History, Honesty, and Lincoln

Brad DeLong claims I've done something "very bad and very extraordinary" -- overlooking

the fact that a free vote of the inhabitants of each of the American slave states -- including South Carolina -- would almost surely have produced majorities not to secede but to stay in the union.

I overlooked that fact because not overlooking it would in no way impact or alter the accuracy of my original claim that

Lincoln resolved to bring [...] smiting and suffering upon large portions of Americans who exercised, through their elected representatives, their sovereign right to remain in the American nation but depart the American nation-state[.]

If five million citizens moved to Tennessee from Maine, it is entirely reasonable to suspect that they would almost surely have produced majorities in favor of staying in the union. Of course the plausibility of this hypothetical has no impact on the factual status of what really happened.

But we all know we are not really talking about who got whose facts right. The real issue is whether a person today is morally defective if they do not make the political non-enfranchisement of slaves in the seceding states a determinative part of their analysis of the civil war. DeLong suggests that

Anybody setting forth the self-evident principle that:

governments... instituted... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

And asserting the people's sovereign right that:

any form of government... destructive of these ends... [triggers] the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government... on such principles and organizing its powers in such form... most likely to effect their safety and happiness...

had better have a solid majority on their side. Not a solid majority of an aristocracy. Not a solid majority of a political class. Not a solid majority of a race. But a solid majority of the people.

Bad news for the American Revolutionaries, then, who flunked their own test as well by never bothering to submit the Declaration of Independence for the ratification of their new country's slaves. Yes, women were left out of it as well. The question is not whether the establishment of the CSA was 'as good' as that of the original USA. Even someone accused of singing 'the old neo-Confederate song' can say quite honestly that of course it was not. The question is whether that mattered politically, and the answer is quite inescapable that it did not. The Confederate secessionists had far steadier legal and political legs to stand on than the American revolutionaries -- in terms of the law of the entity from which they were departing. Many secessionists were scoundrels, yes, and many revolutionaries heroes, and, yes, moral defenses available to the revolutionaries were not there for the secessionists, and that's why in the first case a very inspiring and poetic Declaration was issued and in the latter case a near-exact facsimile of the original US Constitution was drawn up and filed in a drawer in Richmond.

To the point, the same torpedoes used to sink the political authority of the southern secessions must be fired at the American revolution itself. One cannot have it both ways. And if you, like I, decide after all that, even though the franchise was imperfectly overrestricted by today's lights in 1776, the establishment of the United States cannot be dismissed as a bankrupt and fraudulent political enterprise, so too must you conclude the same thing about the establishment of the Confederate States. Morally bothersome? Absolutely. Separate analytical issue? Without doubt. Yet, once again, the rap on people who go down this road has never been about facts but about their outrageous willingness not to let good moral considerations override disinterested political analysis. Disinterested political analysis that does not begin from the premise that Americans who sought to maintain slavery are too contemptible to be discussed disinterestedly is dismissed itself as contemptible:

[...] it doesn't bother James Poulos very much that a majority of the people on whose behalf the "sovereign right to... depart the American nation-state" did not approve of the exercise of that right by those who claimed to be their representatives. African-Americans don't exist, after all--at least not as human beings with a moral claim to a form of government instituted to secure their unalienable rights. [...] Once again, African-Americans simply did not exist -- at least not as human beings with moral claims.

Well of course I can be bothered by it, but what does that change? Other than my willingness to think responsibly and honestly through the politics of the act on its own terms? The deplorable slave status in which enslaved African Americans were maintained meant exactly that they did not exist as human beings with moral claims to political freedom. Slaves had excruciatingly truncated moral claims dependent entirely on the whim of their masters for fulfillment. Freed slaves had claims that were significantly broader. (Even if we shudder at the status they could not shake off, we ought not evade the moral fact that freedom is a nontrivial improvement on slavery.) None of this has anything to do with whether or not free white citizens and sovereign Southern states were actually free citizens and sovereign states under the Constitution, and, of course, they were.

Whether or not any state had the Constitutional right to secede was not dependent upon whether or not they let the slaves, if any, have a fair share in the voting. If one fact about Lincoln is beyond dispute it is that he put the political integrity of the Union above all other purposes of his Presidency. The secession of Minnesota was as bad as the secession of South Carolina, and this is because the rightness or wrongness of secession was a legal question. There always was room for interpretation on that point -- within a framework that, even among Republicans, and including Lincoln himself, even after Emancipation, acknowledged the legal legitimacy of slavery within certain of the United States of America and acknowledged the political legitimacy of American citizenship and government despite it.

The extreme moral shabbiness of this position is plain before all. But the remedy for having blinded ourselves to this moral fact of antebellum and Civil War America is not to now blind ourselves to the political facts of antebellum and Civil War America. When moral outrage blinds political agency, it distorts it and turns it toward the substantive and procedural abuse of power. Any critic of the religious right can recognize that.

Lincoln recognized it, no matter what criticism can be leveled his way. He denied -- as a matter of Constitutional construction, not morality -- that any citizen, William Lloyd Garrison included, had the sovereign right to vote for secession, and he denied that any state, for any reason, could ever dissolve the bonds of Union. But he did not deny that war was war, or that American citizens who had merely fallen out of their proper relationship with the Union would have to be shot at and killed in order to save it, and by the time of his Second Inaugural, Lincoln recognized that he had launched and maintained a brutal and protracted war that brought great pain and woe upon his people -- including those whom victory would return to the fold. He knew what he was doing to the once and future American people of the seceded South, and in 1865 he knew the sorrowful and wrathful depth of the pain he had determined must be the acceptable price of restoring the Union.

That knowledge is many things: humbling, inspiring, immortal, paradoxical, Christian, American, humane, inhumane. What it is not is false, and as bothersome as it is -- like so much of America's flawed past -- it must be a central part of our reckoning with that past. No neo-Confederate song is that.

Comments

[Robert C. Cheeks]

Delightful piece!

Obviously the seceding Southern states executed their act of secession from the "voluntary compact"(Constitution) lawfully.

Most telling, perhaps, were the actions of the "eastern monied interests" who prior to March of '61 didn't care all that much about secession. It was during that fateful month that the fledgling Confederate congress released its tariff schedules, far lower than the existing federal schedules, that annoyed the bankers and manufacturers of New England and New York. War became an inevitability by April.
Ah, yes, human nature!
James, please do more stuff about the War between the States, it does stimulate the juices and it is so applicable.

[jonathan]

The revolutionaries where just that -- revolutionary -- they declared certain "truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" and have "certain unalienable Rights." They did not put that idea to a popular vote -- they simply declared it so, and then set about to build a new system of government to work by the "consent of the governed."

The fact that the founders found it necessary to make concessions to slave owners in order to cobble together a political compromise to form a union is indeed unfortunate and regretable. It meant that the nation was born out of a compromise that made it fall short of its own stated most important principles. In short it declared its dedication to establishing rights that until then none of the people had, but then handed out those rights to only a few.

The acts of succession on the other hand aimed very clearly at moving those states further away from those founding principles, and to maintain and entrench the institution of slavery which was very much not in the interest of the vast majority of the people living in those states.

Your attempt to suggest these two acts -- declaring independence to build a union dedicated to a set of ideas and the act of seccession-- are somehow comparable, politically or morally does not hold water.

[Andrew Cusack]

The fact that the founders found it necessary to make concessions to slave owners in order to cobble together a political compromise to form a union is indeed unfortunate and regretable.

I agree wholeheartedly. If they had just stuck to their guns and not compromised (why should idealists attempt to accommodate political reality?), we would likely have remained free and independent states instead of slaves to this damnable union!

The acts of succession...

Secession, surely? Unless there is some monarchical undertone of which I am not aware.

[jonathan]

We would likely have remained free and independent states. Right, but to paraphrase what Brad de Long asked when he kicked this all off : just who do you mean by 'we' whiteman?
4 out of 10 in the population of southern states of the mid 19th century was black - and blacks had majority representation in the population of several of those states. This was not then, and certainly not now, a politically irrelevant fact. Certainly not when used in any sentence that contains the phrase 'free and independent.'

[Mike Tuggle]

jonathan said: "The [American]revolutionaries were just that -- revolutionary -- they declared certain 'truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' and have 'certain unalienable Rights.' ... The acts of seccession on the other hand aimed very clearly at moving those states further away from those founding principles..."

I hate it when I see this misinterpretation repeated.

The Founders were not "revolutionaries" of the same ilk as the Jacobins or Bolsheviks, who concocted a new blueprint for society they intended to implement by force. The rights the Founders defended through their act of secession from the authority of the crown were their traditional rights as British citizens, which is why Burke supported the American colonists, but not the French Jacobins.

The Declaration does not end at the cherry-picked phrase "all men are created equal." It's not a proclamation of egalitarianism; it's an announcement to the world that all peoples have the right to scuttle an inept or oppressive government, and that they'd just done so. That's why it bears that snazzy title, as opposed to, say, "The Declaration of Universal Equality."

[jonathan]

Thank our blog host for the term 'revolutionary,' but nowhere did I suggest that the Declaration of Independence was a proclamation of economic egalitarianism. How do you read that into my post?

it's an announcement to the world that all peoples have the right to scuttle an inept or oppressive government..

which is why secession, which aimed at breaking a union dedicated to those principles and protections had to be 'scuttled.' Being on the losing side of a legislative fight over tariff policy does not constitute oppression, whereas pulling out of the union and with that extinguishing the protections guaranteed by those original documents (to all residents, but especially to those in bondage and who did not have the right to vote) is.

[Mike Tuggle]

So -- Lincoln "scuttled" the South's right of self-determination to defend the right of self-determination?

[David Caskey]

A few comments on the comments:

Equality phrase in the Declaration. This was a document going to the king of England. It was a statement of fact that the people of the colonies felt themselves to be his equal. From my understanding of the nature of the people at the time, equality among peers was not a government issue. You were born and started fighting and thus provided you place in society without the burden added of inherited royalty. With this in mind, it is perfectly acceptable to have slaves. They were born into slavery for certain, but they could better themselves and their family with hard work. England had a similar program involving coal miners that extended well into the 1800's and was not race based. Plus, representation in the American government was often property based and not a concept of one man one vote. Plus women were not equal until the 1900's. Many were not even sure if blacks could be classified as human, much less have rights. This concept was especially prevalent in the North with many discriminatory laws on the books. Regardless, the war was most definitely not over abolition of slavery. You could argue that it was a point of contention in respect to extension and the ultimate natural demise of the institution, but Lincoln clearly supported continuation of slavery to this day in his first speeches and the original 13th amendment. Consider also that we have a concept of one slave owning country (the US) fighting another slave owning country (Confederacy) over slavery, go figure.

The right of secession. The "Union" at the time of the War of Northern Aggression was only a few generations old. The states considered themselves to be separate political entities that controlled their own destiny with the support of their neighbors in defense and trade. It is clear the North desired to exert undue political influence into the states government and representation that was not part of the original deal. Thus, a whole section of the country felt they had lost the binding force that glued the common interest of the "Union" and wanted to be separate in a peaceful manner. Now, what is the "Union"?
Is it the people, the states, the land? If the land, what right did the North have to control this territory? If it was the people, it would seem that a free society would recognize such a desire for self determination. But the Northern manner of waging war was to do their worst to the people, therefore for ever alienating them from the rest of the country. The result is what we see today.

Lincoln was a vicious, mean, bigoted, killer. He was the essence of what we know of as the modern politician. Double faced and only interested in self promotion and reward. His corruption was the worse that has been demonstrated by any other administration and he forever changed our government from one of a free society to an overbearing, interfering, repressive monster.

[Brad DeLong]

This is pretty sad.

When you speak of the inhabitants of the Confederate states as "Americans who exercised... their sovereign right to... depart the American nation-state" you are talking moral philosophy: that word "right" you see. I might--I might not--agree that southern slaveholders had a "right" to "depart the American nation-state." I don't think that southern slaveholders had any sort of "right" to *take their slaves with them.* Surely the slaves wished to remain under the jurisdiction of the United States of America? Surely their wishes count... if they are people, that is.

[James]

What's sad is that American law before the civil war no longer comports with American morality today, and what's true is that because it did we can't politically philosophize about antebellum America without registering that. There are empirical issues -- e.g., the percentage of voters for secession who didn't own slaves [probably not high, but is it zero?]; and there are democratic theory issues -- e.g., whether slaveholding representatives indeed represented the secessionist will of nonslaveholding constituents, constituents who on your moral-political theory would seem to enjoy a sovereign Lockean individual right and at the time had no other means of representation to express it. You can't disappear citizens of southern states who didn't own slaves, and, indeed, many of them wanted to stay in the Union but weren't a voting majority.

But perhaps most importantly there are legal issues -- if the states were indeed sovereign entities, rather than the slaveholders, then the exercise of the sovereign right I mentioned only exists insofar as slaveholders are state citizens; that is, nobody has a sovereign right to depart the Union, only states do, because individuals were not sovereign and states, so it was argued, were. (And I credit that argument as constitutionally accurate.)

Perhaps I could have been more clear that the sovereign right I mention is the right of sovereign bodies -- states, not individual citizens, and not even groups of citizens who do not legitimize their power through the authority of the state's sovereingty. But the saddest point is that your moral philosophy, though undoubtedly unimpeachable today, simply had no status in public law in the US at the time in question. To my knowledge no one advanced the argument that secession was unconstitutional because the slaves didn't have a say. Maybe someone advanced the argument that it was bad that the slaves didn't have a say, but if the slaves didn't have a say because they had virtually no political status in the Union (just the 3/5ths rule, a sop to the Slave Power without a grain of moral fiber in it), from where would that status materialize upon their exit?

As a matter of moral philosophy, it is not legitimate for people to be the personal property of other people. But as a matter of political philosophy, a regime that credits slave ownership as legal everywhere [the weaker Dred Scott decision argument] or at least within the jurisdiction of slave states [the stronger argument] does not credit slaves with wishes that count politically.

In antebellum America it was uncontroverted that the political wishes of slaves had a legal weight of zero. Moreover, nobody even in the North believed that slaves were like Fort Sumter -- property belonging to the Union that could not be 'taken'. It was in legal contention whether Ft. Sumter was federal property. It was not in legal contention whether slaves were personal property. And yet uncontroverted too was the knowledge that they were people. Sad, yes. But it cannot be denied, and to do so is to continue to damage our right understanding of law and politics in the abstract and our own in particular.