Frost/Nixon, Nixon/Lincoln

Watched it again, tonight, for the second time in a month.

Compared to Nixon, Trump is a lost child, an empty clown, completely out of his depth outside "reality TV".

But anyway.

I admire Lincoln almost unreservedly for his strength of character, for his ability to trust himself, the little nobody from nowhere, surrounded by his cabinet of people vastly his social superiors, and who all knew it.

Nixon, also from the little people from nowhere, was filled with resentment all his life of the big people all around him who looked down on him.

Lincoln actually incorporated his backwoods origins into his political persona, and his devotion to his singular conviction and his singular mission enabled him to keep on, keep on, until victory.

His singular conviction that dominated his entire political life, that slavery ought to be crushed and abolished throughout the entire United States of America, forever.

His conviction and his knowledge that in the end he could only trust himself made him a man prepared throughout those terrible years of war to do the right thing at the moment to get the best result possible at that moment.

He had, for instance, in the beginning, to be ready to stop the war and accept the seceded states back into the Union immediately with no change at all to the status of slavery.

But in a few short years he could and did attack slavery, emancipating all slaves in those states still in rebellion, knowing that now he could do it.

And then in victory he could insist that slavery was over, that it be forever abolished throughout the Union by constitutional amendment.

What a hero he was.

He was as courageous a brilliant nobody with a mission as was Joan of Arc, sent by God himself to save France.

So much smaller was Nixon in that regard, compared to him.

Despite his many and real achievements.

Update.

Between the two of them, LBJ and Nixon sent the South into the Republican Party and out of the Democratic Party.

That made the latter less and the former more sympathetic to racism, shifting the Klansmen, hidden and overt, from the one party to the other.

It also made the Dems more consistently liberal and the GOP more consistently conservative, especially in all things culture war-ish.

Evangelicals and gun rights, you know.

So the two presidents together set the stage for our politics becoming much more polarized and each party more homogeneous as to values and agenda.

Hillary at Wellesley

Right now on MSNBC.

An excellent and forthright liberal speech.

It seems to me now that the contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans is as stark and as harsh as the contrast between Lincoln in 1860, the anti-secessionist and abolitionist Republican, and the opposing candidates who defended secession, slavery, or both.

Imagine the contrast between a speech by Lincoln against slavery and secession and a speech by Jefferson Davis defending both.

Imagine it's the spring of 1861 and there is now fighting at Fort Sumter.

You know you have to choose between secession and slavery and Union and, maybe, hopefully, emancipation.

Do you really have the least, tiniest difficulty lining up with the right side?

Not just the speechmaker but the people she was speaking to, her values and theirs, her views and theirs, her anger and theirs.

Hillary supporters or Trump supporters, Lincoln supporters or Jeff Davis supporters, which are your people?

Can you really say "Neither"?

Evolution and slavery

Note From Lincoln Found in Racist Book

So, are we supposed to think that if whites and blacks "evolved separately" from pre-human ancestors that actually would justify slavery?

Why, because some people at some time in the past said they thought it did?

Does it matter how far back in the pre-human family tree our ancestors are supposed to have separated?

Do tell us more.

As for Lincoln, for all this bien-pensant keeper of Lincoln's unsullied memory has to say, old Abe might very well have believed the theory of separate origin.

We know he was convinced of Negro inferiority and toyed somewhat wistfully with the idea of voluntary removal of freedmen and other black Americans to Africa.

He might, had he lived, have been as soft on the South as Johnson.

He might have accepted, and helped the country accept much sooner, the regime of Jim Crow and compulsory segregation as a poor second best, once voluntary removal had failed.

He was never the social and political integrationist some of the Radical Republicans were and he repeatedly and publicly condemned those views.

But we know for a fact he hated slavery and dragged both the rump USA and the unacknowledged CSA through utter Hell to destroy it.

In this, the foolish South may very well have played into his hands.

After all, after Dred Scott the Slave Power had beaten the antislavery forces to a pulp, as Lincoln knew and admitted.

The South had won its cause, but by then was too alienated and worn out with fighting to accept victory and stay in the Union.

So they left and gave Lincoln and the antislavery cause his and its last and only chance, war.

It should have been a clue . . . .

That O's favorite president was Lincoln.

Lincoln, who unconstitutionally fought and won a war of aggression and conquest against the Confederate States of America for the purposes of (a) forcing them back into a federation to which they did not want to belong and (b) overthrowing slavery forever in those states and all states within the Union.

Lincoln, who usurped the congressional power to suspend habeas corpus and abused it to punish, silence, imprison, or drive out of the country those who opposed him as regards either or both of (a) and (b).

Lincoln, who ignored the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press for the same purposes.

Lincoln, who, when the volunteers stopped coming, adopted a draft to force tens of thousands of men to go fight his war of conquest, a war that had not the least thing in the world to do with defending them, their liberty, or their homeland.

Praise him or damn him, that is what Father Abraham did.

<Aside>

Of course, both parties are war parties, now, and it will be a rare liberal or a rare conservative who will espouse the view, common among America's greater leaders before the Civil War, that a draft is both unconstitutional and tyrannical.

And the same is true regarding the once equally common conviction that if you cannot get volunteers to fight your war then perhaps you ought not to be fighting it.

</Aside>

It is no surprise O admires a president who did so much unlawfully to achieve what O, no doubt, views as results so morally important as to morally justify his illegalities and the slaughter he put the country through to achieve those results.

Reparations

Right.

Blacks owe reparations to white America for all the blood and treasure that ending slavery in the South cost the North, and West, and Far West.

Lincoln's unconstitutional war to conquer the Confederate States of America, force them back into the Union, and end slavery in them was no picnic.

Did Lincoln want war?

Such was the view of some at the time, that he had in fact intentionally provoked it in order to conquer the South and end slavery at gunpoint, throughout the country.

Copperheads, Jennifer L. Weber.

Consider that after Dred Scott the Republicans appeared checkmated and to have no way forward.

Far from seeing slavery on the way to eventual extinction, it looked to be ever more widespread in the United States, ever stronger, ever more entrenched, and perhaps ineradicable by peaceful, political means.

Had the South not seceded, what could Lincoln or the abolitionists have done?

Read the House Divided speech.

How could Lincoln have for a moment sincerely aimed merely at preserving the Union, even with slavery, in the teeth of the declared views of that speech?

And had he not opposed Crittenden, a plan aimed exactly at preserving the Union by further entrenching slavery?

The South really should have seen it coming.

Had they not paid attention when Lincoln, in earlier speeches, insisted "We will not let you go"?

Copperheads, Jennifer L. Weber

Pro-war, of course, but pretty good, all the same.

Lincoln vs the Copperheads

Comparing what Lincoln did to what Johnson and Nixon did about opponents of their wars, it is impossible not to admire their restraint.

Likewise Wilson and FDR and Truman.

Why don't liberals despise Lincoln as a grotesque tyrant?

He made Nixon and the others look like fanatics for civil liberties.

Even Wilson, with his massive suppression of dissent.

And what about his enthusiastic support for Sherman's style of war, shooting prisoners in reprisal when civilians - or irregulars - killed his soldiers and destroying all in his path - roads,  buildings,  crops,  bridges - on his way to the sea?

Because Lincoln ended slavery,  though he did not set out to do that,  and though  he opposed votes and equal rights for blacks in America, toyed with deportation,  and seems never to have abandoned white supremacy.

And because he saved the union and with it America's rise to globalism?

Ah, yes.

The empire of liberty.

Reading Hummel's history of the Civil War.

Josh Marshal to the universe: If you disagree with me you’re a racist!

Neo-confederate libertarians

Not for the first time, Josh tells us how he really feels on the legal and constitutional questions raised by the Civil War.

The idea that there is a ideological divide or set of philosophical questions or priorities that makes some libertarians embrace the Confederacy and secession and despise Abraham Lincoln while others do not is, to put it generously, nonsense.

Neo-Conderates [sic], pro-secessionists, whatever else you want to call them are varying hues of white supremacists or to put it even more simply, racists.

That’s not an accusation. 

It’s simply identifying them as a distinct political strain in American politics.

Do they embrace the Confederacy and despise Lincoln?

Perhaps they do.

Or perhaps not.

Are they, in fact, white supremacists or racists?

And is that supposed to discredit their claims about the constitution, the law, and Civil War?

Hitler built the autobahn and was the patron of the Volkswagen, so Eisenhower was a Nazi and so is your kid who just bought a new Bug, I guess.

There’s a libertarian war over the Civil War?

The libertarians - not without exception, of course - tend to view the constitution as though the incorporation doctrine had been true since 1776 and Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics really had been written into the constitution.

And not in the 14th Amendment but from the beginning.

The neo-Confederates, as a rule, completely reject incorporation, even now, and think states originally had and still have legitimate powers no libertarian could love - powers perhaps eschewed by their own constitutions, but not denied by the federal one.

And nobody doubts that Lincoln violated the constitution massively during the course of the Civil War.

So what?

The libertarian war over the Civil War

What does it say about contemporary politics in general and liberal politics in particular that people think departures from Civil War Unionist dogma about the War Between the States call for “policing”?

Rachel Weiner, who seems to regret the libertarians aren't very good at "policing," nevertheless is far more sensitive to nuance that JM seems.

She appears ready, for example, to recognize that one might hold a critical view of Lincoln and his war without endorsing or in any way legitimating the cause of the South.

She writes,

There are contrarians who criticize Lincoln’s use of federal power and argue that the South had a right to secede — but have no love for slavery or the Confederacy.

Libertarians are anti-war and in favor of market-based solutions, and some argue that even though slavery was abominable, it would have ended for economic reasons with far less bloodshed if the North had allowed the South to secede.

“Though I think Lincoln was the worst tyrant in U.S. history and his war was illegal, immoral, unconstitutional,  I do not think the [Confederacy] was some quasi-libertarian bastion of freedom or justified,” said Stephan Kinsella.

“The real enemy is, as always, the State — whether it be the USA or the [Confederate States of America].” 

On the other hand, JM is not really contradicting her, is he?

She says these guys are not pro-slavery or pro-Confederacy.

He says they are racist and white supremacist.

They could, of course, both be right, on those points.

Lincoln,  himself,  was a racist and a white supremacist. 

And yet, as I said, one can like Volkswagens and the Interstate system without being a Nazi.

Update.

"Neo-Confederate," by the way, covers people who are not libertarians, at all, as well as some who are, if it refers to anyone who thinks secession was not unconstitutional, opposes Lincoln's choice for war, and believes Lincoln violated the constitution quite vigorously in his conduct of the Civil War.

Paleocons, generally.

Think of Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo.

And even that's not all of them.

If that's a neo-Confederate then I am one, too.

And I am no kind of libertarian or conservative.

By that I mean I expect I would have opposed the war, at the time, had I been one of the Northern whites whose taxes would pay for it and who might even be coerced into fighting it.

Of course, had I been a black slave at the time, I would have seen things in a different light.

However much one disapproves being coerced into altruistic sacrifice for others, one is always grateful for altruistic sacrifice toward oneself.

Forbidden history: looking back on the Civil War

Lincoln could have let the southern states go and chose not to.

Whether the world is a better place, all things considered, today as a result is impossible to say.

Slavery might have persisted in the South and in the world longer than it did, had Lincoln let the Southern states go in peace.

But maybe neither the United States of America nor the Confederate States of America would have got involved in The Great War.

Maybe there would never have been a red Russian Revolution.

Maybe there would never have been a Second World War or both the US and the CS would have stayed out of that, too.

And even if there had been a red Russian Revolution there could well have been no cold war involving either the US or the CS.

How’s that for a peace dividend?

The only clear good resulting from the Civil War was the destruction of slavery in the South and its end in the whole United States of America.

Maybe that sped its end elsewhere in the world, but maybe not.

The negative fallout has been the entire history of America’s rise to globalism in which were squandered enormous treasure and oceans of blood, plenty of both being American.

And what about Lincoln’s decision, at the time?

Secession per se was not worth a war to prevent and an altruistic war fought by the boys of the North to save the slaves of the South was foolish and unjust to the people of the North, including but not only the draft dodgers and rioters and the men who went when Lincoln called to meet their early doom.

Anyway, water under the bridge, no?

Split milk?

But it’s an issue today because some Yankee Democrats are intent on blackening the memory of the Confederacy and its defenders in the South while foolish conservative neo-Confederates are only too glad to rise to the bait.

In the long run, and maybe not even that long a run, defending the Confederacy is a suicidal policy for Republicans, nationally.

It all too powerfully strengthens their image as a basically white, Southern, and rural party and the image of the Democrats as a national, multi-racial, and urban party.

And right now the image and the reality behind it appear both to be strangling the Republican future.

Hence the Democrats are only too glad to provoke them into such defenses.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side of the street, even when alert conservatives take steps to alter that image there are others who slap them around for it, heroically standing tall for Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

Lincoln on the Defensive

Lincoln Defended

And the Democrats smile.

“All men are created equal”

Obama a marker on post-racial path

The Declaration of Independence

“All men are created equal”?

What does that mean, exactly, even ignoring the embarrassing notion, best neglected, that this is a self-evident truth?

Neither taken individually nor in groups are all men – all humans – equal with regard to everything, or even merely everything that matters.

Neither in their acquired skills nor in their natural endowments, and again neither as individuals nor as distinct racial or other, smaller, population groups.

Men are larger and stronger than women, and only a fool would deny this is nature as well as nurture.

And men are more violent than women, too; and this is likewise rightly attributed to both nature and nurture.

Jews are smarter than gentiles, and for a very long time this has been attributed, at least in part, to the intelligence-killing genetic impact of millennia of monasticism in Christian lands, during which intelligence was simply bred out of the Christians.

As for the apparent natural intellectual inferiority of American blacks to those of Africa as well as to the euro-whites of America, it has been said that only the less bright Africans were taken as slaves, survived the passage, or survived and were allowed to reproduce under slavery.

Analogous explanations have been offered for a sometimes suspected inferiority in intelligence of American euro-whites to the whites of Europe.

I am not aware of any like explanation for the like inferiority of American Indians to American whites or East Asians.

In any case, only fools, fakers, and those who wish to be deceived claim none of this is real, or none of this is nature and all of it is nurture.

Too, no one thinks all individuals are in fact or by natural endowment equal with respect to special or especially noteworthy talents or abilities.

Mozart began composing at five and wrote an opera at twelve, if I recall correctly; I can barely whistle a tune.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was making ground-breaking discoveries in math in his teens.

Saul Kripke taught himself Ancient Hebrew by age six and had read all of Shakespeare by age nine.

So what, after all, is the significance of the Declaration’s ringing claim that all men are created equal?

Despite being propaganda intended for the wide public of the time, it was not a demagogic rejection of the obvious diversity of human endowments and achievements.

It was not even a rejection of the idea of natural inequalities of races or nations.

It was and is a rejection simply and solely of hereditary differences of power, status, authority, rights, or privileges.

It was and is a rejection of caste.

It was a rejection of monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, and slavery.

It was a demand for republicanism and popular government.

That, at any rate, was the intention of the 18th Century, of the Age of Enlightenment, honestly construed.

It was not quite a demand for government of the people, by the people, and for the people – an idea that, despite bluster and boilerplate and probably not excepting Lincoln, no one really takes both literally and seriously.

The Gettysburg Address

Government by the people?

Actual democracy?

Many are the reasons both obvious and weighty against it, not the least compelling being that the exercise of political power is a full time job.

And another, too, is decisive, all by itself: the people are often malevolent and at all times and in all nations vain, willfully ignorant, impulsive, egoistic, gullible, and stupid.

Whereas, though it’s a matter of degree, their betters are generally only vain, egoistic, and often malevolent.

A sensible person would want to make a government more democratic only in order to give the many a chance to protect themselves from the predations and indifference of the few, managing for themselves a better share, so far as they are capable, of the benefits of civilization and social life.

And always in despite of the awful vulgarity of mass politics and mass culture.

Hence, by the way, a crucial function of the system of representation is and has always been to ensure those with their hands on power were not as bad as the people as a whole, and so would not rule as badly.

To keep the rabble out, in other words.

Not a perfect mechanism, no.

But something.

I didn’t realize he was that old

Pat Buchanan: Obama's Speech Was "Pedestrian" And "Deeply Partisan"

Actually, that well describes Pat’s reaction, here, to Obama’s speech.

But never mind.

This is the interesting part.

PB speaking,

The president is a fine speaker, and I really was looking for something uplifting.

I've read speeches, I've worked on inaugural speeches -- I remember both of Lincoln's, and Kennedy's, and FDR's.

[Lincoln's] second inaugural is one of the greatest -- it's far better than the Gettysburg Address, in my view.

I would never have guessed.

Is he a vampire?

No human lives that long.

Anyway, as he might have it, not since Old Testament times.

;-)

Obama unchained?

Text of Obama's Second Inaugural Address

Going straight to the Declaration, he sounded more like a progressive than he has at any time since the campaign of 2008.

Good stuff, domestically, on the whole, aside from immigration.

Something for all the liberal constituencies, including a commitment to the safety net and to earned benefits that was given billing reassuringly close to the top.

Lesser evil, but only just, in foreign affairs.

This turn did not go unnoticed.

Obama's Inaugural: A New Foreign Policy?

Elsewhere he asserted a need to deal effectively with global warming and a moral imperative to care for the planet for those who will come after us.

But this is the crucial passage in O’s speech committing him and us, unmistakably, to the tradition of presidential liberal global interventionism.

America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation.

We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom.

And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice—not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

A mix typical of progressive presidents since TR. And Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, for that matter.

And the American Vice President lately so much publicly venerated, Henry Wallace.

About which writes Robert Dreyfus at The Nation in that strain of global welfarism that is becoming more influential in contemporary liberalism, or seems to be.

That, to me, ought to be the absolute core of a new US foreign policy.

Not finding small and medium-size enemies, whether impoverished nations such as Iran or mini-threats such as the Algeria-Mali Islamists, and by attacking them creating big ones; not by riling up gigantic rivals such as China by “pivoting” toward Asia and the Pacific with our air force and navy.

Instead, by organizing the world’s attention on urgent needs, such as clean drinking water, vaccination, healthcare clinics, sustainable economic growth, and other achievable goals that, according to countless analysts, could be bought and paid for worldwide at just a fraction of what we now spend on what we euphemistically call “defense.”

There was lots of God in the inauguration, by the way.

Not least in the lyrics of America, sung by a pop star in pop star style.

Well, talk of God was always characteristic of Lincoln, too, one of our president's heroes.

Oh, what is it with the cheesy divas at these affairs, anyway?

I like the national anthem better the way they do it at ball parks.

Just saw Spielberg's Lincoln

Brilliant.

See Mr. Lincoln's war, revisited

Lincoln's was the political faith of the Declaration of Independence, a faith to which he gave a ringing and unequivocal affirmation at Gettysburg.

His party today chooses to disavow the Declaration expressly because of its central tenets of democracy and equality, recalling its affirmations of God-given rights only to berate contemporary secularists and betray the spirit of the First Amendment.

But not Lincoln.

And perhaps he did not ridiculously exaggerate the stakes in this, his most famous speech.

The film begins with black and white soldiers struggling to remember his exact words.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And then without a break the movie shows us the president's struggle, in the first months of 1865, to cement in place the defeat of slavery with the passage of the 13th Amendment.

He would succeed.

And then he would die for it in April, the same year.

A loophole big enough for a battleship

Daniel Webster made a speech in the House denouncing Madison and the Democrats both for starting the war of 1812 and for seeking to draft people to fight it, in December of 1814.

He declaimed drafting people to fight an offensive war unnecessary to the defense of their liberties, their country, their homes, or their families was unconstitutional.

He thus left open the possibility that a draft for a war to serve the nation’s vital interests could be constitutional.

And that makes one wonder what he thought of all those Brit troops who had invaded America and burned Washington DC to the ground.

Anyway, who has not heard of Cap Weinberger’s stunning declaration that there is no place so remote or insignificant in all the world that the US does not have vital interests there?

Who is not aware that the supporters of Mr. Wilson's war insisted America had to fight to make the world safe for democracy?

Or that, according to FDR's supporters, Hitler was out to conquer the whole world, America included, just as the Kaiser had been?

Or that, without America's cold war efforts, communism after WW2 (but apparently not after WW1) was a serious threat to overtake the whole world with Stalin-like tyranny, us included?

Madison, by the way, left Webster undisturbed, so far as I know.

Lincoln would not be so mild toward Clement Vallandigham.

Interestingly, Daniel Webster in his speech of 1814 rejecting the constitutionality of the draft directly addressed the claim that the bare necessity of the thing made it constitutional because the congress and the government in general had to be thought of as endowed with the power to do anything necessary to the achievement of its legitimate, constitutionally prescribed or allowed ends.

And he denounced that idea as Tommyrot.

He flat denied the power of the congress to raise armies, in particular and for example, entailed the power to do anything necessary to raise armies adequate to their admittedly constitutionally authorized purposes.

Yes, at the cost of losing.

What do you think of that?

Wouldn't you think that a claim that congress has so awful a power, so terrible in its impact on the people, on  individuals and on families, could and should be backed by some shred of text?

Surely Webster was right this is far too heavy a weight for the necessary and proper clause to carry?

Mr. Lincoln's war, revisited

Suppose Lincoln had forced the country through all that horror and loss and, in the end, let slavery stand.

Could any national leader have been more infamous in US or even world history for doing anything of more costly and unspeakably stupid futility?

The Articles of Confederation established a perpetual union of the subscribing states under itself, that union’s equally perpetual constitution.

The generation that wrote them blew off both the union and the Articles in flat defiance of several of them and wrote a new constitution far more national in nature – members voted as individuals in that new bicameral legislature instead of each state’s members voting together as a block, for example – that they were willing to see disrupt the union fatally and forever in case it was not ratified by them all, with states previously in now staying out.

The leaders of the southern Confederacy were no more cavalier about the constitution or the union than they had been, and anyway the claim to perpetuity had been discreetly, understandably, but not inconsequentially omitted from the Philadelphia document by its lawless creators.

Union forever?

Phooey.

It is clear as day, I think, that Lincoln’s bloody war to save the union would have been an outrage against humanity and the least common sense had he won and let slavery stand.

And if slavery had within a few decades been actually abandoned voluntarily in all the states that would only have made it worse.

But he did not let slavery stand and what the South feared at the time was very possibly true, though the neo-Confederates today deny it, that Lincoln from the moment the first shot was fired aimed both to keep the South in the union and to end slavery everywhere within it, though he could not at that time say so.

That is, and contrary to what had been the expressed views of many abolitionists before him, he meant to prevent the southern states breaking off and forming a powerful slave confederacy right on our borders, taking away a large part of our national strength and perhaps expanding into the Caribbean, inevitably becoming an enemy and perhaps a menace to the northern, free-state, rump union they would leave behind, as some who favored secession intended.

Many today speculate that had he let the southern states secede slavery would have died out among them anyway within a few decades, as at any rate seems more plausible than the nightmare of entrenched, vigorous, and spreading slavery I have hypothesized Lincoln fought to avoid.

Certainly it is difficult - though I think not impossible - to believe it could in that case have survived as a legal institution anywhere in the Occident up to our own day, though it survives even now illegally in many areas of the world and even legally in some parts controlled by Muslim religious law.

But even granting – and I think it is not certain – that slavery would anyway have disappeared before now it remains true that the Civil War did at any rate much shorten the life span of slavery in the southern states, themselves, and almost certainly elsewhere.

So, why could Lincoln not say so from the beginning if, as I have suggested, he meant to save the union and kill slavery within it from the start?

Because he thought he just might have a plausible constitutional case that secession was nothing but rebellion and he as president had a duty to put it down.

That was the view of the Republicans at the time whose outlook on the matters of federal power and states’ rights made them old-time Federalists on steroids.

But he had no case whatever and did not believe that the federal government under the then constitution had the least authority to disturb slavery in the South under any pretext whatever, and specifically not even under pretext of rebellion.

Though during the war he claimed and exercised the power of emancipation he applied it only to some of America's slaves and was by no means sure of its permanent effect.

Hence the need, eventually, to force through the 13^th Amendment banning slavery to give the Civil War an indisputable meaning it would otherwise most certainly not have had.

Should Lincoln have done it?

Should he have fought this war?

The Democrats who opposed him were certainly right, I think, that he ought not to have fought merely to save the union, just as we mostly feel today, I think, that Canada ought not to fight to keep Quebec in, nor Italy to keep in an unwilling South Tyrol, nor anyone at all to keep the Flemings and Walloons from splitting Belgium as the Czechs and the Slovaks split Czechoslovakia.

And is not the UN, even today, defending the right of secession in the former territories of Yugoslavia?

Those who protest that admitting a right of secession is an absurdity in normative political theory are quite right, but they are missing that normative political theory is absurd in the first place and has little bearing on actual history.

See the earlier posts labeled “amoralism.”

In the real world not only secession but even the more radical step of partition are sometimes acceptable and even the only defensible course.

But assume that, though he said he was, Lincoln was not fighting, even at the beginning, merely to save a union half slave and half free.

Assume he aimed from the beginning both to save the union and to kill slavery within it, if he could.

Should he have fought this war?

Were those in the North and West who opposed him at the time actually right?

Especially the thousands of draftee immigrants forced to fight either meaninglessly to save a pointless union or wholly altruistically, tens of thousands of them dying to free slaves little worse off than the free men of their own working class in the cities of the North?

Everything I have ever read denouncing the draft as the most horrific and hateful servitude when the draftees are taken to fight for anything at all but the defense of their own lives and liberty, their country, homes, and loved ones - if perhaps not in that case - comes here to mind, inescapably, and I cannot but sympathize with them rather than him.

And a good deal of all that was written by American republicans sure the end of monarchy and placing the war power in the hands of a popularly elected congress had put an end to the normal feature of history, the powers that be dragging hundreds of thousands, again and again, to kill and die in causes not their own.

Or by anti-federalists opposed to ratification of the Philadelphia constitution, sure that a strong, national union would perpetuate in American that same ancien regime in which the common people fight endless wars for the empire and glory of rulers to whom they are but canon-fodder and cattle.

Afterthought.

The neo-Confederates and, to be fair, other historians have pointed out quite truthfully that Lincoln was among the absolute worst of presidents for usurpation of power and trampling of liberty, democracy, and the Constitution to make his war.

Wilson’s suppression of dissent and infamous treatment of Debs was not worse, by any means.

And the Federalists who so infuriated Jefferson’s and Madison’s Democrats were cub scouts, compared to him.

Perhaps only FDR's internment of the Japanese in America was a comparable or even greater violation of constitutional rectitude.

And yet another afterthought.

The bulk of the evidence shows that Lincoln was a frank racist convinced of the inferiority of blacks to whites, intellectual and otherwise, though he rejected unto shedding rivers of blood that this justified slavery.

Where modern liberals claim to see contradictions others might see only nuance.