Inquiry
I appreciate Noah’s post on the Beran article. In fact, the article did amaze me, though perhaps it did not really surprise me, in part because I usually expect sharp and interesting articles at City Journal rather than enbarrassing exercises in political mythology. Noah was right to say that the abuse of history is what agitated me so, and if in my response I was a bit too heated it was because I find this particular kind of distortion of history through anachronism and precursorism to be one of the worst things someone studying history can do. Any approach to American history based in the query, “What made it possible for us to enter WWI or WWII?” strikes me as being as misguided and tendentious as the studies of modern German history that read everything that ever happened since the Reformation as one slow, winding road to Dachau. The idea that we can divvy up national histories into partisans of liberty and forces of oppression is one held over from Whig readings of history, which are wrong not simply because they valorise the “wrong” side, but that they must necessarily do violence to the evidence to glorify their preferred party. History should be an exercise in understanding the past, not mutilating it.
In my response, I did not intend to endorse entirely Beran’s simple Lincoln-as-revolutionary caricature, and indeed wanted to stress that Lincoln was also representative of a system that defended different kind of privilege and used coercion. Lincoln’s policies were arguably very revolutionary in their effects, but he was the inheritor of the political tradition of greater centralism and expressed his political vision in first principles derived from a (rather superficial) reading of foundational American texts. He was in some respects less revolutionary than the European liberals with whom he had much in common politically, because his struggle was, at least in his mind, one of preservation rather than a radical break with an existing political system.
As incredible as this seems to some of us, he and other friends of consolidation believed that they were saving the Republic, no doubt much as Caesar claimed and probably genuinely believed that he was saving the Roman Republic through war and dictatorship. Nonetheless, politically and ideologically Lincoln and his party represented the progressive wing of American politics, which, like its European centralising liberal cousins, worked to sacrifice established, customary rights to rather more abstract conceptions of rights. In so doing, they were emancipating some and subjecting others to stricter control, eliminating the privileges of local notables and other regions while enshrining those of their own.
What I hoped to show in my short response was that Lincoln and his heirs were much more like those whom Beran wished to demonise, partly to keep the record straight and partly to puncture an attempt to whitewash what Lincoln and his party stood for and continued to represent at least into the early twentieth century. The polemical point was to stress that Lincoln and his heirs partook of many of the things that Beran vilifies, or the things he tries to use to vilify his targets.
Obviously, my sympathies do not lie with Lincoln and his successors, but even if they had I would like to think that the article’s offenses against truth and the historical record would still have moved me to repudiate it forcefully.
Lincoln and the Civil War as tremendous “centralizers” is one of the great myths of American history. All that the Civil War settled was that there was no right of secession. Beyond that, what were the immediate centralizing effects? Within a dozen years, the 14th and 15th amendments were dead letters and Southern “local notables” had bloodily reasserted their prerogatives. The centralization that did occur was a centralization of the industrializing economy, which was aided by tariffs and Supreme Ct interpretations of the dormant commerce clause, but both those elements were also features of antebellum governance. To get to a real expansion of central govt functions you have to wait until the Progressive era, and to explain the Progressives as some simple linear consequence of Lincoln, you have to ignore a vast amount of intellectual history, not to mention dealing with an awkward forty year gap.
— rd · Nov 4, 04:34 PM · #
But eliminating the possibility of secession is a huge centralising move. It fundamentally changes the character of the state and sets the precedent for suppressing any attempts at separation. It also seems hard to deny that the Republicans were heirs to the relatively more centralist tradition in American politics, which was my main reference to Lincoln and centralism.
— Daniel Larison · Nov 4, 09:56 PM · #
Eliminating the right to secession is not a “centralising move.” It is a preservational one. No state or organization can exist if constituent parts can unilaterally withdraw from it, especially after long use has developed expectations based upon its continuation. What is conservatism? Isn’t it a preference for the old and tried against the new and untried? Lincoln was right. The radicalism of Taney’s Supreme Court and Davis’ red hots had to be met by the conserving vision of Lincoln. Moreover, as Genovese has noted the Southern view of man quickly partook of a debased Darwinism rather than that of the Founding or of Lincoln with further deformations of the American project that haunt us still. There was nothing conservative about the strain of Southern thought that rejected biblical paternalism for a high grade phrenology.
— jjv · Nov 5, 12:18 AM · #
What I don’t understand about this line of argument is why the slavocrat military aggressors are given a pass. The war was not begun by federal action; the US was attacked. And not just at Sumter, either. A lot of Federal territories in secessionist states were invaded and federal property stolen without the slightest pretense of legality, since the secessionist militias invaded before any legislation on secession had even been passed. Forts Morgan and Gaines in Alabama, the Apalachicola arsenal and Fort Marion in Florida, and Forts Jackson and St. Philip, the Baton Rouge arsenal, and the New Orleans US Marine Hospital in Louisiana were all seized before the respective states had passed secession ordinances.
Neither was Sumter the first exchange of fire. The Federal defenders of Fort Barrancas, Florida, fired their weapons to repel an invasion attempt on January 8, 1861, and on January 9 South Carolina militia opened fire upon the US-flagged ship _Star of the West_attempting to resupply Fort Sumter. They scored one hit but inflicted only minor damage.
An armed response from the federal government to this sort of aggression was entirely predictable, and indeed eagerly sought by the secessionist leaders. They were deliberately trying to get the issue settled by war (a war they mistakenly thought they would win) rather than by a peaceful settlement. They thought war would bring slave states which had failed to secede onto their side.
If the secession question ended up being settled by war instead of compromise, those who deliberately brought on the war by attacking the federal government are to blame for that outcome.
— Former 1L · Nov 5, 12:22 AM · #
Daniel: I had assumed when you talked about a centralizing tradition that you meant the Henry Clay tradition of internal improvements and such – in which case I’d agree with you. If you meant opposition to secession, I think I’d have to agree with your critics. In any event, isn’t it as wrong to read Patrick Henry forward into Jefferson Davis, and William McKinley backward into Abraham Lincoln, as it is to do what Beran was doing, trying to make Lincoln into a neo-con avant la lettre?
— Noah Millman · Nov 5, 03:53 PM · #
I did mean the tradition of internal improvements and the “American system.” Opposition to secession in American politics, as I’m sure we all know, is very often opportunistic. When my cousin William Plumer tried to organise New England secession in protest against the Louisiana Purchase to resist what he thought would be a growing slave power, Jeffersonian Republicans (and truth be told, a plenty of Federalists) opposed him. Secession was a response that both sections entertained as an option to respond to what they regarded as usurpations that worked to their disadvantage.
This wasn’t a question of reading Henry into Davis or McKinley back into Lincoln, and I would hope that I would never do such a thing. My intention was to challenge the idea, or at least the implication, that it would have only been with an independent Southern republic that you would have had “jingoistic imperialism” and nationalist doctrines of supremacy, for example. There might very well have been such imperialism and nationalism in an independent Southern republic, but Lincoln’s “free institutions” won and we had them anyway, cheered on by the people who particularly revered the memory of Lincoln. There was no monopoly on the so-called “philosophy of coercion.” What I was objecting to was the idea that Lincoln and people following in his tradition were somehow not nationalists, when that is clearly what they were if they were anything. Nationalists tend to cultivate myths about the unity and integrity of their nation-state, and Lincoln certainly did this. This leads them to suppress centrifugal forces through coercion. They naturally regard this as a conservative and legitimate thing, which is consistent with their conception of how the Union came into being. Lincoln wasn’t a “neo-con avant la lettre”—he was an American liberal nationalist, which is quite bad enough from my perspective.
— Daniel Larison · Nov 5, 08:29 PM · #