Reposted from the Abbeyville Review
By way of prologue, let me say that all of us like the Lincoln whose face appears on the penny. He is the Lincoln of myth: kindly, humble, a man of sorrows who believes in malice toward none and charity toward all, who simply wants to preserve the Union so that we can all live together as one people.
The Lincoln on the penny, had he lived, would have spared the South the ravages of Reconstruction and ushered in the Era of Good Feeling in 1865. The fact that this mythic Lincoln was killed is surely the ultimate tragedy in a tragic era. Indeed the most that any Southerner could say in behalf of the slayer of that Lincoln was what Sheldon Vanauken reported hearing from an old-fashioned Virginian: “Young Booth, sir, acting out of the best of motives, made a tragic blunder.”
But the Lincoln on the penny, the mythic Lincoln, did not exist. Instead a very real man, a political absolutist with enormous human weaknesses, for a time held the destiny of the nation in his oversized palm. So why do we dislike this Lincoln so much? There are many reasons, and here, just for starters, are three good ones:
I. Lincoln was the inventor of a new concept of “Union,” one that
implied a strong centralized government and an “imperial presidency.”
a Union that now dominates virtually every important aspect of our
corporate life as Americans.
This Union did not come about accidentally. Lincoln created it out of
his own imagination and then invented a rhetoric to justify it, a
grammar that has been used ever since that time. You must realize that
before the War Between the States, virtually all Americans believed
that the nation was a loosely connected alliance of political states,
each with a sovereign will of its own and a right to resist the power of
central government, which, since the beginning of the Republic, was
regarded as the ultimate enemy.
“Keep it small, keep it diversified” was the view of federal
authority held by the Founding Fathers; but Lincoln believed—and said
in the Gettysburg Address—that the Founding Fathers were wrong, that
they had imperfectly conceived the nation at the outset and that he,
Abraham Lincoln, had a responsibility to refound it, to bring about a
“new birth.” What he meant by this “new birth” was the emergence of a
strong, centralized government which had the will and the power to
impose a certain conformity on its membership.
If you want to know where the idea of Big Government came from in this country, it came from Lincoln.
In addition to a strong central government, the Founding Fathers also
feared a chief executive who exercised absolute power. The tyrant was
the ultimate villain in an increasingly diversified political order, and
we must remember that, as a matter of strategy, the Declaration of
Independence denounced the sins of George III rather than those of his
duly elected Parliament despite the fact that the poor king was
considerably less responsible than the people’s representatives.
Indeed, it was only later, in 1861, that Abraham Lincoln finally became
the imperial ruler that Thomas Jefferson denounced in the body of the
Declaration.
It is also important to recall that the Constitution in Article I
invests Congress with the authority “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties,
Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common
Defence…”; “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and
make Rules concerning Capture on Land and Water”; “To raise and support
Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer
Term than two Years”; “To provide and maintain a Navy”; “To provide for
calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress
Insurrections and repel Invasions”; “To provide for organizing, arming,
and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as
may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the
States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority
of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by
Congress;” etc.
All these responsibilities are conveyed to Congress in Section 8,
with a catch-all clause enabling legislators to pass laws implementing
“the foregoing Powers.” Then in Section 9, certain prohibitions are
outlined which clearly qualify the powers of Congress. These include a
prohibition against the suspension of habeas corpus, except in
“Cases of Rebellion or Invasion” and against withdrawal of funds from
the Treasury except “in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”
These qualifications, included in that portion of the Constitution
dealing with Congress, are careful limitations imposed on the most
powerful of the three branches by a cautious band of Framers. In effect
they told Congress not only what they and only they could do, but they
also said what they (and by implication everyone else) could not do. The
caution which they here exercised becomes downright fastidiousness
when they get to Article II, which specifies the duties of the
President. He is, to be sure, defined as “Commander in Chief of the Army
and Navy, and of the Militia of the several States,” but only after Congress has called them up, as permitted in Article 1. After
this quasi-military role, the President has precious little left to his
disposal. He can require reports from members of the Executive Branch,
he can grant pardons, he can make treaties which are valid only if
two-thirds of the Senate agree, and he can make various appointments,
again with the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.”
And that’s really about it. One reading of the Constitution reveals
the degree to which the Framers wished to restrict the powers of the
presidency to a ceremonial minimum. Yet Abraham Lincoln, in his attempts
to refound the Republic, completely transformed the nature of his
office, appropriating to it not only powers specifically and
exclusively granted to Congress but also some powers forbidden to any
branch of the federal government.
First, he called up state militias on his own authority, despite the
fact that no one had fired a shot or indeed intended to. To cloak these
actions, he warned of an impending invasion that the South had no
intention of launching and summarily began the War, despite the fact
that Congress had no immediate intention of exercising its exclusive
authority in this area. Lincoln also authorized recruitment of troops
and the expenditure of millions of dollars—all power specifically
delegated to Congress. In order to take such action with impunity he had
to silence those voices who spoke in favor of the Constitution; so he
suspended the right of habeas corpus and imprisoned hordes of his political enemies—according to several authorities almost 40,000 people. These political prisoners were not charged. They were not tried. They were simply incarcerated and held incommunicado. In some instances their closest family members did not know if they were alive or dead until the end of the War.
Among these, incidentally, were a number of newspaper editors,
particularly those from such states as Kentucky and Maryland, where
Southern sentiment ran high. In addition to the imprisonment of these
outspoken critics, their presses were wrecked and their places of
business destroyed. All in all, over 300 newspapers and journals were
shut down by executive order. In an age when casual criticism of the
press by the White House is often regarded as a threat to the First
Amendment, it is odd that Lincoln still receives such ritual respect. No
president in history held freedom of speech or freedom of the press in
greater contempt.
In addition to these more obvious violations of Constitutional rights
and prohibitions, Lincoln also created a state (West Virginia),
imported foreign mercenaries to fight against people he still insisted
were Americans, confiscated private property without due process,
printed paper money, and even dispersed assembled legislatures like some
American Cromwell. In all these things he acted as no other president
of the United States had ever acted before or has acted since.
II. Lincoln’s skillful use of egalitarian rhetoric has given
Northern and New South historians the argument that the War Between the
States was fought solely over the question of slavery rather than over a
number of interrelated issues, none of which in itself could have led
to Secession and War.
In a sense the thing that contemporary Southerners most resent about
Lincoln is the use that has been made of him by recent historians who
want to find in the Antebellum South and the tragic events of the War a
moral exemplum for the religion of equality. To be honest, Lincoln
himself did not go nearly so far, though in his debates with Douglas and
in the Emancipation Proclamation he clearly took the high moral ground
in an effort to win pragmatic political advantage.
Lincoln himself was not an Abolitionist nor was he particularly
sympathetic with black freedmen. He came from a state whose racist laws
discouraged blacks from crossing its borders. If Illinois was opposed
to the spread of slavery it was because the state’s citizens were
opposed to the spread of blacks. This much is a matter of public record.
In addition Abraham Lincoln probably objected to the peculiar
institution on philosophical grounds, as had Thomas Jefferson. On the
other hand, both Jefferson and Lincoln were white supremacists of
sorts, and the latter told ex-slaves in his last year as President that
there was no place in America for free blacks, that repatriation in
Africa was the only solution to the dilemma which emancipation would
soon pose for both races.
Also, the Emancipation Proclamation was not, as most contemporary
Americans now believe, a document which abolished slavery with the
stroke of a pen. It did not, as a matter of policy, abolish slavery at all in
those places under Lincoln’s rule—whether in the five Union states
which still permitted the institution or in Southern territory held by
Union forces. It abolished slavery only in Confederate territory, and
the Proclamation, by its own terms, did not go into effect if the
Southern states chose to return to the fold before the effective date.
Of course Lincoln knew that the seceding states would not respond to
such a proposal; but by issuing the Proclamation after the Battle of
Sharpsburg he was able to send a message to Southern slaves who might be
willing to rise against households without males to defend them. Then,
too, Lincoln was able thereafter to say that the North was fighting to
abolish slavery, a goal he had specifically disavowed well into the
first year of the War.
Now, of course, historians of a certain stripe are able to say that
this was the true cause of the North from the beginning, forgetting the
myriad considerations that preoccupied nineteenth-century Americans,
including tariffs, the rise of a rapacious industrial economy, and the
political principles of the day, which included a devotion to state more
than nation and a fierce commitment to the ideal of self-determination.
Too many modern commentators want to ignore everything in this case
but the moral imperative of the Abolitionist, content for this one time
in history to say that principles were more important than economics.
Thus are Southerners forever branded as oppressors, while Union slaves
are swept under the convenient rug of historical oblivion.
Because Lincoln was a formidable rhetorician (the greatest of his
age) and because it is a twentieth-century failing that we believe the
past is inferior to the present, the statute of limitations will never
run out on our “crimes.” Fifty years after Massachusetts abolished
slavery it was shaking an accusatory finger at Mississippi and Alabama.
Fifty years after slavery had been abolished in these Southern states,
Mississippians and Alabamians were still being called to account by the
high caste Brahmins of Boston. And now that 120 years have passed, it is
the politically prosperous grandsons of Irish immigrants who make the
charges, descendants of the same brutal people who murdered literally
hundreds of blacks in the draft riots of 1863.
It is Abraham Lincoln who invented this rhetoric; and we must either
expose it for what it is or else continue to suffer the kind of abuse
that manifests itself not only in anti-Southern cliches and stereotypes,
but also in political exploitation and in such discriminatory
legislation as the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and gratuitous renewal in
1984. Those laws are bad not so much because of their severe provisions
but because they assume that the integrated South deserves punitive
treatment while the still-segregated North does not. And for that kind
of moral abuse we can thank Abraham Lincoln.
III. Lincoln was responsible for the War Between the States, a
conflict in which more than 600,000 Americans were killed for no good
purpose.
The truth of this statement should be obvious to a contemporary
society preoccupied with the idea of peaceful coexistence and obsessed
with a word like “negotiation.” The current President of the United
States is routinely criticized for taking no steps during his first term
to meet with his counterpart in the Soviet Union. We are told that
military confrontation is wicked, that disputes between conflicting
political states should be solved through diplomatic means, that
Concession is the child of Wisdom.
In 1861 Jefferson Davis made it quite clear in his resignation from
the Senate and again in his inaugural address that all the Confederate
States wanted was to be allowed to leave in peace. He stated this point
explicitly and after so doing he took no action that would have
indicated otherwise to the Union or to its president. No troops were
called up. No extraordinary military appropriations requested. No
belligerent rhetoric from Davis’ office or from his Cabinet. The South
feared invasion, but never threatened it—not even implicitly.
Why, then, did Lincoln call for 75,000 troops “to defend the Union”?
Why did he begin immediate preparations for war? Why did he insist on
dispatching troops to Fort Sumter when a majority of his Cabinet advised
against such a rash move and when he knew that South Carolina and the
Confederacy believed the fortress to be legally and Constitutionally
theirs?
While Lincoln’s dispatch of troops left South Carolinians no choice
but to defend their soil against an invader, Lincoln had a number of
options open to him other than military action. For example, he might
first have brought the whole matter of secession before the Supreme
Court, seeking some legal right to Fort Sumter and indeed to the entire
Confederacy. But then there is good reason to believe the Court would
have ruled that Southerners had every legal justification to leave the
Union. Then war would have been illegal and Lincoln’s incipient dream of
a “refounding” would have gone a’glimmering.
A second choice would have been to refrain from ordering troops to
relieve Fort Sumter and instead to have dispatched a diplomatic team to
Montgomery, or better yet, gone himself for a “summit” with Davis. Given
Lincoln’s prowess in debate, his love of discourse, his persistent
appeals to “reason,” such a course of action would have seemed not only
prudent but in keeping with the new president’s character—decidedly
Lincolnian.
Yet apparently such an idea never occurred to the man who had been so
eager as a young man to engage in amateur forensics and still later to
meet Stephen Douglas in public debate. Historians can give credible
reasons why Lincoln did not take his case to the High Court, but their
voices trail off in weak apology when they take up the question of
diplomatic negotiations. It all boils down to the supposition that, for
his own reasons, Abraham Lincoln felt the situation was beyond the hope
of dialogue—though no one can say exactly why he believed such a
proposition.
Lincoln’s third choice—-the most likely of all—was simply to do
nothing, to wait until the South made some overt move and then to react
accordingly. For the sake of more than 600,000 killed on the field of
battle, one wishes that he had been just a little more circumspect, a
little less sure of his own ability to read the minds of his opponents.
Wait a month and see. Then another month. Then another. Surely the
South would not have marched against the Union. Few believe that Davis
would take such a drastic step. And all those young men would have grown
old and wise—perhaps so wise that they would have found a way to
reconcile their differences and to reestablish a Union they were born
under. But, as I’ve already said, Lincoln did not approve of that Union.
He wanted to found a new one. And the only way to accomplish such an
end was to risk war.
Perhaps it never occurred to him that 600,000 men would die. Perhaps
he was certain that the conflict would be brief and benign, a skirmish
or two on the outskirts of Washington, over in the twinkling of an eye,
with a few Union dead, a few Confederate dead, and everyone embracing
after the show. But if that is what he believed, such an opinion
constituted an inordinate pride in his own prescience, one that we can
only forgive by a supreme act of charity (provided, of course, that our
forgiveness is solicited).
I will only add that despite his often quoted rhetoric of
reconciliation, he instituted a policy of total war—the first in our
history—and saw to it that his troops burned homes, destroyed crops, and
confiscated property—all to make certain that civilians suffered the
cruelest deprivations. He also refused to send needed medical supplies
to the South, even when that refusal meant depriving Union soldiers of
medicines needed to recover from their wounds. And finally, in the last
year of the War, when Davis sent emissaries to negotiate a peace on
Lincoln’s own terms, he ordered them out of Washington that the War
might continue and the Republicans win re-election. As a result, 100,000
more troops were killed, North and South.
Because of Lincoln’s policies the cemeteries of the nation were sown
with 600,000 premature bodies, long turned to dust now, but in their
time just as open to the promise of life as any young draft dodger of
the 1960s. That they fought one another, willing to risk all for their
countries, is something that Lincoln counted on. Indeed you might say he
staked his political future on their sacred honor, and in so doing
impressed his face forever on the American penny.
Sober, reflective, a little sad as you hold him in your upturned
palm, he looks perpetually rightward, gazing out of the round perimeter
of his copper world at an extra dimension of existence—a visionary even
now. And he is as ubiquitous as the common housefly. If you toss him in
a fountain or down a well he turns up in your pocket again, after the
filling station attendant has added on the federal tax and taken your
twenty-dollar bill.
He can purchase nothing now, because his own grandiose dreams of
Union have finally rendered him impotent. Once five of him would buy a
candy bar or a coke. Now it would take a couple of squads. Tomorrow a
regiment. Yet in a way he is indispensable to us as a reminder that in
the ruthless expansion of government our lives are diminished with each
new acquisition of power, with each digit of inflation, however small;
and that such a diminution is infinite; that today, 120 years after his
death, there is no conceivable end to the enormity of government and the
consequent paucity of our individual lives.
And this is why we don’t like Abraham Lincoln.
