the 'United States' as a singular noun. If the Civil War's justification was predicated on the notion that the Union was some mystical body from which no state could willingly leave then Lincoln is certainly not to be looked at as inspiration for conservatives. States have almost lost their sovereignty and are now merely subsidiaries of the federal government, and although Lincoln is not solely responsible for this, we can surely set a line down pre and post 1860's America.

And other questions: What is conservative about an invasion of another country? What were the soldiers in the South fighting for? Was it really just so they could retain slavery? What were the Union soldiers fighting for? Was it to preserve the abstraction known as the Union at the expense of actual places and people?

And finally, just to be inflammatory: Who did Karl Marx support in the Civil War?

"Big Government, in our contemporary narrative, is a based in the Progressive idea that government must provide for a whole flock of rights that Lincoln would have thought every person should have earned by their own labor."

Perhaps, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. Even if today's advocates of big government base their support of it on somewhat different principles, the fact is that Lincoln and his Republican Whiggism bear a lot of responsibility for getting the ball rolling in that direction. To put it another way, both Lincoln and modern progressives have fed Leviathan; the fact that their reasons for feeding it are different is immaterial when discussing its size. The expansive state is the expansive state.

Mike T --

Shall we take the March to the Sea (I speak as a long-time resident of Georgia, espoused to a Georgian woman, father of three Georgians) as the worst of those means?

If so, I think we at least have to stipulate that the firebombing of Dresden and the nuclear attacks on Japanese cities were an order of magnitude more calamitous than Sherman's terrible March. Sherman targeted property, and surely no theory of Just War can preclude the destruction of the enemy's property. Now, it may well be that most of those thrown into privation by the burning of their homes and fields could not be justifiably labeled the enemy, and thus their ruin was wholly unjustified. Nor is it at all obvious that all Atlantans could be justly deprived of their property.

All this I concede, but still must insist that, awful as it was, the March to the Sea stands as a kind of total-war-in-embryo. Indeed, this is the truest charge against Sherman (and to a lesser extent Grant): that it was his insight into what modern war must ultimately look like, an insight first tested against the South. It was Sherman who first espied the potential of modern mechanized total war, and grasped it with a vigor that appalls. But the specifics of his implementation were so rapidly exceeded in later wars as to diminish their horror.

"States have almost lost their sovereignty and are now merely subsidiaries of the federal government, and although Lincoln is not solely responsible for this, we can surely set a line down pre and post 1860's America."

True. The Jeffersonian tradition would view states' rights and other localisms/regionalisms as ways of diffusing government power. In that view states' rights were seen as one more 'division of powers' safeguard against the (rightly) feared tendency of the national government to ever-increasing centralization.

If so, I think we at least have to stipulate that the firebombing of Dresden and the nuclear attacks on Japanese cities were an order of magnitude more calamitous than Sherman's terrible March. Sherman targeted property, and surely no theory of Just War can preclude the destruction of the enemy's property. Now, it may well be that most of those thrown into privation by the burning of their homes and fields could not be justifiably labeled the enemy, and thus their ruin was wholly unjustified. Nor is it at all obvious that all Atlantans could be justly deprived of their property.

Very few of them could have been justly deprived of their property. The destruction of the crops also lead to a great deal of starvation which was also criminal and unjust. Sherman deserved to hang, as he was little better than many of the Axis generals in his treatment of the enemy and those he deemed to be the enemy (two distinct classes). Another problem I have with this tactic is that it was foreseeable that the wholesale destruction they brought in the deep south would create a great deal of racial animosity and injustice after the war since it would create intense competition for the remaining jobs.

All this I concede, but still must insist that, awful as it was, the March to the Sea stands as a kind of total-war-in-embryo. Indeed, this is the truest charge against Sherman (and to a lesser extent Grant): that it was his insight into what modern war must ultimately look like, an insight first tested against the South. It was Sherman who first espied the potential of modern mechanized total war, and grasped it with a vigor that appalls. But the specifics of his implementation were so rapidly exceeded in later wars as to diminish their horror.

Well, the Armenian genocide was nothing more than a little blood-letting then of the Armenian race compared to the Holocaust or the later atrocities committed in the 20th century if we follow that line of thought. Just because one crime is worse than another doesn't mean either crime loses its own individual severity. We are just inclined to focus more on the worst transgressions since they grab our attention more than the comparatively less severe transgressions.

MikeT,

Just because one crime is worse than another doesn't mean either crime loses its own individual severity. We are just inclined to focus more on the worst transgressions since they grab our attention more than the comparatively less severe transgressions.

Weren't you the one saying chattel slavery isn't so severe by comparison to other evils? Are you now going to reverse course and say that it was intrinsically wicked and unjust?

Weren't you the one saying chattel slavery isn't so severe by comparison to other evils? Are you now going to reverse course and say that it was intrinsically wicked and unjust?

Are you now going to create a false dichotomy where none existed?

Weren't you the one saying chattel slavery isn't so severe by comparison to other evils? Are you now going to reverse course and say that it was intrinsically wicked and unjust?

I was too flippant earlier in addressing this. I don't deny that chattel slavery was a crime. What I deny is that it was a crime that ranked up there anywhere near the worst crimes in history. While I can see a good argument being made to invade another territory because the people are committing genocide, I don't regard chattel slavery as any worse than, say, female circumcision with regard to justifying armed intervention.

This is a potentially interesting topic of debate, if people could stop blathering on about slavery for five minutes.

The soundest claim of his Conservatism, in my view, takes cognizance of his remarkable expounding of Natural Law through both statesmanship and philosophy.

A good case can be made that many interpetations of Natural Law are incompatible with conservatism. In particular I'm referring to the idea that Natural Law imposes some indentical and detailed standard of moral behavior on all people everywhere. Taken to one extreme this leads to Jacobinism, ultimately to one world government = "There can be only one".

The conservative idea of distributed power within one country, and of the validity of the existence of different cultures in the world, does not sit easily with such expansive visions of Natural Law.

Mike T,

Your list had one glaring omission: The far worse, far more cruel, far more extensive slave network of Muslim regimes, beginning in the 7th century clear through to the 20th (in some places still existing today), enslaving millions of Asians, central Asians, Africans and -- by the way -- up to a million white Europeans.

Mike T wrote:

Stopping the Holocaust and avenging our losses at Pearl Harbor through war did not justify our attacks on Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If "Mike T" is a Leftist, this would be an unremarkable position, and nothing more need be said. If, however, he fancies himself a "conservative" of any flavor, it raises the question: If they were not "justified", what does this mean in pragmatic terms? Should we have not fire-bombed and A-bombed to defend the world from an alliance of megalomaniac supremacist expansionists (the Japanese, by the way, massacred far more Chinese and Filipinos before the war even began than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined -- and they weren't doing it in self-defense, but out of supremacist fanaticism).

If by "not justified" Mike T intends that we should acknowledge the horror and the tragedy in the necessity, then that is another thing.

Your list had one glaring omission: The far worse, far more cruel, far more extensive slave network of Muslim regimes, beginning in the 7th century clear through to the 20th (in some places still existing today), enslaving millions of Asians, central Asians, Africans and -- by the way -- up to a million white Europeans.

Pardon me for not being comprehensive enough for your tastes.

If "Mike T" is a Leftist, this would be an unremarkable position, and nothing more need be said. If, however, he fancies himself a "conservative" of any flavor, it raises the question: If they were not "justified", what does this mean in pragmatic terms? Should we have not fire-bombed and A-bombed to defend the world from an alliance of megalomaniac supremacist expansionists (the Japanese, by the way, massacred far more Chinese and Filipinos before the war even began than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined -- and they weren't doing it in self-defense, but out of supremacist fanaticism).

The manner in which those cities were attacked was not strategically justified. They were nothing more than acts of revenge, especially Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the Japanese government had already offered to surrender to the U.S. before those cities were bombed. In fact, the terms of the final surrender were not particularly different from those that the Japanese offered. Hiroshima and Nagasaki in particular were simply acts of mass murder against an almost defeated enemy.

Mike T --

There is no way to construe the March to the Sea as a deliberate massacre of civilians. In no way am I defending it, but there is still a difference in kind between it and 20th century calculated butchery of noncombatants.

I heartily recommend Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by my Hillsdale College colleague Thomas Krannawitter (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). It answers in careful and expansive detail each of the objections raised here against Lincoln -- and others.

"I heartily recommend Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President"

The title gives it away: can anyone say neo-con whitewash?

Read the book, Rob.

"Read the book, Rob."

Convince me. Is it anything more that the popularized rehashing of Jaffa it seems to be? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Rob,
I've said it was good and ought to be read. You then called it a "neo-con whitewash" without even reading it. So, I'm a little wary of wasting my time re-endorsing the book, but I'll try:

Krannawitter deals with the objections raised against Lincoln, and lets those who raise the objections speak in their own words. He then goes back to Lincoln, his policies, his writings, his speeches, his actions, and his historical context to show that the objections raised are misguided. He deals with such issues as:

Was Lincoln a racist?
Was Lincoln a child of his age?
Do states possess a Constitutional right to secede?
Was the Civil War caused by slavery or economics?
Was Lincoln's goal to end slavery or to preserve the union?
Was Lincoln the father of big government?
Was Lincoln a tyrant?
Was the Kansas-Nebraska Act pro-choice or pro-slavery?

I may give it a look. But having worked my way through a fair amount of Jaffa, I can't say I'm optimistic.

By the way, here's how I'd answer the questions:

Was Lincoln a racist?
~~~by today's standards, yes. But see #2

Was Lincoln a child of his age?
~~~In terms of his racial views, yes; which goes a fair way in mitigating #1.

Do states possess a Constitutional right to secede?
~~~Yes. O/W there would have been no need to propose a constitutional amendment to prevent it

Was the Civil War caused by slavery or economics?
~~~Both.

Was Lincoln's goal to end slavery or to preserve the union?
~~~the latter

Was Lincoln the father of big government?
~~~a father if not the father

Was Lincoln a tyrant?
~~~Probably too strong a word; authoritarian is better.

Was the Kansas-Nebraska Act pro-choice or pro-slavery?
~~~depends on how one looks at it.


Dr. Bauman,

Thanks for the book reference.

Mr. Cella,

God blesses you on this fine and HOT Georgia day with a house full of Georgians to love! As an Atlanta born, East Cobb bred Georgia boy it just warmed my hear to see my home so strongly represented in a comment.

I have nothing of substance to add here.

God bless,
Jay


Rob G,
I see your point; I, too, always begin an expansion upon what someone has said with "Yeah, that's wrong."

**I see your point; I, too, always begin an expansion upon what someone has said with "Yeah, that's wrong."**

Your complaint would have some scintilla of merit if that was actually what I said; as it stands, it wasn't. What I said was: "That may be one of the reasons, but it's not 'the' reason."

MikeT,
I don't deny that chattel slavery was a crime. What I deny is that it was a crime that ranked up there anywhere near the worst crimes in history. While I can see a good argument being made to invade another territory because the people are committing genocide, I don't regard chattel slavery as any worse than, say, female circumcision with regard to justifying armed intervention.

That is an interesting comparison. Here is the related question to ask about it: Does a state have the right to secede from the union in order to continue the practice of female circumcision? Further, I don't believe for one moment that Lincoln viewed the Confederate states as "another territory". He viewed the rebels as part of a rebellion.

Lastly, the Atlantic slave trade was so cruel it was made illegal in 1808 and punishable by death in 1820. It may be unfair to say that the original method of chattel slavery reflects upon the whole issue of slavery at a later date, but I believe there are legitimate parallels to the Bataan Death March.

Do states possess a Constitutional right to secede?
~~~Yes. O/W there would have been no need to propose a constitutional amendment to prevent it

I have great sympathy for the southern cause (and wild-eyed foaming-at-the-mouth abolitionists like John Brown and Michael Bauman make me laugh) but to grant the right to secede under the Constitution is to deny that the states were ever bound by the Contitution in the first place.

George R:
"wild-eyed foaming-at-the-mouth abolitionists like John Brown and Michael Bauman make me laugh"


You're right, George. Intense and consistent opposition to slavery is hilarious. I'm glad I can make you laugh.

You know what else is funny? Stupidly linking me with John Brown because I defend Lincoln's conservatism and the virtue of the North's cause.

You know what's not funny? The morally obtuse complacency of the ante-bellum south and of folks today who denounce those who denounce southern slavery.

"to grant the right to secede under the Constitution is to deny that the states were ever bound by the Contitution in the first place."

Most if not all of those in the Jeffersonian tradition would disagree with you. The original union of states in the federal republic was voluntary. Nowhere does the Constitution or surrounding documentation teach that the union had to be permanent. At various times before Southern secesssion other regions/states had seriously considered the idea; if there was no possibility of following through with it, or if it were illegal, there wouldn't have been that level of serious consideration.


"wild-eyed foaming-at-the-mouth abolitionists like John Brown"

Someone once wrote that the antebellum misunderstandings between the two regions got to the point where the North thought all slaveholders were like Simon Legree and the South thought all abolitionists were like John Brown. The South has the better case here, though. Many in the North held up the unbalanced terrorist Brown as a hero and martyr, and sang his praises.

This had about the same depth of moral quality as the praise of radical environmentalists for the Unabomber.

George R
As regards the right to secede, as signatories to the compact known as the Constitution, that is, as the makers of the compact and there being no explicit prohibition against secession, yes the States had the right to secede.
Of course they were bound to the Constitution, as long as they wished to be members of the Union. Tough to accept but there you have it, and a reason the matter was settled the way it was.

I don't really think Michael Bauman is just like John Brown. I was just having a little fun with him.

Many in the North held up the unbalanced terrorist Brown as a hero and martyr, and sang his praises.

Which is pretty funny, as the only person Brown killed was a freed black slave.

Does a state have the right to secede from the union in order to continue the practice of female circumcision?

If a state has the right to secede from the Union then it has that right, period. The right is not contingent on any other factors.

You know what else is funny? Stupidly linking me with John Brown because I defend Lincoln's conservatism and the virtue of the North's cause.

In a probably vain effort to drag this fiasco back on topic, let me ask you why you regard Lincoln as a conservative.


Mr. Cella, are you from the South?

The original union of states in the federal republic was voluntary. Nowhere does the Constitution or surrounding documentation teach that the union had to be permanent.

I disagree. The writers of the The Federalist Papers, for example, expressly stated that the purpose of the Constitutional Convention was not to set up a league of independent states, but to establish a true union by means of establishing a supreme, albeit limited, central authority. Therefore, since the authority established by the framers was superior to the authority of the several states, it is absurd to say that the former was subject to the decisions of the latter.

If the Civil War's justification was predicated on the notion that the Union was some mystical body from which no state could willingly leave then Lincoln is certainly not to be looked at as inspiration for conservatives.

Then conservatives have virtually no Founding Father from which to draw inspiration since it is, as Madison put it, a "colossal heresy" to believe that an individual state has the right to secede:

The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it. And certainly there is nothing in the Virginia resolutions of — 98, adverse to this principle, which is that of common sense and common justice. The fallacy which draws a different conclusion from them lies in confounding a single party, with the parties to the Constitutional compact of the United States.

As for Lincoln being racist-
Lincoln likely never met an educated black man before he came to Washington. He called Frederick Douglass "The most meritorious living American", and had him to the White House several times and invited him as his guest at his 2nd inauguation ball.
In his last speech (and likely the one which inspired Booth to murder him) he call for citizenship and voting rights for blacks who'd served in the Union army and those who could read and write. He signed the Freedmen's Act, which provided for education and basic necessities of the newly freed slaves.
Hadley Arkes in his book "Natural Rights and the Right to Choose" relates something that happened early in Lincoln's Presidency. The Buchanan adminstration had refused a patent and a passport to 2 Boston residents. As blacks, according to the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (the Roe v. Wade of it time) they were not citizens and had no rights white men were bound to respect. Lincoln had the previous adminstration's decisions reversed, and had the passport and patent issued. His adminstration TREATED blacks as citizens even before the 15th amendment MADE them citizens in the eyes of the constitution.
On a local note, I live in Washington, DC. St. Augustine Catholic Church here has a Lincoln connection. It was founded (originally as Bl Martin de Porres Chapel) to serve primarily the free black Catholic community. One of the founding members was the husband of Mrs. Lincoln's seamstress. In a time when anyone could stop by on certain days to see the president, a group of its building committee visited Lincoln in his office and sought and gained permission to use the White House lawn for a fundraiser for the Chapel. He not only gave permission, but he and most of his cabinet attended. The fundraiser was highly successful, and raised over $1,000 in a time when that was a lot of money.

BTW, I found "Vindicating Lincoln" incredably informative and I highly recommend it. It deals at length with an idea Mr. Cella brings up, Calhoun's idea of concurrent majority (doesn't like it). It seems very balanced and evenhanded in its treatment of the historical record.

So Perseus, a free government is one where the states are not free to pursue their own destiny? That makes no sense.

And let us get this straight, would you send men to war in a state if it decided to secede from the Union? would you freely fight, meaning would you think this a worthy goal to risk your life and the life of your children? I think that the answer is an obvious "no."

It was Lincoln who retold the American story. Instead of sovereign republics freely entering into a constitutional federation, he saw an indissoluble union from which there is no escape.

Just what is the moral justification for going to war over secession anyway? How does that fit with any concept of Just War? The North was certainly not fighting a war of defense, so how is entering into another state to kill its men, women, and children in order to preserve the abstraction known as the union licit in any way?

Gintas:

I was born in the great state of Colorado. I've lived in the South since 1996. I tend to refer to myself as a Colorado-born Georgian.

Paul,

There is no way to construe the March to the Sea as a deliberate massacre of civilians. In no way am I defending it, but there is still a difference in kind between it and 20th century calculated butchery of noncombatants.

I don't recall saying that it was a deliberate massacre of civilians. However, based on some of the sources I have read, it certainly left a lot of southern civilians in no position to feed themselves, which doesn't really put Sherman in a much better position.

"The writers of the The Federalist Papers, for example, expressly stated that the purpose of the Constitutional Convention was not to set up a league of independent states, but to establish a true union by means of establishing a supreme, albeit limited, central authority."

False dichotomy; the right to secede does not necessarily imply that the individual states were "independent." The union was a true one, but was not based or founded on the authority of the central government. This is a point that the so-called anti-Federalists continually raised in the discussions.

Furthermore, in relation to the states, the central authority cannot be both "supreme" and "limited" at the same time and in the same way. States' rights were seen as a means to that very limitation which prevented the central government from accumulating too much power.

"Just what is the moral justification for going to war over secession anyway? How does that fit with any concept of Just War?"

I asked the question above, and no one answered: if California or New England chose to secede over abortion rights, or if Texas chose to secede over gun control and immigration (as Jon Sandor says above, the right to secede isn't contingent on the reason for secession), would you favor the sending in of troops and the bombing of, say, Boston or San Diego or Dallas, to force them to stay in the Union at gunpoint, as anti-war abolitionist Horace Greeley put it?

That is an interesting comparison. Here is the related question to ask about it: Does a state have the right to secede from the union in order to continue the practice of female circumcision? Further, I don't believe for one moment that Lincoln viewed the Confederate states as "another territory". He viewed the rebels as part of a rebellion.

A state has a right to secede from the union for any reason whatsoever because there is no text in the Constitution to empower the federal government to suppress it. If you read the 10th amendment, it becomes quite clear that the founding fathers intended the federal government to have almost no authority over the states or people on all but a handful of issues.

The problem with Lincoln's view is that the Constitution empowers the federal government to wage war and fight insurrections. An act of secession is not inherently an act of insurrection. In fact, if Lincoln believed in the text of the Declaration of Independence, he would have respected the South's inalienable right to abolish a tie which no longer served its interests. The South's problem was that it fired on Fort Sumter, giving the federal government a legitimate casus belli after the fact to invade.

Lastly, the Atlantic slave trade was so cruel it was made illegal in 1808 and punishable by death in 1820. It may be unfair to say that the original method of chattel slavery reflects upon the whole issue of slavery at a later date, but I believe there are legitimate parallels to the Bataan Death March.

The Atlantic slave trade has no bearing on the chattel slavery practiced in the South. A modern comparison would be to say that it's legal for a tobacco farmer to sell home-grown marijuana and cocaine on the side, but punishable by death to buy it from a drug cartel that is fueling violence in Colombia. What happened over the Atlantic had no practical bearing on the intrastate and interstate sale of slaves within US territory.

I am not debating that chattel slavery was cruel and unjust. Those factors alone cannot be sufficient to warrant armed intervention to wipe out the self-determination of a region that wishes to go its own way. There must be an extremely high standard for what is sufficient grounds for intervention. In my opinion, only something on the level of genocide would be sufficient since murder occupies a unique position in all earthly crimes since it completely destroys an individual life.

If we accept chattel slavery as a casus belli, then we have so many other obligations, and I emphasize obligations, to wage war that it's not funny. If the North was obligated to end slavery in a distant land, and obligated to the point of war, then it is today obligated to liberate Tibet from the PRC. It's likewise obligated to help Chechnya against the Russians. Those are just two dangerous scenarios that came to mind.

"If we accept chattel slavery as a casus belli, then we have so many other obligations, and I emphasize obligations, to wage war that it's not funny."

You have a point here, Mike, but remember that chattel slavery was not the casus belli, secession was. Lincoln only freed the slaves when he knew that he had to do it to "save the Union"; hence, it was exactly what the South said it was, a cynical war move.

I regret belaboring this point, Mike T, but this is precisely the distinction I was making above vis-a-vis Sherman:

"murder occupies a unique position in all earthly crimes since it completely destroys an individual life." There is a distinction separating the March to the Sea from the butchery of the 20th century.

"There is a distinction separating the March to the Sea from the butchery of the 20th century."

I agree, Paul, but it's a distinction of magnitude more than of kind, wouldn't you say? Also, as you stated above, dubious credit must be given to Sherman and Sheridan, as well as to Grant, and ultimately to Lincoln, for this revival of "total war" which gave the various butchers of the 20th century something to draw on for inspiration.

Rob,

You have a point here, Mike, but remember that chattel slavery was not the casus belli, secession was. Lincoln only freed the slaves when he knew that he had to do it to "save the Union"; hence, it was exactly what the South said it was, a cynical war move.

I agree, and I never claimed otherwise. In fact, there were a number of issues that pissed off the South, not the least of which were the tariff and the fact that Lincoln didn't need the South at all to win the Presidency.

Paul,

"murder occupies a unique position in all earthly crimes since it completely destroys an individual life." There is a distinction separating the March to the Sea from the butchery of the 20th century.

I would categorize it as a crime similar in nature, though not in degree perhaps, to the Ukraine famine under Stalin. You cannot leave a people unable to feed themselves when they once were, and then wash your hands of responsibility when they starve to death.

"I agree, and I never claimed otherwise."

Yes, I know, but there are numerous folks who don't get the distinction, including 99 44/100% of contemporary American high school and college students.

Mike T: I'm not buying that comparison either. In 1932, Ukraine did not have several armies operating in the field against the Soviet Union. While Sherman was moving against Hood in Atlanta, Lee's army, though depleted and rapidly losing space for maneuver, was still delivering savage blows against the Federals. At Cold Harbor, for instance. A year prior to that, Lee was threatening major Northern cities; and if things had gone differently at Gettysburg, Lee would have likely be in a position to answer the burning of Atlanta by burning Baltimore.

That's a lot of conjecture, admittedly; but the point is that under no interpretation of Just War is the property of the enemy inviolate.

Nor did Sherman wash his hands of the consequences of his March. He embraced them. He intended them. His purpose was to defeat Lee's army by destroying its means of sustenance.

Also, let's note that one of Grant's first acts after the surrender at Appomattox was to order Federal rations to be distributed to the starving Southern troops.

That's a lot of conjecture, admittedly; but the point is that under no interpretation of Just War is the property of the enemy inviolate.

I'm not aware of a theory of Just War which permits soldiers to burn private property that isn't being used by another army.

I'm starting to get the feeling that a lot of what Just War is is nothing more than a human desire to make sense of and limit an intrinsically bad, bordering on evil, thing. A lot of it seem more like bandaids over a serious problem with arbitrary "you can do this... but no... you can't do that" that is made ad hoc. Specifically, it's wrong to slaughter civilians... but you can burn down all of their property and leave them destitute because they belong to the other tribe.

It seems to me, that it's just a lot of conjecture about what God will really regard as the right course of action, and we're just trying to come up with a systematic explanation that doesn't come down to "do the best you can, but be prepared to throw yourself on God's grace because chances are, anything you do in war outside of attacking the enemy's army will be regarded by God as an intrinsic evil against an innocent third party."

So, while I am not rejecting Just War Theory, I am merely skeptical about how closely it relates to what will be decided on each soldier and politician's personal moment of divine judgment regarding what they should have done.

"under no interpretation of Just War is the property of the enemy inviolate."

This is true, Paul, yet doesn't it reject the targeting of non-combatants? The possibility that an enemy army might use the food on Uncle Joe's farm does not give the right to the opposing army to burn his house and farm and kill all his animals, thus causing him and his family to starve, in order to negate that possibility.

I've seen pro-North sophists attempt to use the principle of double effect here; Sherman and Sheridan's tactics were not intended to starve Uncle Joe and his family, but to prevent Confederate forces from getting supplies. Therefore, under double effect, the suffering inflicted on the non-combatants is permitted or mitigated. Frankly, I think that's a load of crap, and I don't buy it for two seconds.

Note that I'm not saying that you make that argument, only that I've heard it made by others.

I will also add that if the South had firmly routed the Union at Gettsyburg, that any northern city that got torched by the Army of Northern Virginia would have had Sherman to blame for that. Though personally, I think the Confederacy would have been better to serve to retaliate by unconditionally killing Sherman's entire army down to the very last man.

Ah, the mysteries of separation of powers, so dark, so arcane and forbidding, unfathomable in the passage of time and the accretion of power within a slum located on the Potomac.

The question of supreme power, as I see it absurdly used above, goes nowhere.
George R and whoever else, take note.

The federal government, to the extent it held this power, did so within clearly circumscribed spheres, located within the Operating document called the Constitution.
As the saying goes, or is it the Amendment, all other powers were ceded to the States.

Lest we drag ourselves down into the morass of debate connected to the Civil War, which in bygone days was more accurately known as the War Between the States, may we pause and remind ourselves of the vibrant belief in States Rights that existed not only separate from the issue of slavery but upon occasion well outside the South itself.

So let us recall the Hartford Convention where debate was fervid on the issue of secession, and the firm reluctance of New England to participate in a war though to be against their interests.
Toss in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the Nullification doctrine, and other structural factors, and the "supremacy" of the federal government becomes a bit anachronistic.

Rightly put be U S Grant," the right of a state to secede from the Union has been settled forever by the highest tribunal,arms, that man can resort to".

And so it was.
But I think I've gone slightly off thread, sorry.


Not really, Johnt. Here's a quote from the Kranawitter book mentioned above:

**In many ways, Lincoln's legacy hinges on the question of whether states did in fact possess a constitutional right of secession. If they did, then virtually everything Lincoln did as president was illegal at best, immoral at worst. If Lincoln had no legal power and no constitutional duty to maintain the Union against secessionist movements, then Lincoln might well deserve the title "war criminal" … and should be viewed with contempt.** (p. 147)

See, even the Abe-o-philes get it.

By the way, I took the quote from a review of the book here...

http://mises.org/story/3224

...which seems to bear out my suspicion that the work is mostly warmed-over Jaffa.


"the work is mostly warmed-over Jaffa"

Allow me to qualify that, as it sounds harsher than I wanted it to be. It appears that may be a fine work for someone who hasn't already looked at Jaffa directly; it also seems like it may serve as a good summary or compendium of the Claremont arguments. But for those who've already looked at Jaffa's work and weren't convinced, it may just be more of the same.

I asked the question above, and no one answered: if California or New England chose to secede over abortion rights, or if Texas chose to secede over gun control and immigration (as Jon Sandor says above, the right to secede isn't contingent on the reason for secession), would you favor the sending in of troops and the bombing of, say, Boston or San Diego or Dallas, to force them to stay in the Union at gunpoint, as anti-war abolitionist Horace Greeley put it?

I would, absolutely. I don't know why the state's rights crowd won't admit that if taken to its logical conclusion, the right to opt out of governing contracts for any reason (esp. a self-determination to continue criminal behavior) is a prescription for anarchy.

In fact, if Lincoln believed in the text of the Declaration of Independence, he would have respected the South's inalienable right to abolish a tie which no longer served its interests.

Lincoln believed in the Declaration enough to reject the South's perverse reading of "life, liberty and happiness, except for the negro".

"I would, absolutely."

Well, at least you're consistent. Anyone else you'd care to bomb/invade for not living up to your particular view of rights? How about nailing Belgrade again? That was an easy one.

"I don't know why the state's rights crowd won't admit that if taken to its logical conclusion, the right to opt out of governing contracts for any reason (esp. a self-determination to continue criminal behavior) is a prescription for anarchy."

Oh, right! I forgot about all the anarchy unleashed in the U.S. during that horrible era when the government actually took the 10th Amendment seriously. Granted it wasn't a very long period, but still, during those terrible times we were virtually swimming in anarchy, nay, drowning in it! Sheesh.

And last time I checked, at the time of secession slavery was legal (i.e., not criminal) in the Southern states. Immoral it may well have been, but it wasn't criminal.


Step2, for now, and maybe tomorrow as well, I will only point out re your 5:09 post that not everything is taken to it's logical conclusion, which action, if a truth, would be a problem for automatons, less so for humans and for a plenitude of reasons.
Lincoln did use that speculative argument though.

Sometimes you have to fight for freedom -- your own or someone else's -- which is what the North eventually did. Southern folks were so intent upon owning other human beings that they wrapped their racial and economic tyranny in the cloak of states' rights and financial grievance. They decided to sever the union and to risk war rather than set slavery aside. They lost their gamble on every level, as well they ought.

johnt,
You understand that it was Rob G's argument about New England, California, and Texas declaring their independence? MikeT and Jon Sandor have stated that the paramount right of secession allows all other states and regions to follow suit except in cases of genocide. If they want to be inconsistent with their own principle, fine. I am just pointing out the consequence of adherence to this principle makes formal governance functionally nonexistent. There might, I stress might, be informal governance that prevents total chaos, but by that point you are playing with fire near a gasoline tanker.

Anyway, it goads my sense of irony to read complaints about the tyranny of Lincoln and the terror inflicted by Sherman without a single justification for chattel slavery deserving a central part in Southern culture. Yes Virginia, the South was beaten and then held for a time in captivity, but nevermind why.

Anyway, it goads my sense of irony to read complaints about the tyranny of Lincoln and the terror inflicted by Sherman without a single justification for chattel slavery deserving a central part in Southern culture.
For what it's worth (my two cents), I share a similar sentiment.

And let us get this straight, would you send men to war in a state if it decided to secede from the Union?

I would employ force against any rebels who fail to obey federal laws, whether they be Whiskey Boys or Confederates. I also agree with Step2 that a right to secede is a recipe for anarchy.


The North was certainly not fighting a war of defense, so how is entering into another state to kill its men, women, and children in order to preserve the abstraction known as the union licit in any way?

I find puzzling the argument about the Union being an abstraction. The Union is no more or less an abstraction than a state, county, city, or town. And as an object of loyalty, history has demonstrated that citizens can become more devoted to it than a mere state or town.

"Southern folks were so intent upon owning other human beings that they wrapped their racial and economic tyranny in the cloak of states' rights and financial grievance. They decided to sever the union and to risk war rather than set slavery aside. They lost their gamble on every level, as well they ought."

This is what gets taught at Hillsdale, a supposedly conservative institution? You could have pulled this crap right out of some leftist black studies textbook used at Berkeley. Standard Northern "Treasury of Virtue" boilerplate.

"I am just pointing out the consequence of adherence to this principle makes formal governance functionally nonexistent. There might, I stress might, be informal governance that prevents total chaos, but by that point you are playing with fire near a gasoline tanker."

Hogwash. As I said above, such logic implies that the 10th Amendment is a recipe for disaster (which it is, but only for liberal and pseudo-conservative centralizers).

"it goads my sense of irony to read complaints about the tyranny of Lincoln and the terror inflicted by Sherman without a single justification for chattel slavery deserving a central part in Southern culture."

Dude, did you read this whole thread or just jump in at the end? I don't recall anyone defending chattel slavery, or even failing to condemn it. Numerous posters above, and I mean the Southern sympathizers, have called it "horrid," "horrible," and "evil," among other things. Or is this sort of the reverse of Seinfeld's "not that there's anything wrong with that..." Do we have to begin or close every post with a condemnation of Southern chattel slavery, what, to ease white guilt? Sorry, but that's liberal PC b.s. and I'll have no part of it.

"And as an object of loyalty, history has demonstrated that citizens can become more devoted to it than a mere state or town."

Yes, especially when forced to do so at gunpoint, which is why one method that dictators and totalitarians use to centralize control is destroying or otherwise undermining local and regional loyalties.

Hey, doesn't it make you residents of Texas, California, and Massachusetts feel good to know that there are some folks here that would have no qualms about invading your state and bombing your cities if you chose to leave the Union? Is this a great country or what?

Many people are discussing the impending death of the conservative movement. If this is what the movement has come to, it deserves to die.

I am just amazed the posters are entertaining the idea of invading other states because they seek to secede. How is something like that worth shedding blood over? Who's son or father is worth preventing a state from breaking from the union?

In fact, at this point in time I wish states would secede. I was excited to hear of that talk in Texas and I wished New York was filled with more sane people who saw the evils of remaining under the tyrannical arm of Washington.

Lincoln believed in the Declaration enough to reject the South's perverse reading of "life, liberty and happiness, except for the negro".

Yet, he clearly did not believe in the "Independence part" or the right to alter or abolish one's government if it no longer serves one's needs.

I would hazard to guess that if the average Northerner knew what Lincoln's legacy was, the Democratic Party would have won the 1860 election by a landslide because everyone lost in some way during the Civil War.

I would employ force against any rebels who fail to obey federal laws, whether they be Whiskey Boys or Confederates. I also agree with Step2 that a right to secede is a recipe for anarchy.

And if you employed force against the Virginia Commonwealth, my home state, I wouldn't hesitate to use force against you. So, I guess that makes us even.

"In fact, at this point in time I wish states would secede. I was excited to hear of that talk in Texas," etc.

Ditto. The problem is, due to the growth of Leviathan over the past 150 years, it now has its various tentacles, hooks, and poisonous filaments in virtually everything. This makes the idea of secession far more difficult to consider today than it was back then. Still, the redoubtable Bill Kauffman has a book coming out on this issue soon -- I'm anxious to see what he has to say about it.

When the colonies declared their independence from Britain, the British rightly thought it worth the battle to prevent the separation. When the south declared its independence, the North thought it worth the battle as well. In both cases it was.

Saying so has nothing at all to do with leftism, Rob, nothing at all.

I also agree with Step2 that a right to secede is a recipe for anarchy.

And like Step2, you never state why that is. Armed intervention into the affairs of a region that wants to leave has a better track record of causing "anarchy" than simply allowing secessionist regions to leave in peace. Imagine what would have happened if the Russians tried to hold the Soviet Union together by force.

And let us not forget that our colonies broke off from Britain because of abuse and unjust use of authority.

For the sake of clarity, though, let it be said that independence and secession are not good in and of themselves. What happened recently in Kosovo was, I think, unjust. The point is that we have states with inherent sovereignty and independence and have both historical and traditional precedent for acting accordingly.

This discussion began for the purpose of debating whether or not Lincoln should be admired by conservatives or even treated as one himself. It is obvious that he will always be admired by many, including conservatives, but if conservatism stands for anything local and community centered, if it stands for subsidiarity and federalism, and if it stands for the justness of a people defending themselves from outside invaders, then I do not see how Lincoln can be seen as conservative in any way.

"Saying so has nothing at all to do with leftism, Rob, nothing at all."

"Saying so" in and of itself doesn't, but how one says it definitely may. Your narrative of the thing, which you summarized above, comes out of exactly the same historiography as does the mainstream liberal narrative put forth by such scholars as Schlesinger and McPherson. In fact, I fail to see one iota of difference between the two. And it seems odd to me that your narrative would be totally in line with that of historians with whom otherwise you (I'd assume) have huge ideological differences.

"I do not see how Lincoln can be seen as conservative in any way."

As was said above, I think you can make a case for Lincoln being a species of philosophical conservative, with his belief in natural law, the immutability of human nature, etc., but I think that you've got a much more difficult time demonstrating that he was a conservative politically.

Rob,
My old friend Russell Kirk was right to call the American revolution a conservative movement because it was intent upon re-establishing the age-old rights of Englishmen that King George had usurped. Thus, in his conservative appeal to the founding, Lincoln was invoking those same enduring principles -- principles that the south had willingly let slide for decades. Standing with Lincoln against the south's immoral and anti-conservative usurpation of human rights and settled rule of law in the Constitution is not a leftist stand and has nothing to do with Schlesinger. You've placed me both with Jaffa and with Schlesinger, which can mean only that you are confused both about my view and about conservatism.

Slavery is not a conservative principle or practice, nor is rending the union in order to maintain it. Nor is deceptively and disingenuously cloaking the perpetuation of slavery in the garb of states' rights and secession.

Michael Bauman:

Slavery is not a conservative principle or practice, nor is rending the union in order to maintain it.

Chattel slavery as an institution is as conservative an institution as you are going to find. To deny this is to expose yourself justified ridicule. Slavery is not conservative? What is it, liberal? Moderate? No, it is extreme conservatism. For it engenders the fullest and most powerful expression of domestic patriarchal power. Is domestic patriarchal power not conservative?

Now you can say that slavery is evil, but then you will have to admit that some conservative things are evil. Or you can just call all the things you like "conservative" and all the things you don't like "not-conservative", which seems to be your plan.

Rob G,

Numerous posters above, and I mean the Southern sympathizers, have called it "horrid," "horrible," and "evil," among other things.

I've noticed, which is why I have no patience with those who preach secession for the primary reason of continuing that practice. Of course they never own up to making that choice, which makes it difficult to have an honest debate.

As I said above, such logic implies that the 10th Amendment is a recipe for disaster (which it is, but only for liberal and pseudo-conservative centralizers).

No, secession for any reason whatsoever, which is what Mike T explicitly endorsed, implies every formal arrangement can be declared null and void at any time by any participant. Edward the Lesser is the only one so far to entertain the staggering idea that there might need to be some greater degree of justification than mere whim.

Is this a great country or what?

Well it was, until a bunch of rebels conspired to destroy it for reasons entirely unworthy.

No, secession for any reason whatsoever, which is what Mike T explicitly endorsed, implies every formal arrangement can be declared null and void at any time by any participant. Edward the Lesser is the only one so far to entertain the staggering idea that there might need to be some greater degree of justification than mere whim.

I suppose it's entirely lost on you that the United States is part of a unique class of government: a union of different countries and nations under one flag. The United States is like Great Britain in that respect, only on a continental scale. The Scottish today have every right to unilaterally dissolve Britain by declaring independence without asking the English for permission to leave that essentially voluntary union. The United States was created as an explicitly voluntary union.

Thus, in his conservative appeal to the founding, Lincoln was invoking those same enduring principles -- principles that the south had willingly let slide for decades.

Then how do you account for the fact that Lincoln allowed 4 union states to maintain slavery? With all due respect, the facts simply do not support this belief about Lincoln in the least.

Yes, especially when forced to do so at gunpoint, which is why one method that dictators and totalitarians use to centralize control is destroying or otherwise undermining local and regional loyalties.

No doubt you regard the Father of our Country as a totalitarian dictator for seeking to undermine local loyalties:

The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations...your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other. These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the Union as a primary object of patriotic desire.

"My old friend Russell Kirk was right to call the American revolution a conservative movement because it was intent upon re-establishing the age-old rights of Englishmen that King George had usurped. Thus, in his conservative appeal to the founding, Lincoln was invoking those same enduring principles..."

Do the names M.E. Bradford, Willmoore Kendall, and George Carey mean anything to you? If not, I suggest you read them. Your history is befogged by the exhalations from some Straussian la-la land.

"You've placed me both with Jaffa and with Schlesinger, which can mean only that you are confused both about my view and about conservatism."

Your Civil War view coincides with Jaffa's and Schlesinger's -- it can be summed up as follows:

The liberal, progressive North had advanced to the point where it saw Southern slavery as intolerable. The backwards, benighted South, however, would not admit this or agree to it, and chose to rebel against the North's greater wisdom and to secede from the Union, in order to maintain that evil institution, the primary motivation being greed.

The North, being wiser and more advanced, simply could not allow this to occur; after all wasn't the United States a bright and shining light, the bearer of all good things, God's gift of democracy to the world? The all-wise North, then, was fully justified in invading the South using all military means at its disposal in order to keep God's gift to the world united, because, as is plainly evident, God was on its side.

The End

That's Schlesinger, that's Jaffa, that's McPherson, that's Bauman (keep or lose the God-talk, the story's the same). And that's, sorry to say, liberal -- it has its roots in Progressivism, a Rousseauian view of man, and the "Whig view of history."

It allows the North, since it (supposedly) had pure motives, to be beatified, while reducing the entire cause of the South to slavery, thus demonizing it (it's no different than the Nazis, as Schlesinger said, and as you implied above).

That both blatant liberals and the quasi-liberals known as neo-conservatives tell the same story should give any real conservative pause.

"I've noticed, which is why I have no patience with those who preach secession for the primary reason of continuing that practice. Of course they never own up to making that choice, which makes it difficult to have an honest debate."

Sorry, but that's false. It's you guys who can't see (or see but won't admit) that slavery and secession are two different (but not unrelated) issues.

"No, secession for any reason whatsoever, which is what Mike T explicitly endorsed, implies every formal arrangement can be declared null and void at any time by any participant."

While the reason for secession is a secondary matter, it's not an unimportant one. It behooves the seceding state/region to be completely sure that its reasons for secession are serious enough to warrant the difficulties entailed in the process. A state like Texas, for example, would probably weigh a federal prohibition of the death penalty differently than they would the overturning of the Second Amendment. You make it sound like without legal safeguards these states will just secede at the drop of a hat.

"No doubt you regard the Father of our Country as a totalitarian dictator for seeking to undermine local loyalties"

That totalitarians seek to undermine local loyaties does not mean that any transference of loyalties from the local to the national is ipso facto totalitarian. Subsidiarity is a key point here.

Rob G,
It's you guys who can't see (or see but won't admit) that slavery and secession are two different (but not unrelated) issues...While the reason for secession is a secondary matter, it's not an unimportant one. It behooves the seceding state/region to be completely sure that its reasons for secession are serious enough to warrant the difficulties entailed in the process.

So again, was slavery the primary reason for secession by the Confederates? If so, that is what you have to justify as being "serious enough" and George R. at least made an attempt at it, strange as it was. The thing you are refusing to accept is that if it was serious enough to secede over there should be no problem with defending slavery. It can't be both important enough to tear apart the union and at the same time so trivial that it need not be justified as something worthy.

Although slavery was far and away the main reason for secession, I will grant there were additional reasons that could be defended in theory. However, I don't think those extraneous issues were immune to reform and compromise the way slavery was. It was clear the South was not going to permit the practice of slavery to be altered, even in the limited and incremental way Lincoln initially desired.

Mike T,
I suppose it's entirely lost on you that the United States is part of a unique class of government: a union of different countries and nations under one flag.

So the federal government is the United Nations? Wow.

So the federal government is the United Nations? Wow.

I pity you if you that is what you took out of my comment, since the comparison I made was between the United States and Great Britain, not the United States and the United Nations. And like Great Britain (which is composed of Wales, England and Scotland; 3 separate nations), we are a union of multiple nations that speak the same language, but that are otherwise no more the same "one nation, under God, indivisible" than Great Britain.

Rob,

I think it's growing increasingly obvious that both sides are now at an impasse. We can say why the South had a right to succeed, and they can say why it didn't, and no one is going to be convinced. The moral of the story is that if you are going to secede, you need to be prepared to wage war, utterly destroy the enemy's forces and put yourself into a position to be the party that writes the post-war history. Only then will you be "right."

I mean, let's face it. If you accept the notion that South was wicked over any issue regarding slavery, then so was the Union because it tolerated the same damn practice from those who pledged fealty to it. The South's only mistake was strategic: the moment it repelled the Union, it should have gone for the throat by completely destroying the Army of the Potomac, and turning D.C. back into a swamp while the entire federal body politic was trapped inside.

When you get down to it, the right of self-determination only exists in theory until one group wins it from another by successfully waging war on them.

Rob,
Yes, I've read Kendall, Bradford and Carey -- perhaps more times than you. On this point they are mistaken. When conservatives disagree among themselves, as they do on this issue, someone is wrong. This time those three have made a colossal mistake. At other times, they have been profoundly correct, as (for example) Kendall was against Mill.

I have told you why Lincoln was the true conservative on this issue, and explained it along the same lines as Kirk's argument for the Constitution being a conservative document and the American revolution being a conservative revolution. It has nothing at all to do with Jaffa and Schlesinger, no matter how many times you decide to mis-characterize or ignore what I say.

Mike T,
Under Lincoln's impetus, slavery was eventually banished everywhere. Almost never will an evil of that scope, severity, or magnitude get eradicated everywhere all at once.

George R.
If you cannot distinguish between an old institution and a conservative institution, then there's no point in discussing Lincoln's conservatism any further.


"The thing you are refusing to accept is that if it was serious enough to secede over there should be no problem with defending slavery."

No, because its being 'serious' does not necessarily mean that it was right. Just as one can be right on a matter that's trivial, one can be wrong on a matter that's serious.

"I think it's growing increasingly obvious that both sides are now at an impasse."

I came to the same conclusion. All I'd recommend is that those naysayers, who perhaps haven't read Bradford, Kendall, Carey, etc., at least give this a perusal. IMO it's the best brief (i.e., about 40 pages) treatment of the subject from the POV which I'm arguing -- that is a view other than the current liberal received narrative: demonic South, angelic North, secession as unthinkable, the purpose of the war being to free the slaves, etc. You know the drill.

http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/16_2/16_2_4.pdf

And please note that in this essay there is no excusing or justification of slavery whatsoever; to be anti-slavery and pro-Confederacy does not involve a contradiction.

In the piece Dr. Livingston proposes this interesting thought experiment:

"Suppose that, after Lincoln’s election, the
North had begun to secede from the South, as abolitionists had been arguing since the 1830s, and as New England leaders had threatened a number of times. Can we seriously believe that President Lincoln, newly placed in Washington, would refuse to receive Northern commissioners to negotiate a settlement, and that he would have launched the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century merely to coerce the North back into the Union?" (page 76).

In other words, what if New England would have seceded over slavery (to separate itself from a Union which permitted it, and had no intention of ending it in the South) instead of the South? Would Lincoln have had Southern armies invade Massachusetts and Connecticut, just to save the Union? Not bloody likely.

"It has nothing at all to do with Jaffa and Schlesinger, no matter how many times you decide to mis-characterize or ignore what I say."

It has something to do with them in the very real and troubling sense that you, while perhaps not drawing on either of them directly, are telling the same story as them in the same words. And their (and your) version of that story is rooted in liberalism, despite your refusal to see it.

Rob,
Freeing slaves and opposing political evil is liberalism?

For those who are interested in ending modern slavery, go here:

http://www.notforsalecampaign.org

If you cannot distinguish between an old institution and a conservative institution, then there's no point in discussing Lincoln's conservatism any further.

Michael,

Where did I suggest that slavery was conservative because it was old? If you won't respond to what I actually said, I'm just going to have to assume that it is because you can't.

I will retract, however, my suggestion that those who deny that slavery is conservative deserve ridicule, since there is a general confusion on this issue amoung many intelligent conservatives of good will.

"Freeing slaves and opposing political evil is liberalism?"

Of course not. But the story you're telling about how that freedom occurred has a decidedly liberal bent. The Northern Abolitionist narrative to which you subscribe is rooted in the decayed New England Puritanism of Emerson. This Emersonian liberalism gave birth to the Abolitionist Movement. Note, I'm not saying that all anti-slavery proponents were liberals in this sense. There were many anti-slavery activists (to use an anachronistic term), both Northern and Southern, who weren't progressives in that way. But your version of the story is the same as that of the liberals/progressives: the crusading holy North descending on the demonic benighted South, using all means at its disposal (including genocide if need be -- see 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic') to eradicate the evil of slavery.

I would think that a true Conservative would be suspicious of this narrative, as it is not only rooted in Progressivism, but decidedly non-nuanced to boot.


George:
Since conservatism is a movement and state of mind determined to preserve, or conserve, the best that has been said, done, or thought so that a just order may continue, please tell us how slavery is a conservative institution.

Rob,
So, now you're saying that history is liberal.

My point, if it is not clear, is: Do not mistake the revisionist account cooked up by Bradford et al as conservstive -- or as history. It's an evil fiction to which some attach the label "conservative." To say that the South was morally benighted is, in fact, to say the truth, and is not progressivism any more than to say that the Phillies won the pennant because they had better relief pitching and defense. If an idea is true, it's not the private property of any political party or faction. Its simply true to say that the old South's desire to maintain slavery (even if it meant breaching the union) was wicked, and was a denunciation of the principles of the founding. Sometimes even progressives get history right, even when ideologically eccentric and self-justifying southerners do not.

"So, now you're saying that history is liberal."

Lord, help us, no. In any case, I give up. If you misunderstand my point that drastically there's no sense continuing this discussion.

"Sometimes even progressives get history right, even when ideologically eccentric and self-justifying southerners do not."

Translation: anyone who disagrees with the holy textus receptus of current Civil War historiography is either an ideologue or a slaver apologist. Sounds a lot like liberal PC bulls--t to me.

Who's the real ideologue here, I wonder?

Under Lincoln's impetus, slavery was eventually banished everywhere. Almost never will an evil of that scope, severity, or magnitude get eradicated everywhere all at once.

The fact that he went to war without slavery being the casus belli, enlisted the aid of several slave states in suppressing secession, and only outlawed slavery as a punitive act against the secessionist states undermines your argument as a defense of his actions. You might as well wrap up your whole defense in "well look, something good came of it after all, so I guess we'll just sweep everything else under the rug and move on." Lincoln's behavior really does do far more to defend the South's argument that the Emancipation Proclamation was a cheap stunt, than to advance the North's argument that it was anything resembling the mission of the war.

If an idea is true, it's not the private property of any political party or faction. Its simply true to say that the old South's desire to maintain slavery (even if it meant breaching the union) was wicked, and was a denunciation of the principles of the founding.

Michael, your position is a denunciation of the principles of the founding. You and Step2 read the Declaration of Independence in such a narrow way that you completely trash the very point of the Declaration, namely that when a government no longer serves the majority of the people, they have a right to alter or abolish it.

To prove that the Union was upholding the values of the Declaration of Independence, mainly the "all men are created equal" part, you'd have to prove the following:

1) That the majority of the Union's population believed that that applied to blacks, slave or free.

2) That the majority of the Union was prepared to act in accordance with those beliefs after the war (extending full, equal rights to blacks, including private relationships).

3) That at least one of the specific motivations of the Union was to end slavery, end racial injustice and ensure the full legal, economic, religious and political liberty of blacks.

Those are the three main points that need to be addressed regarding the Union's motivation with respect to blacks' rights. Merely pointing to the abolition of slavery says virtually nothing about the willingness of the Union to actually uphold the ideal that "all men are created equal [etc.]" any more than a willingness on the part of some Nazis to deport all of the Jews to Madagascar disproves the point that the Nazi Party was dedicated to the victimization and extermination of the Jewish people.

please tell us how slavery is a conservative institution.

Michael,

I will outline this as simply as I can:

All the insane, perverted, and deleterious radical movements of our age are premised on the notions that all human beings have an inherent right to both freedom and equality. The slave society denies those notions utterly, and as long as it stands no radical movement can ever get off the ground.

Look at the civil rights movement, which evolved into the Black-Panther and black-separatist movements. Could they have ever developed in a slave society? Of course not. In a society where blacks are living as property no one is going to worry about blacks not having equal civil rights.

Look at the women liberation movement. Do you think that would have made any headway in a slave society? Don’t make me laugh. Where men are owned as property, women don’t demand equality. And what’s more, you wouldn’t have any women claiming the right to kill their unborn children.

Furthermore, do you think that three generations of young people running completely amok would ever happen in a slave society? No. In a society where grown men are scourged with bull whips, the youth keep their heads down.

Look at illegal immigration. Do you think that would be a problem in a slave society? No. In a society where even some of the people that belong here can be enslaved, what consideration can those who don’t belong here hope for?

And I won’t even get into the homosexual rights movement.

Slavery may have been harsh and brutal, but it certainly acted as a bulwark against radical progressivism, which is what conservatism is supposed to do. And abolitionism, for that reason, cannot be considered an undiluted good.

I would disagree with George R.'s arguments in a couple ways. First, I'd say that slavery is traditional, but not conservative except in a very broad, somewhat unsubtle sense. Second, I'd argue that the elimination of slavery was, when considered in isolation, an undiluted good; it's how it was eliminated that generates the problems.

Second, I'd argue that the elimination of slavery was, when considered in isolation, an undiluted good; it's how it was eliminated that generates the problems.

That is quite simply unbelievable. How on Earth do you think slavery was going to be eliminated? It wasn't going to happen on its own, the South rejected every attempt at restriction and reform. Which of course the character assassination by Dr. Livingston manages to completely overlook. I find it incredibly telling that he used the exact same Lincoln quote as I did from the Douglas debate, yet was unable to append the last sentence to it. Because when your goal is to misrepresent your opponent and distort history, you have to change the facts. Nowhere has anyone on this thread, least of all myself, taken the position that the North's motives were purely angelic and the South was unmitigated evil, yet that it the mythology we are supposedly engaged in by agreeing with Rob and Mike that slavery was immoral, but unlike them deciding that it should be restricted. It is hard to take seriously someone who says they are anti-slavery yet hasn't the first suggestion on how to go about reducing it or eliminating it. Do you really think someone who pronounces over and over again how horrible abortion is, but then makes every excuse to convince you it should continue unhindered is being honest? Would you do anything but cynically laugh at them if they told you they were anti-abortion?

That is quite simply unbelievable. How on Earth do you think slavery was going to be eliminated? It wasn't going to happen on its own, the South rejected every attempt at restriction and reform.

The South would have had no choice in the industrial age. The old agrarian South could not compete using a slave-driven economy in economies that could combine machine-enhanced agriculture with mass production of goods. Reform or die. Basic capitalism.

I keep wondering how Frederick Douglass would have evaluated some of the arguments on this thread.

When you get down to it, the right of self-determination only exists in theory until one group wins it from another by successfully waging war on them.

Right of self-determination? So you're a fan of the U.N. Charter after all.

"The South would have had no choice in the industrial age. The old agrarian South could not compete using a slave-driven economy in economies that could combine machine-enhanced agriculture with mass production of goods. Reform or die. Basic capitalism."


You'll notice that China, a slave economy in the industrial age, survives rather well, having the fastest growing economy on the planet.

The principles of the founding were articulated in the Declaration, which identified certain inalienable rights and self-evident truths, liberty and equality among them. Both are incompatible with slavery. But in order to get the southern states to join the union, slavery was an arena of compromise. The compromise was meant to be temporary. Yet, many decades later, the south was so recalcitrant that it wouldn't end slavery even if it meant breaching the union and risking war. The south transgressed the principles, agreements, and assumptions of the founding, not the north.

"That is quite simply unbelievable. How on Earth do you think slavery was going to be eliminated? It wasn't going to happen on its own."

There is a considerable amount of literature arguing otherwise; I suggest you acquaint yourself with it. Even some of the Confederate leaders and the less radical Abolitionists believed that slavery in America was on its last legs.

In any case, one must ask the question, why, among the 70+ countries that eliminated slavery in the 1800's, was America one of only two where it did not happen peacefully? The current mythology lays the blame for this entirely on a recalcitrant South. From my reading of history, I find that ridiculous. Seems to me that both sides were equally stubborn and inflexible.

"It is hard to take seriously someone who says they are anti-slavery yet hasn't the first suggestion on how to go about reducing it or eliminating it."

Again, you show your unfamiliarity with the literature. There were all sorts of plans, from both N and S, floating around at the time for some sort of gradual, compensated emancipation, which is how most of the rest of the world ended slavery. That the South was resistant to them there is no doubt. But the Radical Abolitionists in the North rejected them too, instead demanding that it be ended immediately and totally.

"The principles of the founding were articulated in the Declaration, which identified certain inalienable rights and self-evident truths, liberty and equality among them."

Kendall and Carey's "Basic Symbols" argues against that understanding of the Declaration, as does the work of M.E. Bradford, and others. If their view is accepted, one's understanding of the war, among other things, changes.

"You'll notice that China, a slave economy in the industrial age, survives rather well, having the fastest growing economy on the planet."

To compare the Communist/capitalist wage-slavery bastardization that is contemporary China with Southern chattel slavery is inapt. Both are bad, but they're not the same.

"That is quite simply unbelievable. How on Earth do you think slavery was going to be eliminated? It wasn't going to happen on its own."

Surely you're not suggesting that the bloodiest war of the 19th century leaving 600,000+ soldiers dead was the only way that slavery could have ended?

"the character assassination by Dr. Livingston"

Idol worshippers always complain when their false gods are knocked down. I do not propose that we chisel Lincoln off Mt. Rushmore or pull down his statue in Washington. But neither will I offer a pinch of incense at the Lincoln Memorial, as so many liberals and semi-conservatives seem to want us to do.


No one said that Southern slavery and Chinese labor practices are identical. They are not. But they are both radical forms of enforced labor -- and enforced labor can thrive in an industrial age.

You'll notice that China, a slave economy in the industrial age, survives rather well, having the fastest growing economy on the planet.

The laogai are a much smaller percentage of the Chinese labor force than the chattel slaves in the South were. Nice try.

The principles of the founding were articulated in the Declaration, which identified certain inalienable rights and self-evident truths, liberty and equality among them. Both are incompatible with slavery. But in order to get the southern states to join the union, slavery was an arena of compromise. The compromise was meant to be temporary. Yet, many decades later, the south was so recalcitrant that it wouldn't end slavery even if it meant breaching the union and risking war. The south transgressed the principles, agreements, and assumptions of the founding, not the north.

The South lived up to its end in allowing the slave trade to be abolished. The Constitution was, and is, nothing more than a specific legal agreement like any other founding document. If the North wanted to see slavery end up abolished under that agreement, it needed to stipulate that, but, as you said, the South would have never joined the Union under those terms.

I would also remind you that the Union went to war with four slave states marching under its banner, and that it never even so much as looked askance at their practices since they were loyalists. Slavery was only an ex post facto justification for Lincoln's actions. It was a bait-and-switch away from the original point which was that few people seriously believed at the time that the federal government had the constitutional authority to force states to remain in the Union against their will.

The south didn't "allow the slave trade to be abolished." It was abolished on the field of battle, quite apart from what the south "allowed."

Yes, the north "looked askance" at the slavery practiced inside its own ranks. Slavery was abolished there -- and everywhere.

The union was indissoluble -- even if you wanted to break it so that you could continue owning humans. And to say that "the Constitution was, and is, nothing more than a specific legal agreement like any other founding document" shows how little you (and the South) regard the Constitution.

Give it up, Mike T. Dr. Bauman's responses are unfortunately becoming self-parodies. And you can't rationally debate those.

The south didn't "allow the slave trade to be abolished." It was abolished on the field of battle, quite apart from what the south "allowed."

I must be confused because I wasn't aware of armed resistance to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.

Yes, the north "looked askance" at the slavery practiced inside its own ranks. Slavery was abolished there -- and everywhere.

Whatever happened after the fact does not suddenly override the other motives for war, none of which included a crusade to end slavery and empower blacks.

The union was indissoluble

So was the British Empire, you hypocrite.

George writes: "Slavery may have been harsh and brutal, but it certainly acted as a bulwark against radical progressivism, which is what conservatism is supposed to do. And abolitionism, for that reason, cannot be considered an undiluted good."

This is precisely why consequentialism is a failure. Here, George, asks us to look away from the question at issue--the wrongness of slavery--and employ future contingencies in order to justify an injustice.

Perhaps other injustices can be justified as well. Suppose that a child resulting from rape discovers a cure for cancer, or that torturing the innocent children of Hitler in front of him shortens the war. It is no longer the rape or the torture that is at issue, but the apparent consequences. It is the philosophy of Caphias: "Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not." In the words of George, "Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one race should be enslaved for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."

Why would anyone want to help create such a depraved world, on purpose?

Perhaps other injustices can be justified as well. Suppose that a child resulting from rape discovers a cure for cancer, or that torturing the innocent children of Hitler in front of him shortens the war. It is no longer the rape or the torture that is at issue, but the apparent consequences. It is the philosophy of Caphias: "Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not." In the words of George, "Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one race should be enslaved for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."

Why would anyone want to help create such a depraved world, on purpose?

That is what I have been asking Michael Bauman. A significant portion of his defense of the invasion of the South rests on the action of the Union well after the war started, and the consequences of those decisions. His argument, and to an extent those of several others here, has been "slavery was ended near the end of the war in most of the continent, and completely thereafter, thus the Union's efforts were noble and the South's were not." That completely ignores the fact that the casus belli was not slavery, but rather the act of secession and the assault on Fort Sumter, and that the Union changed its goal well into the war to suit its purposes (ideological for some, practical battlefield considerations for others).

Bauman's argument would justify imperialism and ending the right of self-determination by force if the attacking party could prove that in the course of its suppression of the seceding party, it accomplished a moral good. Since no region is populated by angels, that line of thought can be used to justify any brutal suppression of any independence movement.

The cause of the war was secession and the cause of secession was slavery. To call that "self-determination" is as perverse a euphemism as one can imagine. Secession was not an "independence movement." It as a movement to maintain "brutal suppression."

I haven't seen that kind of double talk since Bill Clinton left office.

"Since no region is populated by angels, that line of thought can be used to justify any brutal suppression of any independence movement"

Or the imposition by force of any sort of supposed "higher" ideals (including democracy and/or capitalism) on a reluctant foreign country or region.

Frank Beckwith:

This is precisely why consequentialism is a failure. Here, George, asks us to look away from the question at issue--the wrongness of slavery--and employ future contingencies in order to justify an injustice.

I don't think you can accuse me of consequentialism, because I wasn't suggesting any course of action but was only pointing out that chattel slavery tends to engender a conservative society, whereas Abolitionism can be argued to have opened the progressive floodgates. And just because the end does not justify the means, it does not necessarily follow that the means justify the end.

The South would have had no choice in the industrial age. The old agrarian South could not compete using a slave-driven economy in economies that could combine machine-enhanced agriculture with mass production of goods. Reform or die. Basic capitalism.

They had a chance to reform legally, they chose a different course. I also think George R. blows your economic theory out of the water, slavery was primarily an expression of the social order and patriarchal power.

There were all sorts of plans, from both N and S, floating around at the time for some sort of gradual, compensated emancipation, which is how most of the rest of the world ended slavery. That the South was resistant to them there is no doubt.

True as far as it goes, but whenever a Confederate apologist blusters about how Lincoln initially sought those limited approaches and resisted pressure from the abolitionists of his time, it is revealed as "proof" that the war had nothing to do with slavery. So on one hand, if Lincoln had emancipated all slaves at his inauguration he was an imperialistic crusader. On the other hand, if he proposed a gradual, compensated pathway to emancipation he was an imperialistic crusader and a hypocrite.

The union was indissoluble
So was the British Empire, you hypocrite.

The American colonists did NOT secede. They revolted. The Declaration of Independence refers to the laws of nature, not the British constitution. And in order to justify the radical step of revolution, the colonists had to demonstrate that the Crown "evinced a design to reduce them under absolute despotism".

The cause of the war was secession and the cause of secession was slavery. To call that "self-determination" is as perverse a euphemism as one can imagine. Secession was not an "independence movement." It as a movement to maintain "brutal suppression."

Exactly. The alleged "right of self-determination" was exercised to preserve the enslavement of yet another group of people. I'm also still curious how a conservative grounds a "right of self-determination" since the very term has a liberal provenance.

**it is revealed as "proof" that the war had nothing to do with slavery**

To say that slavery was not the casus belli is not the same as saying that "the war had nothing to do with slavery."
The false logic runs like this:

A) Slavery was the primary reason for secession.
B) Secession was the casus belli.
C) Therefore, since slavery "caused" secession, slavery was the "real" casus belli.

You're arguing that a denial of C entails a denial of A, which plainly isn't the case.

As historian Jeffrey R. Hummel puts it, why the South chose not to remain in the Union, and why the North wouldn't let it leave, are two different questions. It's the Northern apologists' continual blurring of these questions that causes confusion.

"on one hand, if Lincoln had emancipated all slaves at his inauguration he was an imperialistic crusader. On the other hand, if he proposed a gradual, compensated pathway to emancipation he was an imperialistic crusader and a hypocrite."

Lincoln had no interest in emancipating the slaves at the time, as he himself stated; the hypothesizing of that occurence is a red herring.


The American colonists did NOT secede. They revolted. The Declaration of Independence refers to the laws of nature, not the British constitution. And in order to justify the radical step of revolution, the colonists had to demonstrate that the Crown "evinced a design to reduce them under absolute despotism".

First of all, the colonists did secede. If they merely revolted, they would have taken their efforts to London, not tried to sever their ties with London. Second, they very much did in practice justify themselves by drawing on the "rights of Englishmen" and various parts of what we call the "British constitution" in justifying themselves.

There is no convincing you, Bauman or Step2 of anything because you are so caught up in the contemporary narrative about the Civil War that you won't see reason. Thus I go back to my point that it is might, not moral arguments, which ultimately makes all things right or wrong. The Union won fair, and took us back in under the right of conquest, which is the most sincere and observable right by which any state lays claim to another.

True as far as it goes, but whenever a Confederate apologist blusters about how Lincoln initially sought those limited approaches and resisted pressure from the abolitionists of his time, it is revealed as "proof" that the war had nothing to do with slavery. So on one hand, if Lincoln had emancipated all slaves at his inauguration he was an imperialistic crusader. On the other hand, if he proposed a gradual, compensated pathway to emancipation he was an imperialistic crusader and a hypocrite.

Actually, what it tells us is that Lincoln would say and do anything to preserve the Union. He was willing to compromise with the South in the beginning, and then he went to war to bring the South back in. Like any good leader, he tried to sow domestic chaos in the South by sending a clear signal to as much as half of the labor pool that they were free from bondage the moment Union troops began to enter their area.

A good strategy, and I would never call him a hypocrite. I would call you, Bauman and Perseus hypocrites for the way you engage in stereotypical philosophical dancing around how, when, where and why one can secede, but Lincoln was at least brutally consistent.

Mike T,

Who is the "us" you reference in your above comment? Do you see yourself as a citizen of the Confederate States of America that lives under the rule of a conquering nation?

"because you are so caught up in the contemporary narrative about the Civil War that you won't see reason"

Up until about three or four years ago, I was in the same boat. I read one of Thomas DiLorenzo's books on Lincoln and thought, "This can't possibly be true, can it?" But as I started reading works from authors outside the current mainstream liberal narrative, it began to occur to me that there was a lot more to the story than I had learned in high school and college.

The book that probably helped me the most in beginning to think along these lines is Robert Penn Warren's little essay "The Legacy of the Civil War." Warren was certainly no Southern apologist, as his critique of the South in the book demonstrates, but neither did he whitewash the North.

What was fascinating was to go back and reread McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" after having read a fair amount of the 'alternative' stuff. Its one-sidedness fairly leaps off the page. In every instance where there's some discrepancy or disagreement among scholars, McPherson almost without exception gives the benefit of the doubt to the pro-Northern view. The lack of objectivity borders on the appalling.

Rob G. & Mike T,

Please give a brief narrative of the "true" events that led to secession and war then that accounts for all of the relevant facts but does not center on the Southern state's desire to continue the institution of slavery without interference from the forces int he Northern states that sought to diminish or outright end that institution. What is the simplest counter narrative that you have to offer. I am not looking for arguments, but just an honest narrative to counter the traditional understanding.

Who is the "us" you reference in your above comment? Do you see yourself as a citizen of the Confederate States of America that lives under the rule of a conquering nation?

I see myself as a southerner and an American. I regard the South as a conquered nation in the same sense that Wales is a conquered territory of England. The Welsh are fully English subjects, with all of the rights thereof, but that doesn't change the fact that they are still, even in 2009, a conquered people. For me, the right of conquest is sufficient for me to put the issue aside in my day-to-day feelings about it. They won, we lost; they conquered us, that settled the debate on our sovereignty.

Please give a brief narrative of the "true" events that led to secession and war then that accounts for all of the relevant facts but does not center on the Southern state's desire to continue the institution of slavery without interference from the forces int he Northern states that sought to diminish or outright end that institution.

Please give a brief explanation of why your question is relevant in light of the fact that the Union's casus belli was not slavery. Otherwise, all your question is is a bait-and-switch.

Mike T,

You have repeatedly attacked the traditional or “liberal” narrative as mistaken and outright deceitful. You have made the claim that the South was morally and legally justified in secession and that slavery was not the primary justification for the war. Dr. Baumann has conceded that secession was the case for war, or casus balli if you insist, but that the primary reason for secession was the South’s desire for self determination on the issue of slavery. The narrative then that he is operating on is well known.

You propose that this narrative is false and that the justification for war was merely the preservation of the union with no regards to the liberation or moral standing of the slaves. So I was asking for you to give a brief narrative of the growing hostilities that demonstrated your point without slavery being central to the argument. You have been very clear that those of us who do not agree with your position on this issue operate either out of ignorance of history, dishonest Lincoln worship, or liberal revisionist intentions. I am not certain why I am then trying to trick you by saying briefly tell me your story and enlighten me. Assume that I am ignorant and help me see the big picture of what actually happened.

Forgive the mispelling of caus belli.

I've got to stop trying to do this when distracted. I typo like crazy.

Jay, I'd say that the primary overarching reason for the South's secession was that it felt that it was being threatened both economically and culturally, not only by the North's opposition to slavery (which was undoubtedly a primary factor -- I disagree with those scholars who discount that reason altogether) but also by the tariff issue, and the fact that with the election of Lincoln they had no real way politically to oppose the continued attempt by the North to further its economic and cultural hegemony over them.

Some scholars portray the situation as if the South decided to secede simply because of the 1860 election. As a matter of fact, I just had a discussion the other day with a guy who said, "You can't decide to secede just because an election doesn't go your way." The election was the precipating factor, but this view fails to take into account the previous 30+ years of Northern attempts to control the South.

Note that I am a Northerner myself, and in no way do I defend slavery. It was an evil system that needed to go. But I've come to my conclusions through a lot of reading of authors whose works range from the very pro-Northern to the neo-Confederates and lots of folks in between.

For those who might be interested, there is a thought-provoking and long essay in the latest New Republic about Lincoln:

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2634954a-b287-480e-9fbd-8a4663174031

Wilentz is a liberal historian, but he tries to highlight some of the complex issues involved in evaluating Lincoln as an American statesman.

You propose that this narrative is false and that the justification for war was merely the preservation of the union with no regards to the liberation or moral standing of the slaves. So I was asking for you to give a brief narrative of the growing hostilities that demonstrated your point without slavery being central to the argument.

The general disagreement over slavery was certainly part of it, but there were other issues including taxes, cultural contempt between both sides, and a general southern tendency to not want to be told to do by outsiders even if the orders are probably good ones.

You have been very clear that those of us who do not agree with your position on this issue operate either out of ignorance of history, dishonest Lincoln worship, or liberal revisionist intentions. I am not certain why I am then trying to trick you by saying briefly tell me your story and enlighten me. Assume that I am ignorant and help me see the big picture of what actually happened.

I am simply saying that since the Union did not go to war over slavery, slavery is not particularly relevant. The Union went to war over whether or not a state can secede at any time, for any reason. Slavery was, after all, not the only issue over which the South nearly seceded. The tariffs were in their own right a severe grievance.

You are elevating slavery into a moral issue which neither side claimed as a case for war. The Union did not give a rodent's posterior about slavery in and of itself, otherwise it would have responded to slavery in its four slave states with the Emancipation Proclamation. Rather, the Union was primarily defending the perceived supremacy of the United States government over individual state governments.

Jay,

Just so we're clear, I take my position that slavery was largely irrelevant to whether the Union was justified because I believe that only something like the Holocaust could justify armed intervention when there is no otherwise legitimate casus belli. I am extremely reluctant to justify armed interference in the affairs of any people, and would just as vehemently oppose armed intervention if New England seceded today to defend abortion. I say that last part as one of WWwtW's only commenters who believes that abortion is murder, and should be punished accordingly once its reprohibited, so that should tell you how skeptical I am about moral arguments for violating the right of self-determination of a people.

***I do not regard practices like slavery, female genital mutilation, and abortion to be justifications for war in and of themselves, and I have no evidence that the Union ever claimed that slavery was itself part of their casus belli.

Rob G & Mike T,

I appreciate both of your responses and clarifications. I am going to wait until I have time to mull it all over before I say anything in response. (If I say anything at all)

Jay, grab a copy of Warren's little book that I mentioned above. It's only about 100 pages and can be read in an hour or two, but it's quite profound.

The Union did not give a rodent's posterior about slavery in and of itself, otherwise it would have responded to slavery in its four slave states with the Emancipation Proclamation.

As mentioned before, Lincoln was interested in a gradual emancipation, this does not imply he had no interest in ending slavery. The reason you expected Lincoln to jettison that approach when he needed all the allies he could get shows how far you've accepted the false narrative that he was or should have been an ideologue about slavery.

I say that last part as one of WWwtW's only commenters who believes that abortion is murder, and should be punished accordingly once its reprohibited, so that should tell you how skeptical I am about moral arguments for violating the right of self-determination of a people.

By "people", I suppose you are excluding a particular race. Additionally, if you believe abortion to be murder, which many other posters and commentators on this blog assert and some have called it the abortion Holocaust, it seems odd that you would dissolve the Union in order to allow it to continue. In short, you should give up saying that there is even one reason to warrant interference with a rebellion/secession, since by your own standard you don't believe that to be the case.

First of all, the colonists did secede. If they merely revolted, they would have taken their efforts to London, not tried to sever their ties with London. Second, they very much did in practice justify themselves by drawing on the "rights of Englishmen" and various parts of what we call the "British constitution" in justifying themselves.

The American Revolution was a full dissolution of government (not merely a withdrawal from the British Empire) that dumped the Crown, which held the executive and federative powers, and as a consequence all political ties with Great Britain were severed (since the Crown was the link to Great Britain). There was no need to consult London once that step was taken. The rights of Englishmen were cast as part of natural rights as is evident in the text of the Declaration and Jefferson's Summary View.

I would call you, Bauman and Perseus hypocrites for the way you engage in stereotypical philosophical dancing around how, when, where and why one can secede, but Lincoln was at least brutally consistent.

I deny any legal right of an individual state to secede from the Union despite what apologists for the Confederacy or the Essex Junto might claim. There are only two ways to achieve that end: constitutional revision or dissolution of government (i.e. revolution).

You, on the other hand, continue to dance around the philosophical grounding for a "right of self-determination" of a "people."

By "people", I suppose you are excluding a particular race.

No, since there were a number of free blacks and even black slaveholders in the South.

Additionally, if you believe abortion to be murder, which many other posters and commentators on this blog assert and some have called it the abortion Holocaust, it seems odd that you would dissolve the Union in order to allow it to continue. In short, you should give up saying that there is even one reason to warrant interference with a rebellion/secession, since by your own standard you don't believe that to be the case.

I disagree with those who call abortion analogous to the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a state-executed mass murder, not a state-sanctioned private act committed by millions of private citizens.

I deny any legal right of an individual state to secede from the Union despite what apologists for the Confederacy or the Essex Junto might claim. There are only two ways to achieve that end: constitutional revision or dissolution of government (i.e. revolution).

The Confederates would claim that they did just that, only they were not successful in forcing the Union to accept that dissolution at bayonet point the way the colonies were with the British Empire.

No, since there were a number of free blacks and even black slaveholders in the South.

The number of free blacks was less than 7% of total blacks in the South. Many of the earliest black slaveholders had slaveholding white parents, overall around 84% were mixed race. Although it varied by region, in most cases the "slaves" were family and friends, which provided means to grant them freedom or some degree of protection. This pathway became increasingly restricted by the states over time with a corresponding reduction in black slaveholders but also an increase in the percentage using it for purely economic motive. So the number of blacks owning slaves for economic motive was a minority of a minority of a minority. Not exactly a representative sample of the "people".

The Confederates would claim that they did just that

The Confederacy denied a dissolution of government in the Lockean sense of the Declaration. Rather, they claimed a legal right to leave the Union as if it were a treaty from which one party may withdraw at any time. That's why it was supposedly legal secession rather than extra-constitutional revolution.

A thought on Lincoln as a conservative: Quite a few commentators have argued that in a sense the Civil War was the final battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, and that Hamilton won. Now there's no doubt that politically speaking, Lincoln was a Hamiltonian, being a disciple of Henry Clay, a Whig, etc.

It seems to me, however, rather difficult to square true conservatism and Hamiltonianism, since the former eschews big government and the latter embraces it (Lincoln and the Civil War-era GOP definitely embraced it. The fact that it wasn't as big then as it has gotten since is of no import.) Those conservatives and libertarians who see the expansion of government as a problem per se are those who seem to have the biggest disagreement with the Lincoln defenders. On the other hand, there are those conservatives who don't mind the expansion of federal power, provided the expanded central state does things that they agree with, and doesn't in the process get TOO big, whatever that means. These types tend to be Lincoln apologists.

This brings me back to a point I made above, way back when, early in this discussion. The things that conservatives can admire in Lincoln are what might be called philosophical: his belief in natural law, unchanging human nature, the value of rhetoric as a moral force, etc.

When it comes to politics, however, it appears much harder to reconcile Lincoln the politician and political theorist with conservatism; Lincoln was a Hamiltonian, and I'm not sure how consistent it is to be a "Hamiltonian conservative." In fact, the notion seems almost incoherent.

As a southerner, I always found it odd when American conservatives defended Lincoln. Where I grew up, Lincoln apologists were invariably leftists. I suppose I can understand how a northerner might have a different view of the man, though I cannot agree with that view.
Leaving aside our quite natural prejudices as well as the standard conservative objections to Lincoln (Are there any left wing objections to Lincoln?), I was struck by the words of Willmoore Kendall above. It seems a very strange kind of conservative who celebrates a man who, "...transformed the fundamental affirmations of the ...Founders..." and created a new "religion," albeit a political one, for the American people to live by.

Regarding Sherman in Georgia, I'm surprised no one brought up Confederate troop behavior in Georgia. The Confederate general Joseph Wheeler was particularly destructive in Georgia, but the truth is he was just carrying out Confederate war policy of denying the enemy anything valuable. That's why Richmond was burning when Union troops overran it. Destroy anything possibly of use to Sherman in his path, and they were never sure exactly what Sherman's path was going to be. As a consequence of Confederate policy, they destroyed a great deal of goods and property simply to deny its potential use to Sherman.

Confederate Maj. Gen. D. H. Hill wrote that "the whole of Georgia is full of bitter complaints of Wheeler's cavalry . . . I hope to God he will never get back to Georgia."

That this policy and action is overlooked in Georgia and elsewhere, or more likely unknown, is pretty revealing. To say nothing of the Confederate war policy of summary execution of black Union soldiers.

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