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Harry
Jaffa says Jack Kemp and I have been conducting an “uncivil
war” over Abraham Lincoln’s character. Well, for my part, I deny it.
Kemp called me one of the current “assassins of Lincoln’s
character,” which I thought was a little rabid, inasmuch as I had given
Lincoln praise as well as criticism in the speech Kemp referred to (without having
heard or read it, naturally). Jaffa doesn’t say how I was
“uncivil” in defending myself by quoting Lincoln. I don’t
consider it character assassination to distinguish the real Lincoln from the Mythic
Lincoln.
But before I get into details, let me go right
to the real point. In the book I’m now writing about Lincoln, I argue for the
right of secession. And I also argue that if there is a right of secession, it follows
that Lincoln had no authority to suppress secession by force.
Jaffa thinks that he and Lincoln have, between
them, demolished the case for secession. Far from it. To make their case, both of
them have had to misread the American founding documents, especially the
Declaration of Independence.
What, exactly, did the
Declaration of Independence declare to be independent? Thirteen states —
“free and independent states.” Now in 1776 and long afterward, a
state was by definition free, independent, and sovereign. If it formed a
confederacy with other states, it could withdraw — secede — reassert
its independence — at any time, because a confederacy was, again by
definition, a voluntary association of sovereigns. And the Declaration said nothing
about a “Union,” or as Lincoln later put it, “a new nation.”
In order to get around these inconvenient
facts, Lincoln said falsely that the Union was older than the
Constitution, older
even than the states. How could a union of things be older than the very things it
was a union of? Isn’t that a bit like saying that a marriage is older than
either spouse?
Well, said Lincoln, the Union had been formed
while the future states were still colonies — then they declared their
independence of Britain — but not of each other, mind you — then the
Union was “further matured” in the
Articles of Confederation — then it was matured still further in the Constitution;
but at every stage, the states had had no existence outside the Union, so the Union
was indissoluble. At least no state could withdraw without the consent of the rest
of the Union. (This contradicted Lincoln’s own ringing affirmation of the
right of secession during the Mexican War, but never mind. He came up with a fine
and convenient distinction between a “revolutionary” and a
“constitutional” right of secession.)
Oddly enough, the states of 1776 thought they
were states, plural, not provinces of a sovereign “Union.” N.B.: They
did not declare themselves a single “free and independent
state,” which is what Lincoln (followed by Jaffa, of course) in
essence said they were.
Let’s pause briefly on one point here. A
state can secede from a confederation any time it wants to. It needs no
justification beyond its own sovereignty. Lincoln, in denying that the states were
sovereign, was denying that they were really states at all. All the rest is
secondary — whether slavery was good or bad, whether it was endangered,
whether the Southerners were acting like sore losers over the 1860 election, and
so forth.
Now for the
Articles of Confederation. As their name implies, they defined the Union as a
confederation of the states, not as a sovereign power over the member states. In
fact their second article says plainly: “Each state retains its sovereignty,
freedom, and independence,” et cetera. Each state, if I understand these
words correctly, “retains,” among other things, its
“independence.” This would seem to imply that each state already
enjoyed its independence — not only of Britain, but of the other states.
So the Articles of Confederation were a
second Declaration of Independence. Even as the states were still fighting
together to secure their independence of Britain, they asserted their independence
of each other as well! They were loosely united in a confederation, or, as they also
put it, “a firm league of friendship.” But they retained severally their
“sovereignty, freedom, and independence,” which I interpret to mean
their sovereignty, freedom, and independence.
In the
1783 Treaty of Paris, Britain recognized, and listed by name,
the 13 “free, sovereign, and independent states.” Evidently the states
were sticklers for acknowledgment of their separate statehood. They didn’t
settle for recognition of “the United States” in the aggregate.
Note that the Constitution always speaks of the
United States in the plural. There is a reason for that; it isn’t just a quaint
detail of linguistic usage.
Perhaps a Straussian analysis will
demonstrate that the “inner meaning” of these documents flatly
contradicts their ostensible meaning. Meanwhile, we may be pardoned for taking
them literally.
We may also note that President Thomas
Jefferson, chief author of the Declaration, said, when some states talked of
secession, that they should be permitted to go in peace.
The Constitution says nothing about
secession, either way. But it doesn’t equate secession with
“rebellion” or “insurrection,” as Lincoln did. It says the
federal government may aid a state in suppressing “domestic
violence” — if the state requests its help. It doesn’t
suggest that the federal government may invade a state against its will for any
reason.
How could Lincoln be so wrong? Well, he was a
product of a later generation of rising nationalism, typified by Daniel Webster and
Henry Clay, that was out of touch with the Founders and the Framers of the
Constitution. As a matter of fact, the longer I study Lincoln, the more I am
convinced that he was simply ignorant of the greatest body of American political
thought; I seriously doubt that he ever read even
The Federalist Papers. If he did, he never assimilated
their thinking about the problems of “confederation,”
“consolidation,” “usurpation,” and the like. Jefferson
Davis was steeped in these ideas and completely mastered them, as his memoirs
show. Lincoln, however, couldn’t have carried on an intelligent conversation
with Madison, Hamilton, or his hero Jefferson (whose Kentucky Resolutions he also
seems ignorant of).
Jaffa may be surprised to learn that much of
my critique of Lincoln, as I will present it in my book, King Lincoln, is
drawn from the evidence of his own recent book,
A New Birth of Freedom. He doesn’t realize how
damning to Lincoln his own words are. For example, he says Lincoln thought that
“the Union stood in the same relationship to a state as a state to a
county.” Could Lincoln (or Jaffa) really hold such a naive view? The states
were not formed by counties delegating powers to them; the counties had no
sovereignty, but were mere subdivisions of the states. The states were not mere
subdivisions, or inferior parts, of the Union. Lincoln’s simple hierarchical
view of the Union is a far cry from federalism. Again we see Lincoln’s
simplistic nationalist ideology.
Jaffa tries to make Lincoln sound like an
avatar of the Founding Fathers, but about all he took from them was a set of
snippets — “All men are created equal,” “consent of the
governed,” et cetera — from which he wrung inferences they would
have rejected. Jefferson in particular would have disowned Lincoln as a disciple.
Lincoln’s lack of learning was a serious
defect, and it cost all Americans dearly. I’m not just defending the
Confederacy; I think it was foolish to secede when it did, though it was fully
within its rights. The point is that Lincoln’s war deprived all
the states of their ultimate defense against federal tyranny and usurpation. Since
1865 the federal government has had little to fear from the states, and it has
steadily usurped their reserved powers without much opposition and with total
impunity.
To my mind, the most egregious case was the
U.S. Supreme Court’s wholly arbitrary 1973 ruling that the states could not
constitutionally protect unborn children from violent death by abortion. This was
not only morally outrageous, but constitutionally absurd. But by then the states
were helpless. Lincoln made that possible.
When Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to
invade the South after Fort Sumter fell, several governors refused to comply,
calling his military assault on their sister states “illegal,”
“unconstitutional,” and even “revolutionary.” This last
term is significant, because modern liberals who adore Lincoln — James
McPherson, Garry Wills, and George Fletcher, for example — credit him with
achieving a “revolution” in securing federal supremacy over the
states. This amounts to an admission that it was Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln, who
was fighting to “preserve the Constitution.”
Lincoln would never concede this, but he
doesn’t have to: his fans do it for him. They applaud him for helping bring
about the centralized, consolidated, monolithic — or, as they would say,
“progressive” — government the Constitution was designed to
prevent. Not only open leftists but “neoconservatives” adore Lincoln
too.
Jaffa says I remind him of die-hard
Confederates and Jim Crow politicians defenders when I say that Lincoln
“launched a bloody war against the South, violating the Constitution
he’d sworn to uphold.” Well, I can’t help it if I remind Jaffa of
such folks, any more than he can help it if he reminds me of a desperate Trotskyite
defending “true” Communism against Stalin’s
“betrayal.” The carnage of the Civil War (620,000 deaths) was wildly
disproportionate to that of Fort Sumter (one horse was killed).
“Who fired on Fort Sumter?”
Jaffa demands, as if who fired the first shot had anything whatever to do with the
merits of secession. If secession was a right, the South had a just claim on
Sumter; if not, not. Had Lincoln ordered the first shot, no doubt Jaffa would be
justifying it.
But the question of the first shot is of some
interest. Lincoln wanted a war. But as a master of public relations, he didn’t
want to fire the first shot, because he knew that in the minds of ordinary people,
constitutional abstractions carry little weight; all they want to know is,
“Who started it?” Firing the first shot makes you look like the
aggressor in the eyes of the masses. Both sides understood this well enough, but
Davis committed a terrible mistake by letting Lincoln maneuver him into shooting
first. Nobody was killed (except the aforementioned horse), but the North went
mad with war fever.
For more than a month, Lincoln allowed his
subordinates William Seward and Ward Lamon to assure the Confederates that
Sumter would be peacefully evacuated soon, and the Confederates rightly felt
betrayed when Lincoln sent provisions and reinforcements instead. The official
line is that Lincoln didn’t know what Seward and Lamon were doing. But did
he take responsibility for them? No. Did he discharge them for blundering the
country into a gigantic civil war? No. Did he even reprimand them? No. He was
quite happy with the result, as he privately told Orville Browning and Gustavus
Fox.
So much for secession. Now for what Jaffa
calls my “disingenuous” quotations from Lincoln on race. He says I
must know better. He refers to his 1959 book Crisis of the House
Divided, “a book Sobran once knew well, and once spoke of with
great approval. In it I explained that Douglas’s strategy was to identify
Lincoln with abolitionists, the most radical, and radically unpopular, of those in
the antislavery coalition. Lincoln’s disavowal of abolitionism was
absolutely necessary to his political survival in the climate of opinion of Illinois
voters in the 1850’s. To have failed to make such disavowals would simply
have disqualified him as a political leader of the antislavery cause. Sobran knows
this, and his present use of these quotations is simply disingenuous.”
Not exactly. I’ve never read that book
through, let alone praised it. I did praise a couple of Jaffa’s other books, but
he ought at least to be more precise when he’s impeaching my honesty. In
any case, Jaffa makes the same argument elsewhere, all over the place in fact, and
I’ve always found it unconvincing — actually, I find it just a little bit
disingenuous.
Lincoln didn’t just “disavow
abolitionism” — he opposed Negro citizenship in the United States. Was
this just an election-year ploy? Were his various anti-Negro statements, as Jaffa
puts it in his new book, mere “concessions to the prejudices of his
times”? If so, Lincoln certainly went far out of his way to create a false
impression.
Lincoln always supported the fugitive slave
laws, not only verbally, but actively. In 1847, as a lawyer, he represented a
Kentucky slaveowner named Robert Matson who was trying to recover a whole
family of fugitive slaves in Illinois.
In 1852, when he was out of politics and
wasn’t courting votes, he eulogized Henry Clay for his promotion of
colonization — encouraging free Negroes to return to “their native
clime,” Africa. They were Africa’s “lost children,” and
restoring them to their homeland would be a “glorious consummation”
of the misfortune of slavery in America. If it could be accomplished, Lincoln
thought it would be remembered as one of Clay’s greatest services
“to his country and his kind.” Later he would settle for sending them
to a tropical climate in the Western Hemisphere, always provided it was
outside the United States.
Lincoln himself was an active member of the
American Colonization Society. He often referred to the American Negro as
“the African.” In his 1854 speech on the Kansas-Nebraska act he again
urged colonization, on grounds that Negroes could never be the
“equals” of whites in America. In his 1857 speech against the Dred
Scott decision he once more urged colonization as “the only perfect
preventive of [racial] amalgamation,” which filled white people with
“natural disgust”; the solution was “to transfer the African to
his native clime.” He wasn’t seeking office yet. He simply believed
what he said — that “God made us separate.”
During his 1858 debates with Douglas, Lincoln
said nothing more in disparagement of the Negro than he had already said before,
and often. He was slightly more explicit than usual about denying Negro
citizenship; he had no objection to Illinois’s harsh black code, which
forbade free Negroes to vote, hold public office, serve as jurors, or intermarry
with whites. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity. He repeatedly cited the
“physical difference” between the races as sufficient reason why
they could never live together on equal terms.
Far from being a campaign ploy, colonization
was Lincoln’s passion, an idee fixe. He dragged it into speeches and
conversations at odd times, as if it were an uncontrollable obsession. His admiring
secretary John Hay thought he was a bit of a nut on the subject and was relieved
when he finally stopped pursuing it. Usually Lincoln was a realist; but he ignored
those who pointed out that American Negroes were being born faster than they
could possibly be shipped abroad. “The enterprise is a difficult one,”
he conceded; “but ‘where there is a will there is a way,’ and what
colonization needs most is a hearty will.” To him it was not just a vague
hope but a practical project.
As president, even as the Civil War raged,
Lincoln made time to pursue colonization. He founded colonies for free Negroes in
Panama (then still part of Colombia) and Haiti. In his 1862 state of the Union
message he even proposed a constitutional amendment to promote colonization of
“free colored persons” outside the United States. In his negotations
with the border states, he suggested gradual, compensated emancipation,
accompanied by colonization to South America. He pledged to pursue colonization
in his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. He invited a delegation
of free Negroes to the White House, where, citing the “physical
difference” again, he exhorted them to lead their people in a mass migration
to Panama, where they could support themselves by mining coal.
What an inspired idea — converting
American Negroes into Panamanian coal miners! The Negroes must have thought he
was crazy. But Lincoln was quite serious. He couldn’t drop the idea until his
colonies fizzled out in mid1864.
Similarly, Jaffa can’t drop the idea that
Abe Lincoln was on a lifelong “mission” — his word — to
achieve Negro equality in America. If this Lincoln sometimes said and did things
indicating he had other ideas for the Negro, well, that was all part of the Plan! He
could only defeat bigotry by posing as a bigot himself, like an FBI agent
infiltrating the Klan. Honest Abe couldn’t afford to be honest about race
— or perhaps he was only pretending to be dishonest? If so, he
overdid it. He left more evidence than even Harry Jaffa can explain away, and Harry
Jaffa has devoted an arduous lifetime to explaining such things away.
I trust that by now it’s obvious to
everyone but Jaffa that this Lincoln — his cherished crusader for equality
— is a wholly imaginary being. The Mythic Lincoln, sent down to earth from
heaven to vanquish not only slavery but racial prejudice and inequality,
can’t long survive the publication of Lerone Bennett Jr.’s
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Bennett
adduces a thousand facts that show why serious abolitionists derided Lincoln as
“the Slave-Hound from Illinois”; I have cited only a few salient
details.
Jaffa insinuates that anyone who quotes the
same Lincolnian words quoted by the White Citizens’ Councils in days of yore must
agree with the White Citizens’ Councils. He misses the rather obvious point that
Lincoln agreed with the White Citizens’ Councils. Lincoln
was an unabashed racial separatist. Why should liberals be allowed the privilege
of claiming him?
Actually, Lincoln had a double purpose: to
prevent the political separation of North and South, while achieving
the permanent racial separation of whites and blacks. Just as the
“nation” couldn’t go on being half-slave and half-free, neither
could it survive half-white and half-black. Lincoln wanted a unified white America.
This remained his ideal even when he gave up on colonization for the time being.
Lincoln wound up performing two of the most
important acts of American history: waging a civil war and emancipating the
slaves in the seceding states. Both acts were attended by accident, intrigue, and
rich irony; but the Lincoln mythology stubbornly insists that they were part of a
providential mission of which Lincoln was the fully conscious agent. Like Christ,
he was put on earth to play the predestined role of redeemer; he pursued his
redemptive mission single-mindedly all his life; when he didn’t seem to be pursuing it, he was
only, out of necessity, fooling lesser men who were not yet prepared for the full
blaze of his divine truth. He always remained, in his pure essence, uncompromised.
If he sometimes said unseemly things about the very people he had been appointed
to deliver from bondage, he didn’t really mean them. He
couldn’t have meant them. And shame on those who say he did
mean them.
This is the Mythic Lincoln; Harry
Jaffa’s immaculate Lincoln, and the Lincoln of a good many other idolaters
as well. In his prize-laden book Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills
dismisses Lincoln’s belittling remarks about Negroes as
“accommodations to the prejudice of his time” and makes not a single
mention of Lincoln’s desire to ship the dark people abroad.
The real Lincoln was a lesser, more
complicated figure, even a tragic one, embarrassing to the mythology. And he knew
himself: he recognized his dark reflection in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He
would have had enough humor to laugh heartily at his hagiographers.
This is the man I will present in King
Lincoln — not the incarnation of the American Idea, but an oddly
concrete human being who, for some reason, never allowed his children to meet
their grandfather. The Mythic Lincoln is open and universal, with nothing to hide:
the real Lincoln was “secretive,” “reticent,”
“shut-mouthed.” The Mythic Lincoln quoted Scripture and talked like
the King James Bible: the real Lincoln could never bring himself to believe. The
Mythic Lincoln detested cruelty and violence: the real Lincoln accepted 620,000
deaths, to “save” an ill-defined “Union.”
August 2001
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