…is endlessly fascinating. And so I enjoyed Mr. Pomocon’s post below and the responses to it. Here are some random comments that are meant to be provocative in the armchair speculation kind of way:
1. Lincoln could have avoided the war had that been his highest objective.
2. The war was a high-risk move. The South could and should have won. Insurgents usually win.
3. What would we think of Lincoln today had the South won?
4. The South lost because of decisions distorted by slavery and honor. It wasn’t just that the North had more men, more weapons, and more technology generally. Lincoln especially put his rational faith in technology–the telegraph, the railroad, weapons development etc. Lee’s approach to battles was honorable and even worked remarkably well early, but the big-battle (lots of men killing lots of men) approach was bound to favor the North over the long term. The South was far too reluctant too risk slavery (by, say, arming the slaves) to gain victory.
5. The Civil War was horribly bloody–the whole gentleman using high technology thing. A big thought after the war: Was it worth it? That thought, as Louis Menand shows, was a cause of the moral nihilism of our pragmatism and Social Darwinism etc.
Big principles and deep nobility, the thought was, both produce lots of senseless and unspeakably cruel killing. The novelist Marilynne Robinson shows the destructive effect of all that blood on the idealism of the neo-Puritanical, abolitionist MIDWEST. Was this kind of reaction to the war the beginning of of American “nonfoundationalism” that’s especially powerful today?
6. In a certain way, the South won the second civil war, the terrorist movement of the KKK that ended the occupation of federal troops. Those insurgents knew what they were doing. And the South was largely left to itself for almost a century.
7. If the South had won the war, the result might have been the same fate as South Africa–apartheid and isolation. Losing the war made the South the South; Southern literature, for example, is all about the experiences of displaced aristocrats and a kind of very otherworldly Christianity that was the product of political defeat.
8. Lincoln was a great commander-in-chief and a very deep and principled thinker. But to what extent should we build a civil religion around him? What is the relationship between Lincoln’s moral egalitarianism, techno-development, and the individualistic tendencies toward apathetic indifference and commodification? What’s the relationship between being dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and the actual Jeffersonian Declaration? What stand does today’s populist (non-southern) Porcher take on Lincoln? Near the Civil War’s end, intelligent southerners were thanking God for Lincoln, and soon enough they knew his “martyrdom” would be a disaster for them. To what extent should we speak of Lincoln and savior and martyr (as Walt Whitman does)? (These questions are in no particular order and have no particular answer in my mind.)
9. Was the Civil War a result of a defect or defects in the original Constitution that probably only could have been resolved on the battlefield? Is that why the post-Confederate pushing of constitutional issues always seems like whining…?
July 1st, 2010 | 1:31 pm
4. Maybe ‘honor’ distorted the South’s strategy. But to an unrecognized extent, the North and the South fought the way they did because they shared a view that God was the arbiter of battles. The Civil War was in some sense an appeal to heaven to resolve a dispute that could not be resolved within the normal political framework.
July 1st, 2010 | 1:52 pm
I think any president who ends up being assassinated will inevitably get favorable reviews in the history books. (Who speaks of Kennedy as the president who started Vietnam?) Nevertheless, in this time in which dark and conflicted heros are the ones that capture our imagination, it might be a good time to encourage some creative reflections on what Lincoln really did — morally and constitutionally — in order to preserve the Union.
July 1st, 2010 | 4:02 pm
RE: Numbers 2 and 4, Even with the best generals, the South needed almost everything to go its way in order to compensate for its relative disadvantages with respect to manpower, production, wealth, etc. However, its finances and its politics were constantly in disarray, so it stood little chance of overcoming initially steep odds. Many of the South’s problems of course stemmed from the fact that states’ rights proved a rather awkward premise of unified action. In any event, it seems more accurate to say that the South had an outside chance of victory but almost certainly should’ve lost; of course the war lasted as long as it did due to the superiority of the Southern generals.
July 1st, 2010 | 5:29 pm
An armchair thought of my own. . . 4 is very true. We tend to think the side that won was bound to win–but that isn’t even true of WWII, where Germany singlehandedly fought two major powers on two different fronts, and still barely lost. (Japan didn’t help by bombing Pearl Harbor instead of invading Russia’s Far East.) Although the South was overmatched in terms of men and material, they might have won by sacking Washington, D. C. and causing the North to sue for peace. The war was unpopular with a large segment of Northerners from early on, but the South was unable to capitalize on this “unpatriotic” sentiment–Lincoln’s unconstitutional decision to throw dissidents into jail by the thousands and close down newspapers may have made the difference.
July 1st, 2010 | 6:57 pm
Prof. Lawler, your insights are brilliant, as always, but I question characterizing the Confederates as “insurgents,” which are usually thought of as irregular forces undermining the order imposed by a government already in possession of the territory. The Confederates began the war as a government and regular military in full possession and control of its territory; the Union had to invade and overthrow the Confederate government. While there were Confederate insurgents in certain theaters of the war, and the Klan were insurgents after the war, the Confederacy was not, by and large, and insurgent movement.
July 1st, 2010 | 9:07 pm
Lincoln ignored the right of the states and brought the full bore of the army and navy down on several of them. He had no authority over states that had left the union.
There is no part of the Constitution that forbids a state to leave the union that it had voluntarily joined. The right of the citizens have always trumped that of the limited government established early in our formation.
Suspending the writ of habeous corpus was the final slap to the Consttution and yet Lincoln is hailed as a great American.
How soon we forget the tyranny of a rogue president that was rebuked by the Chief Justice. Read the letters written to Lincoln by Chief Justice Taney. We have all but deleted them from public scrutiny.
As much as we want to feel good about the
man, we must all recognize his true nature and the situation he was left with when his bank left in early 1861.
Lincoln was a politician, first…and in my way of thinking, he illustrates the typical kind of person that believes themselves more capable of leading others, and depriving them of their God-given rights.
Slavery would have played itself out. Judging history is a fool’s game.
We were not the same people in the mid 19th century. Lincoln was a man of his time…and was no saint.
Read the epilogue.
July 2nd, 2010 | 7:55 am
There’s a lot to say in response to all these fine responses. But just one for now: Don’t John P’s comments suggest that the Progressives are, on one level, the true heirs of Lincoln? They’re the ones that celebrated those two wars that, it’s true, helped Americans get over the CW. The populists, porchers, isolationists all think that WWI was fatal for real (non-imperial) liberty in our country. Today’s Beckian conservatives hate Woody Wilson, but not so much America’s aggressive, principled egalitarianism (rightly understood). On the other hand, Bryan can be viewed as the true heir of Lincoln (or at least the abolitionists) by defending Biblical egalitarianism against Darrow’s Darwinian/Nietzschean elitism.
July 2nd, 2010 | 10:50 am
Point 1–”Lincoln could have avoided the war had that been his highest objective.”
I would wonder about the credibility of any historian who doubts the answer is “yes.” The point can be rephrased: Could the war have been avoided–or, at the very least, could it have been less than the first total war (Sherman’s March to the Sea, the burning of the Appalachian Valley in order to deprive the roaming enemy troops of provisions) if Lincoln had not had the ambition of being a world-historical individual? Actually, Lincoln did not equate himself with mere rabble like Napoleon; it is arguable that he hoped to be the world-historical individual of all world-historical individuals. If Lincoln had not been bent on greatness, the Civil War would not have happened at all, or would not have been as calamitous as it was.
July 2nd, 2010 | 3:13 pm
I don’t doubt that Civil War experts have hashed this out lots of times, but I don’t see that the North’s actual advantages were, in themselves, clearly decisive absent contingent factors having to do with statesmanship, public opinion, and chance. Converting the North’s demographic and material resources into a warfighting machine was not a given and neither was the persitence of the North in continuing to fight the war in the face of both horrible casualties and long duration. The war could have been lost by a simple change of mind by Lincoln at any time. The Confederacy had realistic hopes of winning a political victory (the election by a despairing an war weary North of a President who might agree to a ceasefire that would be as good as winning the war – maybe) right up to the fall of Atlanta.
July 2nd, 2010 | 3:39 pm
I agree with Pete. And the fall of Atlanta depended on Sherman being so easily resupplied by railroad. Had Forrest been unleashed in GA to keep that from happening, I’ve been told… In any case, a better performance in the West (where the South’s leadership was mostly pretty bad and sometimes [Hood] crazy bad) might easily, as Pete says, have made Lincoln’s reelection impossible. And that would have been a victory after the disasters at Vickburg and Gettysburg [both of which could have been avoided]–the combination of which guaranteed, on a purely military level, the eventual defeat of the South. (Remember that North Vietnam defeated the United States after the disastrous [for the Communists] Tet Offensive, and “we” started to give up at a time when we were in fine shape militarily.) Pete rightly points to the enormous importance of the man Lincoln (especially contrasted with the honorable fool Davis) in prevailing against pretty stiff odds.
July 2nd, 2010 | 4:41 pm
Moral nihilism of our pragmatism? Does Menand actually say that? (It’s been a while since I last read him) I have a hard time seeing pragmatism as nihilistic.
July 2nd, 2010 | 4:43 pm
I, for one, did not intend in my comments to render statesmanship epiphenomenal or to subordinate drama and chance to History, etc….though they do read that way somewhat…..
July 2nd, 2010 | 4:57 pm
[...] Lawler had an interesting post on the Civil War up at Postmodern Conservative. I’m never sure how to deal with these counterfactual [...]
July 2nd, 2010 | 6:01 pm
Armchair strategists will gleefully pound the keyboard until their fingers bleed at the mere mention of the American Civil (?) War. And, they will just as readily separate into one of the two disparate camps: the Yankee blue-belly, or the butternut and gray clad, Johnny Reb. As Americans it’s our most significant cultural pull; either to embrace that Illinois saint, Father Abraham, and his God given mission to put an end to the suffering African multitudes, or the beleaguered Southern people in their efforts to repulse the horrors and insults of the Federal armies, descending as Satanic hosts on the land of magnolia to inflict death, destruction and rapine on a people who only desire to be free of the consolidating vagaries of a regime, so horrific, it’s people have no sense of honor, liberty, or freedom.
What American male worth his salt has not considered that brave ancestor(s) who formed line of battle with his regimental comrades to assail the enemy’s redoubt. To march in brigade front, bayonet fixed, kepi pressed hard against the brow, a prayer to God on his lips, in full knowledge that in the instant he may be standing in His presence. And, who among us did not shiver and tear up at the courage and bravery of that young man…such is the power of that war.
I used to regularly write for a magazine (America’s Civil War) and one subscriber, an Ohio State patrolman, made it his business to drive down my very rural road to locate where I lived. Fortunately for me he was also a Southern sympathizer so it was only to encourage me, as I later found out.
Our dear friend, fellow interlocutor, and brilliant essayist, Peter Lawler, is one of those who can’t help himself when it comes to the Civil (?) War. I’ve noticed over the years that here at PoMoCon Peter is apt, more times than not, to jump in on any discussion concerning Lincoln and THE war.
Peter, I think, has an existential need to contemplate the “late unpleasantness,” simply because those sad events, in many ways ground who we are and what we have become historically and culturally. It’s the stuff that drives philosophers, if not mad, then perhaps to two fingers of Maker’s Mark, a fine Confederate Bourbon.
Setting aside the battle dispositions, movements, and results, the question at hand is and has always been, in what way did the American Civil (?) War affect our nation? That is the question we need the philosopher of history to explicate.
July 2nd, 2010 | 6:48 pm
and the Pete comment was I. Sorry.
July 2nd, 2010 | 9:21 pm
There are several pretty objectionable and around 20 rather questionable ideas in this flock of 70 or so ideas set into flight by Peter and the commenters. So what to shoot at amid all these birds? Many of them are quite brilliant and worthy of long life(i.e., discussion).
Let’s kill an easily-shot one first, which is the idea put forward by Ken Z. that the essence of Lincoln’s choice was either: a) be a world historical figure, or b) let the South secede. (And somehow a) involves approving every aspect of Sherman’s policy!) To state the argument here is to refute it, and to show that Ken seeks to assume the worst of Lincoln.
Peter’s #1 and #2 are pretty tendentious propositions to make without posing similar ones against the key Southern leaders and elites, regarding a whole number of decision points between Lincoln’s nomination and Virginia’s secession. That is, by combining the two propositions and turning their aim against the other side, (while excising the very weak claim that the South logically should have expected to win), we get this:
A.) The Southern elites could have avoided the war had that been their highest objective. The prospective war, like all wars, was inherently risky. The highly possible defeat in such a war would more thoroughly destroy all the goods they claimed to be fighting the war for than would cutting deals with Lincoln, and would produce mass slaughter to boot.
B.) If by the logic of A.), we conclude the war was not avoided by the South fundamentally due to honor’s sake, it would be an honor flying directly in the face of prudence, justice, and Christian morals. Big if, of course, as other factors were in play–see JPs claim below about the Upper South deciding on the basis of thinking it would have to join the fight against the deep South, for example. In any case I have a lot of respect for the simple man’s gut instinct to defend his home state, but I have a lot of hard questions about and for the class of elite Southerners involved in the key decisions.
And let’s do a couple more:
C.) What would we think of Lincoln today, esp. given what he said up to and during the election, had he let the South secede? (Let’s ask this granting JP’s idea that the remaining union would not have been eroded or significantly weakened by the passive endorsement of the secession principle.)
Or, if the Lincoln of the campaign and the LD debates can only be the Lincoln who goes to war given the South’s bad choices, are we
D.) cool with Lincoln chickening out in ’54-’59 and never insisting upon Lincoln-ism, and are we thus cool with America settling for Stephen Douglas’ “solutions” and leadership?
Bottom line: if you load the key contrafactual burdens solely upon Lincoln, perhaps to shake up the civil religion built around him by the Claremont-ers and such, you invite these responding contrafactuals, and they take you right back to Lincoln’s speech in ’54 against the repeal of the Mo. Compromise, and even right back to the poor decisions made by Jefferson, Randolph, and so forth back in the early 1800s.
I know who I think painted who into a corner, and all love for things Percy-ian and Porcher-esque aside, I’ll take my stand in the corner of Tocqueville and Abe(see Dan Mahoney’s recent review in CRB), defending that last patch of American principle even if it risks a bloody and risky CW. My feeling is that the key question boils down to this–which would have been more disastrous to cause of human liberty, a defeat of the Union side in the Civil War, a Union that nonetheless had had the willingness to articulate and fight for natural rights principles and constitutionalism, or Lincoln and Republicans like him chickening out in ’54-’59, de facto resigning themselves, for fear of war’s possibility, to the political victories of Roger Taney, Stephen Douglas, the fire-eaters, and thus perhaps also victories by the Garrisonians and the John Brown-niks?
Of course, contrafactual can pile upon contrafactual, and perhaps it doesn’t do us any better to see into the most likely version of the what-if political past than it did Tolkien’s Denethor to obtain the most authoritative view possible of the political present. That is, the possibility raised in the Second Inaugural of the particular war being a “mighty scourge,” and the general point raised about God’s providence can never be dismissed.
July 3rd, 2010 | 5:01 am
Sara is right that the point was to consider the places of chance and statesmanship in war. It actually would have been a disaster for the the whole world (including the South) for the South to have won the war or to have separated permanently (as I pointed out). The point was not to diss Lincoln, but only to suggest that even his reputation for us depends somewhat on chance.
I’m not even saying Lincoln particularly wanted the war. Many of the leading men of the South did, though. The most intelligent men at the Georgia convention–Alexander Stephens and Benjamin Harvey Hill–counseled waiting on war, watching Lincoln for a couple of years (he might not be that bad), and meanwhile preparing militarily and industrially for the conflict that might come. They were overwhelmed by the honorable hotheads. Georgia’s behavior during the war was stunningly irresponsible in terms of the pursuit of victory, with honor and the state’s “rights” trumping cold calculation.
It’s not crazy to say the Southern desperation was the cause of the war, and that didn’t have that much to do with Lincoln. The slave regime was daily getting more extreme and had to end badly in some way. Why not have it tested or, better, consumed in war? Anyone who’s read, say, Tocqueville on the South’s unspoken fears could have no nostalgia for antebellum life. I’m on record as being against “selective nostalgia” about the South’s past, just as I’m on record in seeing a lot good about the present-tense South with its integration, air conditioning, evangelical religion, and entrepreneurial spirt.
The war as providential scourge doesn’t move me that much; that it was somehow God’s plan that war be much worse than either side could imagine is, of course, certainly true. Lincoln’s point was that His purposes were different from and in a way less judgmental than the purposes of either side. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is noble, to be sure, but not simply a statement of “His” truth on the march.
Still, the outcome might have been the best deal the South could have gotten, and it’s not true, in my opinion, that its particularly monstrous form of slavery otherwise would have just faded away. The long war was, obviously, much more decisive than a short one would have been.
July 3rd, 2010 | 1:27 pm
Carl,
It’s implausible to think that a hands-on war president like Lincoln could have been unaware of the March to the Sea, and it’s equally unlikely that General Grant would have dared to unleash that corker without the President’s knowledge (and tacit permission); Grant was not a free-wheeling general, despite his undisputed authority over the whole Army.
It’s not so easy to dismiss the idea that ambition pushed Lincoln to war, and a remarkably destructive war, at that. If Lincoln had allowed the South to secede, there would have been no war, at least not during his presidency, and Lincoln would have had no chance whatsoever of being what he most earnestly desired to be and is regarded as today: One of the greatest political and military leaders in all of history–and arguably the greatest, considering America’s subsequent “glorious” destiny. I’m not sure why you don’t see the obviousness of this plain truth, or why you think it’s an easy bird to shoot down.
July 3rd, 2010 | 7:42 pm
A point on point 6. The second civil war that overthrew the Reconstruction governments and established an extreme form of white supremacy (as opposed to the milder but still significant forms of racial discrimination that prevailed in the North) was a war fought within much narrower grounds and, that granted the (white) North’s two greatest (or at least most valued) objectives and was fought on an issue over which the North itself was (mostly) lukewarm some of the passion of the war faded and Southern propaganda made inroads with the Northern public. The white Southern insurgents had given up on secession and slavery. They were fighting to prevent African Americans from using their rights as citizens. The great mass of the North could tell themselves that they had won on the really important issues, and with 300,000 Union men dead, that was good enough. There is a whole lot wrong with that of course, but I think the role that the specific political ground that the Southern insurgents chose to contest is important in why they were able to outlast the North in the second civil war.
July 4th, 2010 | 9:15 am
Well, “tendentious” was too strong on my part.
I certainly accept the whole “war is unpredictable” idea, esp. for this war, as it applies to both sides. No-one can deny the operation of chance or providence in Lincoln’s attainment of political greatness.
Happy Fourth all!
July 4th, 2010 | 10:08 am
A discussion admirably conducted by gentlemen (and lady). If there’s more to be said, it won’t be by me.
July 4th, 2010 | 1:12 pm
Alas, I ‘ner read a remark from our distinguished academics and others concerning the question of the legality of secession! If the Southern states were within their rights to dissolve the voluntary compact which formed the confederation/union under the Constitution of the United States, then Father Abraham is, as John Wilkes Booth mentioned, a tyrant.
July 4th, 2010 | 1:28 pm
To me the legality of seccession is a boring topic, although I have to admit the issue points to a defect in the Constitution itself. The Constitution begins “We the people,” but still it seems that sovereignty was divided between the national government and the states. According to Hobbes, dividing sovereignty is institutionalizing civil war. According to Calhoun, sovereignty is like chastity, it can’t be surrendered in part (or something like that). So it was inevitable that the Constitution, on this matter, generate competing and irreconciliable theories. Not only that, the Lockeanism of the Founders, as Brownson points out, points to the right of secession all areas of life if any contract (such as marriage) no longer serves one’s self-interest. Our Founders’ theory couldn’t account for the loyalty that must be at the foundation of any nation. Lincoln’s interpretation wasn’t right beyond all reasonable doubt, but neither was it a tryant’s rationalization (far from it). The matter, as Hobbes predicted, had to be resolved on the battlefield of a civil war, which it was. Case closed. Confederates, please stop whining. And of course I can’t forget that the legislatures of the southern states were dominated by slaveholders who used the ordinary white guys as cannon fodder to defend their worse than peculiar institution. That might be tyranny too.
July 4th, 2010 | 2:00 pm
I dunno, I thought you’d said your last on the topic…not that the above isn’t good stuff?
“Confederates, please stop whining.” Well, now that one hurt..a little. Actually, living just north of the Ohio river, near the hometown of the beloved Democrat, Mr. Vallandingham, I’m probably more inclined toward the “Copperhead” perspective.
Two things I noticed in your sharply and delightfully written response, Peter, is (A) you seem to agree with me re: secession but then you imply Father Abraham had the right/obligation to invade a neighboring country that really only wanted to live in peace with the eastern monied interests and (B) your constant reminders that the South engaged in African chattel slavery while the North was merely virulently racist.
Would it have made a difference, Peter, if the South was seceding because the federal gummint had passed pro-abortion legislation in 1861?
And, I do think “secession” is a fascinating subject, not boring at all, and thank you for the wonderful references.
July 4th, 2010 | 4:16 pm
Random answers:
1. I conclude that secession was inevitable but war wasn’t. Keeping the upper South in the Union would have made the Confederate army so disproportionately puny and the Confederacy so indefensible that the CSA would have continued to exist at the sufferance of the Union, a massive embarrassment for the honor-driven Southern aristocrats (especially ex-War Secretary Davis).
2. Lincoln was a great man, but achieved greatness as a President when in the Second Inaugural he made his public acknowledgment that he was a scourge and a sacred messenger (Rieff’s terms) the cornerstone of his Presidency, the war, and the peace to come.
3. But the Radical Republicans, who cared much more about radical nationalism than Lincoln’s sacred message, resorted to the politics of scourging when Lincoln was assassinated. The Republican Party always contained some unreconstructed Whiggery, which itself contained and dovetailed with some unreconstructed racism and historicism. The ugly and paradoxical result was a band of racist, historicist, Darwinian science-worshippers who loved Lincoln for the worst of Hobbesian reasons. Too few people care much to pursue the roots of progressivism deep into this particular corner of the Republican party.
4. Carl asked in another thread I think where I’m getting the claim that the Upper South seceded mostly because they declined to muster troops for a federal/national war on their brethren and fellow slave states to the south, doubtless becoming a bloody Kansas-style battleground in the process (Missouri, Virginia, and Tennessee all contained huge and stubborn Unionist populations). The answer is that I did a lot of work on this stuff in college and I can’t remember any of the cites, but I’m pretty confident that I remember the bottom line correctly.
5. Hobbes was right about faction in Europe, but not in America, where conditions were different. The idea that secession would have led directly to anarchy is absurd. But the secession of the entire South, upper and lower, did put the remaining Union in such a weakened state that the fear of a complete fragmentation into vulnerable and inadequate confederacies was not absurd. The South was eminently capable — perhaps horrendously so — of carrying on as a nation-state for a long, long time. Deprived of the Unionist Upper South (these seceding states voted for Bell/Everett, the Constitutional Union ticket, remember), the cosmopolitan, diverse, immigrant-filled, super-capitalistic, merchant-driven, residually puritan rump North, by contrast, could probably not endure on its own as a nation-state. Too many centripetal forces. The war overcame this. This is why Lincoln risked everything on the war.
6. Peter is right that the 4th is a time to transcend counterfactual history in celebration of the greatness and goodness of the USA. For philosophers, of course, part of that celebration inevitably involves a deep exploration of why what happened before, during, and after the civil war happened the way that it did. Without that exploration, we probably won’t fully or even adequately understand how and why the USA is so great and good.
July 4th, 2010 | 7:33 pm
James, did Lincoln acknowledge that he was a scourge or that the war, in the way that it developed (and it developed according to the exact hopes of few,) was a scourge and judgment on North and South and Lincoln too?
On the Radical Republicans: We might be talking about two different groups (or two partly overlapping groups at different times), but my understanding of the Radical Republicans , is that initially they pursued (perhaps with too little charity towards defeated Southern whites) political racial equality. I’m not sure how much less firm (disqualifications from voting aside) Lincoln would have been in the face of violent attempts to subjugate the freedmen (and women.) The sacred message included the hope for “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right” and for a “just” peace after all. It didn’t last of course, and the Radical Republican commitment to racial political equality became a kind of gestural politics in the latter part of the 1800s.
About later developments you are right and there might have been seeds of those qualities you describe even in many of the Radical Republicans, especially after they tasted political defeat in the second civil war and they cast about for a new basis for political action, but I remember an old prof of mine describing the agenda and ideological change of the Republicans in the first half of the 1880s in directions very similar to those you describe. There is also Republicans trying to rationalize the tacit agreement between Northern and Southern whites that they would each live with (though some on both sides might still complain) about the outcomes of the first Civil War (no secession and the end of slavery) and the second civil war (the federal nonenforcement of the rights of African Americans in the South.)
July 5th, 2010 | 6:06 am
James, why would you have a problem with four, five, or six (or more) separate and independent republics existing and flourishing on the North American continent? Would it not be better to live within a confederation of neighboring republics then as an empire?
And Peter, your comment that “…the South was largely left to itself for almost a century,” indicates an attitude that seems to say that it’s the federal gummint’s obligation to correct/modify the thinking of the various regions, states, or individual Americans?
And, the reason why the ‘po’ white Southerner volunteered was because your people had invaded his country. No one forced him, no one had to bribe him…it was about defending his people, about Southern honor.
July 5th, 2010 | 3:22 pm
Admitting that Lincoln is one of the greatest political leaders in world history, as I did above, isn’t meant in a praiseworthy way. The cost of Lincoln’s dreadful ambition was 620,000 dead soldiers (on battlefields of amazing frequency and unusual ferocity, as John Keegan emphasizes in his recent book), the first total war (waged solely by the Army of the Potomac against the South), and the creation of a centralized state that is consonant with an empire and not a republic.
Was Lincoln a tyrant? As Wittgenstein said, “Don’t think, just look and see.”
July 5th, 2010 | 6:50 pm
Bob – they wouldn’t have flourished. There was no Aristotelian utopia waiting over the hill. So as much as empire — domestic empire — troubles me…and believe me…it does…I’d pick it over the Europeanization of America. Were it mine to pick, which it warn’t.
July 6th, 2010 | 7:48 am
So I agree with JP (and so don’t agree with MacIntyre) on the selective nostalgia and hopelessly utopian modern polis thing. The nation is the modern form of the polis, and it’s easy distinguish between America and the Roman empire or the British empire. Let me apologize to Bob for maybe being too abrupt in my response to him. I thought I was giving you some due by acknowledging the nontrivial and genuine const argument for secession. That means, for example, the defeated Confederates shouldn’t have been treated like traitors.
July 6th, 2010 | 9:05 am
Peter, my goodness, no apology is ever needed in regard to these exchanges. I learn so very much from you James, Carl et al and truly appreciate the directness when there’s a little fire in the belly. And, I do agree as to the importance of both the period and events and their relationship to modernity.
Let me apologize to you for an intentional provocation or two, totally unnecessary and an indication that I’m growing cantankerous in my dotage.
In closing, James we’ll have to disagree on the viability of an American secessionist movement whose strength, I think, would have been the citizen requirement that it be a republican gummint(s) that would rise out of the collapse of the old Union. I don’t think it would have any components that one might define as “Europeanization.” Also, I’m a Voegelinian, and we don’t do utopias, Greek or otherwise.
And, I agree with Peter, that the “defeated Confederates shouldn’t have been treated like traitors.” I know R.P. Warren told us, in his famous essay in “I’ll Take my Stand,” that it was the Yankee effort to disenfranchise the Confederate veteran that helped promote the KKK.
I hope this discussion might continue in the future.
July 6th, 2010 | 11:04 am
With the spread of capitalism, slavery was doomed, war or no war. Free labor is more efficient than slave labor. So the Civil War was not necessary for ending slavery. Also, praising Lincoln’s role in ending slavery begs the question of why the U.S. was the only country that went to war over slavery; the other countries ended slavery peacefully in the 19th century.
The divided-sovereignty argument for why we had a war (pace Peter Lawler) doesn’t give enough credit to the understanding of states’ rights up to the Civil War; it was the overwhelming orthodoxy. And to the extent that federal sovereignty was in play, it was based on the principle of subsidiarity, and so there was not–at least in any clear way–an inherent conflict between state sovereignty and federal sovereignty, one that could only be decided by war. Subsidiarity is the neglected subtext of the belief in confederation as opposed to Lincolnian consolidation.
July 6th, 2010 | 6:45 pm
Was the Civil War a result of a defect or defects in the original Constitution that probably only could have been resolved on the battlefield?
Yes. Acceptance of a practice of slavery, the idea that a human can “own” another human as property, was the flaw at the heart of the original U.S. society. Africans were not considered human beings at the time that the Constitution was formed.
July 7th, 2010 | 10:49 am
Fantastic stuff Peter on secession, and intriguing stuff JP on the Republican party.
However, JP, when you say
“Too many centripetal forces. The war overcame this. This is why Lincoln risked everything on the war.”
you’re going seriously overboard, and inserting your retrospective interpretation of the stakes (which could be correct) into Lincoln’s 1860 brain. A.) ANY evidence that this concern motivated Lincoln’s decision for war? B.) Worse, the way you put it (i.e., “THIS is why”) you’d have to show that this was the ONLY motivation.
Finally, with regard to this whole “could the North have been viable with so-many states stuff,” you sound a lot more like S. Douglas than like Lincoln in your elevation of geographic and cultural factors over political principle. That is, you show fairly little concern about the necessary implications of accepting (or de facto accepting) the principle of secesionism. On the basis of a geo-socio-cultural theory of what would have held the Union amputated of the South together or not (a bit like Douglas’ geo-socio-cultural theory of why slavery would not spread into the colder territories under popular sovereignty, against Lincoln’s worry that even South Dakotan settlers might turn out to like to have some slaves if the political path to doing so was made easier) you wave aside the atomistic dynamic inherent to secessionist logic(as well as the unifying dynamic inherent to anti-secessionist thought and rhetoric). With Lincoln, and as a political theorist, I say respect the logical dynamics embedded in principles, and err on the side of caution against the operation of bad dynamics. Such a position does not, I trust, necessarily wed me to the one Deneen seems to espouse in places, which is to basically start America over in an communitarian groove by ripping all the Lockeanism out. (Of course, Deneen at times sounds pretty sympathetic to secession for his own reasons–since he won’t admit that the primary polis in our day must be the nation, that peculiar part of the Lockean logic he likes!)
But all my theoretical musings aside, the bottom line JP is you haven’t the evidence for your statement.
July 10th, 2010 | 6:38 pm
“With the spread of capitalism, slavery was doomed, war or no war. Free labor is more efficient than slave labor. So the Civil War was not necessary for ending slavery. Also, praising Lincoln’s role in ending slavery begs the question of why the U.S. was the only country that went to war over slavery; the other countries ended slavery peacefully in the 19th century.”
It is intriguing how widespread this false idea is. The USA was _not_ the only country where there was a war over slavery–in Cuba, the Ten Years’ War (1868-78), about as destructive on a per capita basis as the US civil war, played a critical role in ending slavery on the island.
Also, it is not at all clear that slavery in the USA (or in an independent CSA) would follow the same course as in other slaveholding areas of the Americas. The seceding states, compared to places like Cuba or Brazil, had a much higher percentage of the free population in slaveholding families and a much lower free black population.
I am not in general a fan of economic determinism, and this is a particularly unconvincing example of it.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact