Lincoln and Southern Secession

Here is a review of a book written by a conservative, reviewed by a Leftist. I agree with the reviewer's conclusions. Maybe it will provoke some discussion.

Amen.

 

All well and good, but the South is stuck with their claim slaves were nothing more than property.

Well, we prohibit ownership and possession of all sorts of property, from nuclear weapons to marijuana. Can you imagine seceding because the Feds say you can't have dope?

Was secession allowed? No, the Supremacy Clause is the unmistable evidence the Founding Fathers wanted a federal union to replace voluntary confederation.

 

To free the slaves, a very good thing, and have no real follow-up on what do afterwards, a very bad thing, was led this country to where it is now.

 

What makes the guy that reviewed the book a leftist?

 

Who was the greatest modern statesman? Washington wasn’t democratic enough (among other things, he harshly condemned Shays’ Rebellion) or intelligent enough. Jefferson certainly was both but was perhaps a little too cool and rational to inspire supreme devotion. Gladstone was a giant but in a placid age. Churchill saved his country but didn’t have much sympathy for the lesser breeds. After reading Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom,” along with his earlier Crisis of the House Divided (1959), I’m convinced it was Lincoln. No one else has borne so painful and important a burden, virtually alone, with so much humility, humor, and fortitude. Perhaps other political leaders have displayed as much wisdom or energy. But only Lincoln attained spiritual grandeur.

How, in the hell, is George Washington considered to have been president in the "Modern" era? Same with Lincoln.....

 

Oh, there was a follow up: Radical Reconstruction. I doubt even it would have gone far enough. They should have remade the borders of every southern state and renamed for Union generals.

 

Lincoln had intelligence that was off the charts. And unbelievable political instincts.

And he had two other advantages that are less well known. Under the Myers Briggs personality criteria, Lincoln would have been classified as an "INTP", which is the most logical of the 16 different personality types. He also suffered from depression his entire adult life. It is said that the only benefit coming from depression can be the ability to see things clearly, exactly as they are, without emotion clouding one's judgment. Depressed people can be very perceptive.

Because of these things, Lincoln was neither an optimist or a pessimist. He was the ultimate "realist". And he had the ability to see the big picture in any situation. He didn't see the Civil War (or anything else) from up close; he was able to see all of the moving parts and how they interacted, coolly and unemotionally, from 30,000 feet above. This allowed him manage the war efficiently. When combined with his total lack of ego and single-minded dedication to keeping the union together, it's not surprising he was able to do great things.

 

Err ... read anything at all that he has written about politics. He describes himself as a 'gradualist radical'. By the way, I don't use 'Left' or 'Right' as terms of insult (or praise). They're just descriptions (crude, encompassing all sorts of tendencies and currents within each) to describe American politics in the early 21st Century.

There are many good thinkers on the Left, and Scialabba is among those at the top of the list, in my books. Always a pleasure to read, an independent mind, not trapped in academia, never given to cant. Read his book What Are Intellectuals Good For? and you'll see what I mean. Here's a customer review of it:

 

If I had to choose one person to represent humanity in a galactic congress of intelligent creatures, it would be Abraham Lincoln, for many reasons. The phrase 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will' applied to him.

One of the profound experiences of my life was standing in front of that great, brooding statue of him in Washington DC. Dear God we need someone like him now!

 

It's more basic than that. It's a matter of self-determination, the most basic of all rights that Lincoln did not respect. The South didn't want to be a part of the Union. It was their right to secede, even if they were morally corrupt due to slavery. I think Lincoln had a lot of good qualities, but he thought preserving the union was more important than the most basic of all rights, and the lives of many Americans. He was frankly wrong and America paid a high price. Still paying the price by being a country that should not be one country.

Lincoln explicitly did not fight the civil war to free the slaves. While he did hate slavery, he abolished it primarily to help secure victory.

 

I suppose 'modern' for many people means the time they live in now, or when TV was invented, or the automobile, but in the scholarly world (i.e.among people with some background in the humanities, for whom Scialabba is writing) , 'the modern era' began roughly at the end of the 17th Century -- the beginning of the 'Age of Reason'.

As a rough guide ... go back in time a few centuries -- say to 1500 -- and almost any educated person you met in Europe (this whole concept applies only to Europe and its offshoots) did all his thinking within the confines of Christianity and the Ancients. His references would be to the ancient Greeks, and the great Christian philosophers like St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, or to the Bible. When the English radicals took on the monarchy in 1642, they based their thinking and justifications for revolution on the Bible -- as Macaulay said, "they humbled themselves in the dust before their God, the better to set their foot on the neck of their King".

Now go forward a few decades, and examine the Englishmen in North America, breaking loose from the Mother Country and setting up a new government. They were rationalists -- not atheists (most of them) -- but their arguments were grounded in reason -- "Nature and Nature's God". Go to Continental Europe at the same time and you'll find the same thing. You can read Voltaire, or Jefferson, or Burke and you're reading people with whom you could have a conversation today. But you would have a hard time having a similar conversation with Aquinas.

You can overdo the 'modernity' thing. There are no hard boundaries in the history of thought. There were 'modern'-style thinkers in an earlier age -- the ancient Greeks were rationalists, so was Roger Bacon, Machiavelli, and others. But we usually date 'modernity' from about three centuries ago. That's what Scialabba meant. Further explication here.

 

This is true in a narrow, technical sense, and one of Lincoln's most quoted sentences is to this effect. But Lincoln knew that 'victory' for the Union meant the eventual end of slavery. Had he convinced, or intimidated, the South into not seceding in the first place, that would still have been true, and the Southern slavocracy knew it, which is why they seceded.

I also believe that Lincoln had a transcendent purpose, above and beyond doing away with slavery. He was actually a profound thinker, in my opinion.He understood the world-historic significance of the United States, a democratic Republic in a world hostile to such things, but a democratic Republic which had the potential to lead the world towards representative government. (He was not alone in that ... you see this same wish expressed by several of the Founding Fathers, even though they were not Jacobins and had no wish to carry their principles into other countries on the point of a bayonet.)

In addition to his Inaugural Addresses, we need to look at the Gettysburg Address. You can never have enough Lincoln, so here it is:

The central proposition of America: that all men are created equal. And the significance of the Civil War: whether any nation -- not just the United States -- dedicated to this proposition could actually endure.

It's still an open question.

 

Yes, it is well-spoken propaganda. I'm not sure what it is about two separate countries that would mean there would no longer be any such thing as a democratic republic. Maybe a slippery slope? And ironically I'd say keeping the South as a part of America probably detracted from the ideal of being a beacon of freedom, given how they opposed progressive social change for at least another hundred years, and an argument can be made for today as well. Lincoln abolished slavery largely to keep Europe out of the war, who had already abolished slavery.

America really hasn't been some wonderful thing for the rest of the world. The main time I can think of that we could be called the good guys was in WWII, but otherwise we're just a bully nation throwing weight around for influence, killing millions of foreigners like insects and crying over losing thousands of ours. I appreciate the freedoms we have, though.

 

Finally, a truthful history lesson.

Let me state once again that freeing the slaves, while a good thing, NOT having a viable plan, or any plan, for dealing with their freedom, wasn't.

 

A slippery slope, yes. If any state or group of states could simply secede, there may well have been a succession of secessions over the years, since the economic interests of the various parts of a geographically-large continental power like the US are by no means identical. Apologists for the slavocracy sometimes pretend that the South seceded because of Northern-imposed tarrifs on English-made plows, which is nonsense, but has some plausibility.

As I've said before, in a world of nice guys, it would be wonderful to have a thousand little countries of five million people each. But in a world that brought us Mr Hitler and Mr Stalin, I'm glad that the democracies had one great, wealthy, uninvadable Big Brother over the water.

It's perhaps worth quoting some Churchill here, from his diary, describing his feelings when he learned about Pearl Harbor
“I knew the United States now was in the war up to the neck. So we have won after all.” He wrote that there were some “silly people here in England [not just in Germany or in enemy countries] who, discounted the force of the United States. Some said the Americans were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They couldn’t stand the bloodletting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections, these people were saying, would paralyze the American war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now,” these people said, “we would see the weakness of this numerous, remote, wealthy, and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey [the British Foreign Minister] had made to me more than 30 years before ... that the United States is like ‘a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate.'"

As for the American role after WWII. First, we kept Mr Stalin bottled up. Whether that could have been done in some or way, or needed to be done at all .... I don't know. The late Gore Vidal, who thought we provoked Stalin into communizing Eastern Europe, seems naive to me.

However, I do believe we badly misjudged the anti-colonial revolutions, especially but not only those led by nominal Communists. I think we threw away a huge credit we had, as the only non- (or, to be fair, not-too-) colonial power. I think we could have made Titos out of Mao and Ho, probably brought the Iranians along into modernity, helped the 26th of July Movement in Cuba make it into another Uruguay ... maybe even have done the same in Chile and Guatemala. ... no doubt self-interest -- Dulles on the board of United Fruit, which didn't want to give an inch in Guatemala, the autonomous interests of the military-industrial complex warned about by Eisenhower -- played a big role in determining our foreign policy.

But I could be wrong.

Anyway after the US walked away from world responsibility in the aftermath of World War I, and got Hitler as a result, not many here wanted to take that chance again. Well, lots of Republicans did -- the 'isolationists' -- but our Democratic president didn't, and I note that no Democrat since then, not Carter, not Clinton, not Obama, has fundamentally changed our foreign policy. So the guilt, or misjudgements, are bi-partisan.

I thought and still think that Trump would be a disaster. But one of the two or three wee bits of silver peeking out of that dark cloud was the fact that he wasn't a captive of the Washington foreign policy establishment, and he did hint at maybe taking a new approach to foreign policy, rather than continuing to be the world's policeman. But I have no idea what his foreign policy is now, or if there any guiding principles to it at all.

It seems to me that now is a good time for liberals and conservatives to actually have a conversation about what our foreign policy should be -- putting aside Mr Trump and whatever relationship he has with the Russians. But I'm not holding my breath on that one.

 

"Forty acres and a mule" was the slogan for a while. The link, to the Wiki article by the same title, has a discussion of similar plans at the time. The section on the 'Southern Homesteading Act' is particularly interesting. But you're absolutely right. I think Lincoln would have made a huge effort to resolve this, if that idiot hadn't murdered him.

What was needed was a radical solution: not only (good) land for Blacks, but irony of ironies.... secession for them (the South could hardly object). That is, a Black-ruled Republic on former American soil, aided in its first years by the United States, especially in building schools and training teachers, and under its military protection. That would have meant, ideally, buying out some large areas in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas, where the land was not state-owned already, with serious financial inducements for the whites to leave and Blacks from elsewhere to move in. I'm sure a lot of Southern whites would have objected, but after getting 600 000 people killed, their objections shouldn't have carried much moral weight. Mass population movements under duress are not pretty, but ... the mass population movement under duress of Africans to the Americas wasn't pretty either, so we couldn't say we weren't used to it.

[At this point, cue someone to start sneering, 'Ha, look what happened when we let them rule themselves in Africa, look at Detroit and South Chicago ...' .... but the point is, people want to be ruled by other people that look like them. So let them.]

 

Sorry, but that's a false conclusion. If you join a club and sign a paper saying you have to abide by the rules of the club that doesn't mean you have to be a club member for life. The Supremacy Clause only means that all members states have to abide by the Constitution. It doesn't mean they can't secede. If the CSA had won, just like Americans winning the Revolution, there'd be no question about the legality of secession. It was only after Appomattox that the illegality of secession was confirmed.

Add to this, Lincoln clearly invaded the South not to stop slavery but to preserve the Union at a cost of 2% of the US population.

 

You are correct that there is now no question about the legality of secession, just as there is now no question about owning slaves in the United States.

The folks who rejected the United States Constitution and proclaimed their right to own slaves attacked the United States and killed United States citizens, lost.

(See The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States.)

After United States forces at Fort Sumter were attacked, the United States responded with the primary goal of preserving the United States. The resolve to end slavery in the United States became an imperative for the United States during the war to preserve the United States.

 

The OP quotes the whole, long review, and I can understand it if some people didn't read the whole thing, just skimmed over it. Let me just quote the last paragraphs, with the key sentences in bold for those really in a hurry, which are the essence of it:

 

Excellent post. I'm home sick for a few days so I'll give this a read.

 

You would probably like Scialabba's other writings, whatever your politics. He's basically a book reviewer, not just of 'political' books. He could easily have been an academic, but wasn't. (He's retired now.) I like the guy because he's not afraid to criticize his 'own' side. But he's not a middle-of-the-roader, just someone who thinks for himself.

 

Are you claiming that the CSA killed US citizens at Fort Sumter?

 

As you should be be aware, the attack upon US forces at Fort Sumter did not occasion loss of life. Hundreds of thousands of citizens loyal to the United States - as well as hundreds of thousands fighting against the United States - were killed in the war that began with the attack upon Fort Sumter.

 

Dude, there would have been no war if Lincoln didn't invade the South.

Look at this map and tell me how the South was attacking the North.

 

We moved Indians en masse so forcibly moving the blacks wouldn't have been a foreign concept.. But wasn't Liberia setup for their return to Africa?