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The Reluctant Emancipator
 I
like to call myself a “reactionary utopian” because it
sounds romantic. The truth, however, is less glamorous. Let’s be
honest. I’m actually a recovering
Republican.  Once
you’ve learned to hate the Democrats, it’s hard to stop.
In the Goldwater era, when I was
young, Republicans were talking about such high principles as federalism,
limited government, and fiscal restraint. How did the party go from all these
things to their polar opposites in George W. Bush?
In a word, war. As we prepare for
another slam-dunk cakewalk preemptive war, this time with Iran, it may be
well to recall that the GOP had its origins in big government, which leads to,
and thrives on, war. Only weeks after the first Republican president took
office, the United States were at war against their estranged sister states.
It proved to be the bloodiest war in
American history, consuming 600,000 young Americans. Setting moral and
political questions aside, we can never really know what was lost. How many
of those young men, had they lived, would have blossomed into Edisons,
Fords, Gershwins, and other geniuses whose fruits we would still enjoy and
profit from? All we know is that the country was perpetually impoverished by
this colossal waste of life. You never hum the tunes that never got written.
Nevertheless, we still celebrate
— no, deify — the man who brought on this horror by refusing to
countenance the peaceful withdrawal of seven states. Of course Lincoln is
chiefly honored for ending slavery. It’s a nice story, but it isn’t
exactly true.
When the Confederacy was
formed, so many Southern Democrats left both houses of the U.S. Congress
that both the House and the Senate were left with Republican majorities.
With this near-monopoly of power, the GOP — in those days, the GYP, I
suppose — passed two “confiscation” acts in 1861 and
1862, authorizing the seizure of any private property used to assist the
“rebellion.” These powers were so vaguely defined that they
permitted limitless repression, such as the closing of newspapers critical of
Lincoln’s war. In combination with Lincoln’s suspension of
habeas corpus, anyone could be arrested for anything in the Land of the
Free.
![[Breaker quote for The Reluctant Emancipator: The events that controlled Lincoln]](2006breakers/060124.gif) The
1862 act expressly declared slaves
in the seceding states “forever free.” This was the real
Emancipation Proclamation, but Lincoln was actually reluctant to act on it,
doubting its constitutionality. For months the radical Republicans attacked
him and egged him on, and finally he gave it effect in the most famous
executive order of all time. He argued that in wartime he might take a
punitive step that would be illegal during a time of peace.
This was a dubious technical
argument, and Lincoln wrote his own Emancipation Proclamation in dull, dry
language, with none of his typically memorable rhetoric. It had, as the
historian Richard Hofstadter later put it, “all the moral grandeur of a
bill of lading.”
Lincoln had had other plans for
ending slavery. He’d always thought it should be done gradually, with
“compensation” to the slaveowners and the freed blacks to be
encouraged to leave the United States. It was his conviction, repeatedly and
openly stated, that though all men are created equal, abstractly speaking,
the Negro — “the African,” he called him — could
never enjoy political and social equality with the white man in this country;
the black man would have to find his equality somewhere else, “without
[i.e., outside] the United States.”
So Lincoln waged war to prevent
the political separation of North and South, but in the hope of achieving racial
separation between black and white. Both goals entailed vast expansions of
Federal and executive power. Limited government, anyone?
With its current Jacobin-Wilsonian
zeal for spreading “democracy” around the globe, the
Republican Party today is more or less back where it started. And once
again, a Republican president is claiming wartime powers, under the
Constitution, to act outside the Constitution. But at least Lincoln thought he
owed the public an explanation, and he did give them one, of sorts.
Still, the myth persists that
Lincoln lived his whole life for the purpose of abolishing slavery, and was
finally able to do this with a single inspired sovereign act. Like most historical
myths, this one ignores all the interesting details. As Lincoln himself said,
“I have not controlled events, but plainly confess that events have
controlled me.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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