Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
February 2001
Volume 8, No. 2 -- Special Lincoln Issue
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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Features
THE MOVING PICTURE
(page 1)
The progressive Hive is buzzing furiously against John
Ashcroft, George W. Bush's choice for attorney general --
a religious man who opposes abortion and moral
degeneracy. In other words, he's what Joe Lieberman
pretended to be. No wonder they hate him.
* * *
The population of the United States, according to
the official census figures, is now over 281 million.
Given the likely number of illegal and other uncounted
residents, the real figure is probably over 300 million.
If abortion weren't legal, it would be approaching 350
million.
* * *
Victor Borge is dead at 91. The Danish-born
comedian-pianist, a Jewish refugee from you-know-who, was
a particular favorite of my mother, with his patented
blend of suavity and silliness, dignity and self-mockery.
He didn't just make you laugh; he made you happy. His
humor was a survival of civilized delights. My father,
who rarely agreed with my mother, loved him too. "Ladies
and gentlemen," Borge began one show solemnly, patting
his piano, "the Steinway people have asked me to tell you
... " pause " ... that this is a Baldwin."
* * *
Hearty thanks to those astute readers who pointed
out that Charles II was restored in 1660, not (as I
recently wrote) 1860. I could make a case that a monarch
was installed in 1860, but I prefer to move on and let
the healing begin.
* * *
This issue is largely devoted to Abraham Lincoln,
the central figure in my forthcoming book on the decline
of constitutional government. I'm fascinated by one odd
fact: this most Shakespearean of presidents (his favorite
play was MACBETH) was killed in a theater by a brilliant
young Shakespearean actor (who had played Macbeth on the
stage). At that moment, of course, John Wilkes Booth
thought of himself as another Brutus striking down an
arrogant Caesar. (Booth had played both these roles as
well.)
* * *
I am simply astounded at the degree to which Lincoln
has been falsified. With the happy exception of the
Library of America's Lincoln anthology, most editions of
his speeches and writings deliberately omit his
utterances on racial matters whenever they conflict with
contemporary liberal opinion. His scholarly celebrants
play those views down in order to sustain the impression
that he was (or would have been, had he lived in our
time) an apostle of the agenda of "civil rights,"
integration, affirmative action, and so forth. Somehow
Honest Abe has inspired more lies than any other
American.
* * *
Since writing the ensuing essay, I've learned that
Lincoln, like his hero Henry Clay, was a member of the
American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 for the
purpose of encouraging the gradual emancipation of slaves
and their resettlement outside the United States,
preferably in Africa. Now forgotten, the society
represented an important movement, a via media between
the abolitionists and pro-slavery forces. It helped
create Liberia, whose capital, Monrovia, was named for
one of its members, President James Monroe. Other famous
members included Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew
Jackson, Millard Fillmore, John Marshall, Francis Scott
Key, Daniel Webster, and even two of Lincoln's political
foes, Stephen Douglas and Roger Taney.
LINCOLN VERSUS HIS "RIGHTFUL MASTERS"
(pages 2-6)
Abraham Lincoln was a humble, kindly man of the
people, devoted to liberty and "government of the people,
by the people, for the people." Forced to wage civil war,
he did so reluctantly, "with malice toward none, with
charity for all," ever appealing magnanimously against
sectional hatred to "the better angels of our nature."
But in the end, believing in the equal dignity of all
races, he made war, freed the slaves, and gave America "a
new birth of freedom." He was, in particular, the best
friend black Americans ever had.
This is the Lincoln of popular mythology, of
folklore and movies, but also of scribes and scholars.
New books continue pouring out to shore up and even add
depth to the myth. Whole books are written about the
Gettysburg Address alone. Steeped in Shakespeare and the
King James Bible, Lincoln endowed his words with a
resonance rivaling theirs in the American mind.
Even to criticize Lincoln is to sound like a
sorehead. Nevertheless, it must be said, again and again,
that no other figure in American history is so different
from his accepted image. Lincoln's rhetoric is so
eloquent, so overpowering, that it distracts us from the
record to which it stands in amazing -- yet obvious --
contrast. His own conduct of the Civil War gave his
brilliant words the lie. Yet, in most Americans' minds,
those words still define the meaning of that war.
Before the war, before his presidency, Lincoln
displayed the makings of a great man. In his famous
debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, he impaled Douglas
with iron logic. Douglas had endorsed "popular
sovereignty" -- the right of people in the territories to
decide whether to legalize slavery -- but then embraced
the Dred Scott decision, in which Chief Justice Roger
Taney had said that the Constitution forbade Congress
*or* the people of the territories to ban slavery in the
territories. Taney, in other words, had *denied* popular
sovereignty when it came to slavery. So Douglas couldn't
have it both ways.
Lincoln pressed further. Because Douglas and the
Democratic Party wouldn't directly say that slavery was
wrong in principle, they were bound to treat it, as a
practical matter, as a right. There was no middle ground.
And if the U.S. Supreme Court should extend its own
logic, holding that the Constitution established slave
ownership as a right even in the currently "free" states,
the Democrats would be bound to accept "the
nationalization of slavery." So far Lincoln was right,
and he had Douglas cornered.
If Lincoln's career had ended there, it would have
been an honorable and even glorious one. But as president
he became overweening, waging a disastrous war by illegal
means and defending his course with sophistry. Because he
won the war, crushed the South, "saved the Union," and
issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he has been
canonized as our greatest president, and his arguments
have escaped the scrutiny they deserve. In fact his
fallacies have come to sound like truisms, so that it now
seems odd even to ask if they were really cogent. Because
he was essentially right about slavery, it is too easily
assumed that he must have been right about everything
else.
But after all, it is logically possible that he was
right about slavery and wrong to wage war. He knew this
himself, though his idolators now take it for granted
that if slavery was wrong, the war that ended with its
abolition must have been justified -- a simplistic
argument Lincoln himself never made. Until the
Emancipation Proclamation he was at pains to assure
everyone, North and South, that he was *not* waging war
on slavery. His famous 1862 letter to Horace Greeley
stressed the point: "If I could save the Union without
freeing any slave, I would do it." He added that he would
be as willing to save the Union by freeing all slaves, or
by freeing some; he neglected to say whether he would be
willing save it by *extending* slavery -- though, if
saving the Union was his supreme and sacred goal, well,
why not?
Lincoln's great presidential speeches are based on
one false proposition: that the war was necessary to
"save the Union," which the Confederacy was trying to
"dissolve" and "destroy." A Southern victory would cause
not only the Union but self-government itself to "perish
from the earth"! Lincoln was always careful to equate
secession with "aggression" and "treason." He inflated
the South's desire to withdraw -- peacefully, if possible
-- from the confederated Republic into an apocalyptic
threat to self-government everywhere, forever.
Lincoln's rhetoric always implied that the
"rebellion" would not only sever the South, but
annihilate the North. Over time he spoke less and less of
the "Union" -- in 1861 he had called it "this
Confederacy"! -- and more and more of the "nation" as a
simple, unitary thing, of which the individual states
were mere subdivisions rather than federated sovereign
components. A radical change occurred in his own
thinking. As the pro-Lincoln historian James M. McPherson
observes, Lincoln began with the conservative goal of
"preserving" the Union, slavery and all, but ended with
the revolutionary aim of using the power of the federal
government to transform the internal character of the
Southern states. Ultimately the Union victory proved less
a conquest of the South by the North than the triumph of
the federal government over the states, of "consolidated"
government, as the Framers of the Constitution called it,
over federalism.
Yet the Union would have survived secession; it
would not have been destroyed by a few states reclaiming
their sovereignty. To cancel your membership in a society
is a very different thing from *destroying* that
society; but Lincoln was bent on erasing this simple
distinction (though earlier in his life he had supported
independence movements in Mexico and Hungary). And even
if the South had been allowed to secede in peace, a later
reunion, on terms agreeable to both sides, would have
remained possible, even probable, without the terrible
rancor that ensued from the war.
In order to rally wavering public opinion to his
cause, Lincoln waited for the South to strike the first
blow. The North was by no means eager for war; many
Northerners, perhaps most, were willing to let the South
go its own way. They knew very well that a diminished
Union would continue to survive. But Fort Sumter ignited
the sort of war fever that Pearl Harbor would set off in
isolationist America in 1941, though the only death was
that of an unfortunate Union horse. The Union prisoners
were treated gallantly after their surrender, but the
North reacted as if they had been mercilessly
slaughtered.
In his first inaugural address, Lincoln had
cunningly set the stage for the war he insisted he didn't
want. He had said that he had neither the "lawful right"
nor the "inclination" to disturb slavery where it already
existed, and he quoted and endorsed the Republican
platform's declaration that "the maintenance inviolate of
the rights of the states, and especially the right of
each state to order and control its own domestic
institutions according to its own judgment exclusively,
*is essential to that balance of power on which the
perfection and endurance of our political fabric
depend;* and we denounce *the lawless invasion by armed
force* of the soil of any state or territory, *no
matter under what pretext,* as among the gravest of
crimes." (My emphasis; but note the loophole afforded by
the word *lawless.*) He even avowed his willingness to
support a proposed constitutional amendment protecting
slavery from federal interference.
Having said this, Lincoln proceeded to deny the
right of secession. The Union, he insisted, was
"perpetual," and secession was not "provided for" in the
Constitution. He went further: "The Union is much older
than the Constitution." It commenced with the Articles of
Association in 1774, and was "matured and continued" by
the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of
Confederation in 1778, and finally by the Constitution
itself in 1787. Any act of secession was therefore
"legally void." It was his "simple duty" to enforce the
law in all the states; "and I shall perform it, so far as
practicable, unless *my rightful masters, the American
people,* shall *withhold the requisite means,* or, in
some authoritative manner, *direct the contrary."* (My
emphasis.) That is, only the people could stop him from
waging war on the seceding states; but he clearly implied
that should they do so, he would heed their desires.
Meanwhile, he said, the Union "will constitutionally
defend and maintain itself." He added that if the Supreme
Court were to decide "vital questions" of public policy,
the American people, those "rightful masters" of the
government, "will have ceased to be their own rulers,
having, to that extent, practically resigned their
government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
So Lincoln presented himself as the humble champion
of popular self-government and portrayed the Confederacy
as an "insurrection" against lawful and constitutional
majority rule. But there were some holes in this
argument. At Gettysburg he would say that the Declaration
had created a "new nation" in 1776, though in fact it had
said nothing about a monolithic "nation"; it had asserted
that the colonies "are, and of Right ought to be, Free
and Independent States." The Articles of Confederation
had laid down the principle that "each state retains its
sovereignty, freedom, and independence." Nor had the
Constitution denied the ultimate sovereignty of the
states, three of which had expressly reserved the
unconditional right to secede in their ratification acts.
As Jefferson Davis later pointed out, either those
reservations were valid (in which case *every* state
must also retain the right to secede), or the conditional
acts of ratification were invalid and three states had
never joined the Union.
Lincoln's appeals to the Constitution and the people
were also hollow. He flagrantly violated the Constitution
in order to wage war and, just as significantly, to
suppress dissent in the North. He outraged many
Northerners by raising troops and money himself for
several months, without summoning Congress, whose powers
he was usurping. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus,
thereby usurping another congressional prerogative; and
when Chief Justice Taney ruled that this was a violation
of the Constitution, Lincoln not only defied the ruling
but wrote an order for Taney's arrest! He later offered
the lame argument that a part of the Constitution might
have to be violated in order to preserve the whole. But
Taney, in this case, was on firm ground: the suspension
of habeas corpus during war or insurrection had always
been a legislative, not an executive act. Lincoln was
acting as a dictator, for which there was absolutely no
provision in the Constitution. But, as he ominously put
it: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the
stormy present."
Equating opposition to the war with "disloyalty" and
"treason," Lincoln authorized more than 10,000 arbitrary
arrests and shut down hundreds of newspapers throughout
the North. Many civilians were improperly tried by
military courts and hanged in virtual lynchings for no
worse crime than opposing the war. Lincoln wasn't
deferential to his "rightful masters, the American
people," when they sought to direct him otherwise than as
he was inclined to be directed.
Nowhere was this clearer than in Maryland in 1861.
The legislature voted against secession, but it
recognized the right of any state to secede and opposed
keeping the Southern states in the Union by force. When
it denounced the war as "unconstitutional" and refused to
supply troops, Lincoln had the antiwar members arrested
(along with the mayor of Baltimore and other prominent
antiwar citizens) and used the army to set up a puppet
government for the remainder of the war. On election day,
federal soldiers, armed with bayonets, guarded the polls
and arrested suspected Southern sympathizers; many of
these soldiers also voted illegally.
It was a nakedly rigged election, made necessary by
Lincoln's definitions of *treason* and *disloyalty,*
which were so broad as to include, if we count
Southerners, most of the population. Presumably the
Marylanders who wanted to remain in the Union, while
acknowledging that others had the right to secede,
considered themselves quite loyal. They also considered
themselves Lincoln's "rightful masters," entitled to hold
him to the Constitution they thought he was flouting
through the means available to them. But Lincoln felt it
was up to him to elect a new electorate, having found the
old one unsatisfactory. He wasn't taking back talk from
his rightful masters.
Lincoln's suppression of debate throughout the North
made a mockery of his claim to be defending "government
of the people, by the people, for the people" and
amounted to his own rebellion against his "rightful
masters, the American people." He didn't confine himself
to usurping Congress's powers, defying the Supreme Court,
and making war on the South: he waged war against the
freedom of the people of the North as well. He made
"saving the Union" a holy cause from which there was no
appeal.
At Gettysburg Lincoln said that the "new nation" had
been "dedicated to the proposition" that "all men are
created equal." But the Declaration actually *invoked*
that proposition by way of self-justification; it hadn't
*dedicated* the "nation" to it. Lincoln also neglected
to mention "the consent of the governed," a Jeffersonian
principle that confronted him awkwardly as he attempted
to impose his will on the South.
European observers were shocked not only by the
brutality of the Union army in the South, but by
Lincoln's reign of terror in the North. His most recent
biographer, David Donald, deems Lincoln's presidency the
worst period for civil liberties in American history. And
so it was. Even the crackdowns of Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt during the two world wars were mild by
comparison. (For a good summary of Lincoln's crimes
against the Constitution and foreign reaction to them,
see WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS by Charles Adams,
published by Rowman & Littlefield.)
To finance his war, Lincoln imposed an income tax,
later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and
fiat money in the form of depreciating greenbacks, which
all were forced to accept as legal tender; the greenbacks
too were later ruled unconstitutional by the Court, in an
opinion written by Chief Justice Salmon Chase -- who had
been Lincoln's secretary of the Treasury when the
greenbacks were issued! For Lincoln, the sacred end of
"preserving the Union" justified nearly every means.
Even so, the war dragged on, becoming so unpopular,
in spite of all his efforts to suppress dissent, that
Lincoln expected to lose the 1864 election. Only the
morale-boosting conquest of Atlanta saved him from
defeat.
Republican government depends on the freedom of the
people and their elected representatives to discuss the
vital practical questions before them; and no question
can be more vital than the choice between war and peace.
Without this freedom, public opinion becomes uninformed
and stultified, and "the consent of the governed" becomes
meaningless.
So, in the 1864 election, Lincoln had certain
advantages he hadn't had in 1860. He no longer needed to
fear the opposition of the Southern voters; and he had
crippled opposition in the North.
Lincoln's views on racial equality have also been
astonishingly misrepresented. It's well known that he
expressed opinions on race that are now repugnant to most
people, but he went beyond thinking that blacks were
naturally inferior to whites. His words in debate with
Stephen Douglas in 1858 are occasionally quoted:
I will say then that I am not, nor ever
have been, in favor of bringing about in any
way 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.
But this was not all. He underlined the point by
adding: "I am not in favor of Negro citizenship."
Addressing the question whether individual states had the
constitutional power to confer citizenship on the Negro,
he said: "If the state of Illinois had that power I
should be opposed to the exercise of it."
Lincoln's apologists try to minimize these words as
mere concessions to the prejudices of his age. But they
represented his own convictions, and he put them with a
force we should not ignore. He went out of his way to say
them when he had no need to, repeating the same
sentiments in several ways. He also backed them up with
action.
Beginning with his 1852 eulogy of Henry Clay,
Lincoln's hero and an apostle of both emancipation and
colonization, Lincoln had spoken openly of the
troublesome presence of the free Negroes." In 1854,
speaking of the Kansas-Nebraska act, Lincoln had asked
what should be done with black slaves:
Free them, and make them politically and
socially our equals? My own feelings will not
admit of this; and if mine would, we well know
that those of the great mass of white people
will not. Whether this feeling accords with
justice and sound judgment is not the sole
question, if indeed it is any part of it. A
universal feeling, whether well- or ill-
founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We
cannot, then, make them equals.
He suggested a policy of "gradual emancipation," ideally
followed by colonization elsewhere: "My first impulse
would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia
-- to their own native land." That was to be a consistent
double purpose of his political life: to oppose both
slavery *and* Negro citizenship.
Speaking on the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Lincoln
said: "There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly
all white people to the idea of an indiscriminate
amalgamation of the white and black races." He protested
that counterfeit logic which concludes that,
because I do not want a black woman for a
*slave* I must necessarily want her for a
*wife.* I need not have her for either; I can
just leave her alone. In some respects she
certainly is not my equal; but in her natural
right to eat the bread she earns with her own
hands without asking leave of anyone else, she
is my equal, and the equal of all others.
But he added that "the separation of the races is the
only perfect preventive of amalgamation." He proposed "to
transfer the African to his native clime. In 1860 he
would approvingly quote Jefferson on the necessity of
"emancipation," followed by "deportation."
As president, Lincoln supported colonization
movements that would encourage free Negroes to move to
Africa or Latin America. In modern language, he favored
grand apartheid, with the races separate but equal: in
fact he believed that the black man could become the
white man's equal *only* through separation. In this
belief the author of the Gettysburg Address joins hands
with Louis Farrakhan.
Lincoln's champions hate to see him as a
segregationist, but that's exactly what he was. In 1862
he became the first president to welcome a group of free
Negroes to the White House, but he did so for the purpose
of giving them a stern lecture on the necessity of their
leaving the United States:
You and we are different races. We have
between us a broader difference than exists
between almost any other two races. Whether it
is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this
physical difference is a great disadvantage to
us both, as I think your race suffer very
greatly, many of them by living among us,
while ours suffer from your presence.... It is
better for us both, therefore, to be
separated.
This was a constant theme of Lincoln's presidency:
that freed slaves would need a new home, *outside* the
United States. In his December 1861 state of the Union
message he spoke of "the acquiring of territory" and "the
appropriation of money" for "the plan of colonization."
In 1862 he addressed representatives of the nonseceding
border states on gradual emancipation, mentioning that
there was "room in South America for colonization." In
September he wrote a preliminary draft of the
Emancipation Proclamation which included a pledge that
"the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with
their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with
the previously obtained consent of the governments
existing there, will be continued."
Finally, to confirm the seriousness of his purpose,
Lincoln urged in his December 1862 state of the Union
message that Congress adopt a *constitutional amendment*
authorizing colonization: "Congress may appropriate
money, and otherwise provide, for colonizing free colored
persons, with their own consent, at any place or places
without the United States." He added: "I cannot make it
better known than it already is, that I strongly favor
colonization." This proposed amendment is remarkable in
two respects. First, it specifies that such colonization
must be directed *outside* the United States. Second, it
quaintly assumes that Congress would need constitutional
authority to take colonization measures; today, of
course, Congress and presidents don't bother seeking such
authority for *anything* they may care to do. Lincoln
still shared a few old scruples about the limits of
federal power.
Lincoln's enthusiasm for colonization, also called
"deportation," failed to gain adherents, and after the
amendment failed he dropped the subject.
In retrospect, colonization may seem a harebrained
scheme, and it embarrasses Lincoln's modern admirers. But
it was close to his heart, and it was no passing fancy or
hobby: it was integral to his thinking and policy on the
subject of race. There is no room for doubt that he was a
convinced segregationist. Nor did he think in the least
that this meant that he was anti-Negro; on the contrary,
he believed total separation was necessary for the good
of both the white and black races. He realized it would
be hard to achieve, but it was no less his ideal, as well
as his practical goal, for that.
Lincoln can't be understood unless we see that this
was indeed his ideal. It may seem strange that this idol
of liberalism should have viewed racial segregation as
something to aspire to, but the facts are unequivocal.
Abraham Lincoln, the same man who was willing to take
extreme measures to prevent the political separation of
North and South, was also willing to take other ambitious
measures to accomplish the total separation, political
and social, of white and black.
Because he succeeded in the one goal and failed in
the other, the second goal has been forgotten and
airbrushed out of the Lincoln myth, along with his
assaults on civil liberties and his order for the arrest
of the chief justice of the United States. But since
Lincoln is revered not only for his successes but for his
personal character, these facts, which are something more
than incidental details, are essential to any attempt to
see him whole, as the towering but tragic figure he was.
NUGGETS
STRAIGHT THINKIER: Harvard's distinguished philosopher
Willard Van Orman Quine, who specialized in mathematical
logic, has died at 92. His more abstruse work was beyond
my ken, but his witty and invigorating essays, which I
read in grad school, gave logic a charm I didn't know it
could have. And it's not as if this country can afford to
lose another logician. (page 8)
UNPARDONABLE: Orrin Hatch and other bipartisan
Republicans are calling on G.W. Bush to pardon Bill
Clinton -- *before* any indictment is issued. Okay, as
long as wešre allowed to tar and feather him. (page 11)
TIMELY WORDS: Besieged with office-seekers on his arrival
in Washington, Lincoln told his law partner William
Herndon: "This human struggle and scramble for office,
for a way to live without work, will finally test the
strength of our institutions." (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
BRIBE, n. -- An irregular transaction through which the
citizen may get his money's worth of service from the
government.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Stealing an Election (December 12, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/001212.shtml
* How Washington Thinks (December 21, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/001221.shtml
* Memoirs of a Heretic (December 26, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/001226.shtml
* Free Virginia! (December 28, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/001228.shtml
* Money and Morality (January 2, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010102.shtml
* Christ the Culprit? (January 4, 2001, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010104.shtml
And an appendix (exclusive to the electronic edition):
* (December 19, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/001219.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
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