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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: The Neo-Unionists’ Rope of Sand (No King But Lincoln) I. E Pluribus Multi The recent publication of Professor Tom DiLorenzo’s book, The Real Lincoln, has caused great unhappiness in the House of Lincoln and for good reason. Lincoln is commonly taken as the true "founder" of the U.S. imperial state and its matching ideology. Efforts to trace a path between Lincoln and the actual "founders" (to use that word) only yield a web of rationalization, wilful misreadings of the record, and wrongheaded assumptions about late 18th-century American political practice, values, and ideas. Even as the South undergoes a Third (and final?) Reconstruction, many Northern historians and other literati are deeply shocked to learn that there remain those who even now do not accept the official theory of the war of 1861-1865 and the received gospel of the union. More re-education is necessary! Things are said to have been "settled" by Mr. Lincoln’s war, as if being shelled, blockaded, defeated, occupied, and reconstructed, would in the nature of things produce genuine intellectual conversion in the South: an argumentum ex sledgehammer. Even worse, there are non-Southerners, too, who have failed to learn the great historical "lesson" Mr. Lincoln taught with blood and iron – and more of those last, in fact, than Chancellor Bismarck needed in unifying Germany. Sundry Neo-Conservatives have sprung to their PCs to trample out the "Neo-Confederate" vineyard with its many wrathful grapes. Along with most eminent Civil War historians, they hold that all opposition to the received view of Mr. Lincoln’s war must rest, in the end, on the post-1865 works of disgruntled ex-Confederates, who, having lost, had the nerve to say that questions other than slavery helped bring on the war. II. A Debate Older Even Than Neo-Conservatism These sides and their arguments have long existed. But which was closer to the truth of things? Such matters are not "settled" for theory or history by the outcome of a war. Reason does not yield to Grant and Sherman, even if Lee did. The nationalist, or Unionist, position characterized men who wished to retain the forms of the British Empire, while substituting themselves for George III, Parliament, and the British bureaucracy. They wanted an American empire and American mercantilism. Their opponents, for various reasons, wanted to retain the colonial autonomy they had enjoyed under "benign neglect" prior to 1763. Decentralists wanted only the loosest possible federal connection (using "federal" in its classical meaning) and mainly in foreign relations. Their program was not "about slavery" but, rather, grew from their inherited values, institutions, and prejudices. Indeed, there were a good many slaveholders in the "Federalist" (= Nationalist) camp in 1787. The nationalist school - from James Wilson, Joseph Story, James Madison, and John Marshall, through Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Lincoln, and Francis Lieber, down to Jaffa, Samuel Beer, and many other contemporary American historians - have done very well rhetorically. They - the above list is not exhaustive - believe they have won every battle. Hence their shock that unbelievers still roam the land. The problem is that the nationalist "case" is but a rope of sand. III. Can You Get One People for the Price of Thirteen? The merits or otherwise of the nationalist case are central to the campaign against "Neo-Confederate" heretics, who decline to go marching through either Georgia: the nearby one, or the former Soviet one. If metaphysical "ideas," destiny, and so on called forth a single American (when? 1776? 1789? 1865?) with a singular "sovereign" authority to set the general government "over" the states; or if, alternatively, there factually existed from some time or other such a single, undivided American people "in the aggregate" – it becomes much easier to deny the right, power, or capacity of any smaller political society to withdraw or secede from a union established by, or in the name of, such a hypothetical, unitary people. The smaller societies may only appeal to an operationally meaningless "right to revolution," which Professor Jaffa offers us in high jest. It is a grand joke, and one pioneered by Lincoln during the Mexican War, when he said that, "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better." Lincoln was a noted frontier humorist, but the phrase I have italicised reveals the crafty lawyer at work. This is an offer you can’t re-use. Just as it matters whether or not there was One People, so, too, does it matter whether there were instead, thirteen peoples organized into thirteen political societies - fourteen if one counts Vermont: completely irregular and self-created. One could easily imagine thirteen existing colonies, with a long history of separate political existence, sending their delegates to meet to discuss and coordinate resistance to the King of England, who, on the American revolutionaries’ most popular argument – an argument intended to take Parliament out of the loop - was the only thing giving unity to the British Empire. There is an added bonus: at no point in this story do we really need the concept of "sovereignty." VI. The Union Created Instantly Ex Nihilo For the Instant Nationalists, the fact that on July 4, 1776, representatives of the Colonies termed themselves "united" outweighs their claim to be "free and independent states." But this seems a rather feeble and indirect way to announce the arrival of a new, single, "sovereign" power in the world. This interpretation entirely dodges the possible meanings of "united": e.g., united in the struggle against England, united as Americans, etc. It tells us nothing about political arrangements as of that date or in the future. In addition, the One-Shot Declarationists pretend to believe that the Continental Congress next "authorized" the colonies to draw up constitutions for themselves as states. In the actual document, the word is "recommend." This is hardly the language of a supreme "national sovereign" addressing inferior political societies. Let us review some other opinions. Judge Samuel Chase said in Ware v. Hylton (1796) that colonial delegates had announced "not that the United Colonies jointly, in a collective capacity, were independent States, but that each had a right to govern itself by its own authority, and its own laws without any control from any other power on earth. I have ever considered it as an established doctrine of the States that all laws made by the legislatures of the several States after the declaration of independence were the laws of sovereign and independent States." Carl Becker wrote in 1922 that the Declaration presupposes "a conception of the [British] empire as a confederation of free peoples submitting themselves to the same king by an original compact voluntarily entered into, and terminable, in the case of any member, at the will of the people concerned." Note the distributive theme. Such things are lost on the Neo-Unionists, who leave the bulk of the document unread, in favor of endlessly dwelling on their five favorite words. The real mistake, as B. B. Kendrick said in his 1941 presidential address to the Southern Historical Association, was for the Southern states to ever enter into any union with the Northern states. Such is the wisdom of hindsight. But perhaps we are on Neo-Platonist ground with the union as eidos, or eternal form. Origen of Alexandria believed in the heavenly pre-existence of souls. Perhaps Neo-Unionists believe the union has existed from "time out of mind" in pre-created anticipation of an historical-salvational mission. But that comes near to Gnosticism, and I would never lumber Neo-Unionists with that, especially those of them who claim to have read, and understood, Eric Voegelin. So we come back to our more limited hermeneutical task. Nationalists could contend, I suppose, that anti-nationalists, too, read the evidence selectively; but Neo-Unionists seldom try to demonstrate that particular anti-nationalist readings are wrong. They prefer to sail above all that, gliding through high-minded clouds of inexorable and ineluctable inevitability in the Airbus of History. VIII. Hotel Columbia: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave It is a persistent pretended argument of Unionists that "unanimity" clinches the case. It is said to matter that the colonies issued a "unanimous" declaration in 1776. This is less than a tautology. By definition, any agreement is the unanimous act of those doing the agreeing. It tells us nothing about the agreement, the status of those agreeing, etc. No charter of unlimited, organic unity arises from the mere agreement to something. Lincoln held that, hypothetically, the states collectively could agree to dissolve the union, but that one state could not withdraw on its own. This undermines his own assertions about a single, aggregated people, but perhaps that people – via those ratifying conventions, which spoke only for separate states – agreed to subject its/their Oneness to some new rule, perhaps under the amending power. Why should this be so? The states were competent to confederate, withdraw to form another federation, and yet suddenly they are found incompetent to leave the latter? If Single Peoplehood decides the case, we might expect to find more evidence of such a people than appears to be available; or, if thirteen distinct peoples knowingly made themselves into a new people, we need to see more evidence of that than is usually offered. The theory of a clever swindle by Mr. Madison and his allies cannot decide things, either. It would have to be shown that the state conventions could alienate, unawares, the separate jurisdictions and rights of their constituents permanently and irrevocably. Lincoln did not "save" an existing union; he fashioned a new, involuntary one by his characteristic methods. X. Final Observations In June 1821, Justice Story wrote his colleague John Marshall regarding the dangerous doctrines of the Virginians. If those views prevailed, he said, "We should dread to see the government reduced as Virginia wished it, to a confederacy; & we [Federalists] are disposed to construe the Constitution of the U.S. as a frame of government & not as a petty charter granted to a paltry corporation for the purpose of regulating a fishery or collecting." Imagine, if you can, the Constitution treated as a practical business contract and the federal regime degraded to doing useful, menial jobs. Imagine the parties to the contract remaining superior to their Great Agent. The horror! No great empire was built by delivering the mail. Far-seeing men like James Madison have always known this. There is no public monument to the Unknown Subcontractor, but the Great Agent has given himself many monuments. Mr. Lincoln and his war made it possible for later presidents to eschew unheroic bourgeois escapism in favor of constant wars and moral uplift, at home and abroad. Now you can see why we must love him; and why DiLorenzo, for shaking our faith in Lincoln, has become a public enemy. The central state made war and war made the central state, to paraphrase Charles Tilly. "The truth is out there." ~ Fox Moulder I close with a word to interested readers who might ask how we might recover the authentic British North American political tradition? Given the sheer wealth of written material from our revolutionary era, I suggest that we read that, as opposed to brooding over a small number of more prestigious "texts," while hoping for some kind of cabalistic-alchemical-hermetic illumination or revelation. But I could be wrong. Read the original documents. Don’t take the nationalists’ word for it; and don’t take mine, either. Think for yourselves; you are not in public school any more. Get a sense of how 18th-century Americans used their language. War is too important to leave to the generals, and the historical origins of American political life are too important to leave to Neo-Unionists. Poster Comment: Happy Birthday Abe, you son of a bitch.
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