coloradoconfederatarian - JONES DEBATES CLAREMONT FELLOW RICHARD REEB

Snaggle-Tooth Jones Debates Claremont Fellow Richard Reeb on Lincoln, Claremont's Jaffian Interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, and the Right to Secession

I. Introduction, 11-10-09

What follows is a lengthy exchange Claremont Institute Fellow Richard Reeb and I had over the question of the Southern secession and the war waged by the North to force the Southern states back into the Union. Our debate was occasioned by an article written by Reeb entitled "Abraham Lincoln was truly a great man", which he published in commemoration of the Lincoln Bicentennial. I responded to the article in a blog entry, notified Mr. Reeb of its existence, and it all took off from there. I decided to collect the several blog entries and comments box responses here for easy accessibility. It is a long exchange, but well worth the read.

My initial response is in the dialect of Snaggle-Tooth Jones as you typically read it here. Subsequent responses are in "Yankee tawk", however, so that the long exchange will be easier to read.

Throughout the exchange, Reeb's comments will be identified by italicized bold. I respond to Reeb point by point.

I incorporate by reference a number of online sources, to which I provide links. It is of paramount importance that you read them.

BTW, here is Reeb's blog, for those of you who want to follow his work.

Now, without further ado. . .

II. Reeb's article "Abraham Lincoln was truly a great man."

III. Response of S. Jones, 2-10-09 blog entry, to the Reeb article.

Richard H. Reeb is a Claremontista blogger who blogs at John Andrews’ Claremontista “Backbone America ” . Bein’ Claremontistas, Reeb ’n Andrews are devotees of wut some people call the “Lincon Cult” , that assembly of faithful Yankee neocons who, followin’ th’ intellectual gurus of th’ cult, Leo Strauss and Harry V. Jaffa, thank ol’ Abe is jus’ th’ peachiest indervidual t’ come along since Jesus Christ. I write about th' Claremont Institute here, n’ y’all kin check my archive that contains blog entries that have t’ do with ‘em Claremont boys.

Ohn Feb. 9, 2009 Backbone America posted a blog entry by Reeb entitled “Abraham Lincoln truly was a great man.” How great, y’all ask? Reeb’s openin’ paragraph says a little sumthin’, I thank, ‘bout how effervescent them cult members all is ‘bout POTUS 16:

In his famous Lyceum Speech in 1839, Abraham Lincoln expressed his hope that George Washington would always be revered. Little did Lincoln know that he too would be revered and that more would be written about him than anyone except Jesus Christ.

‘L, none of them reverent tomes has anythin’ t’do with the actual truth ‘bout Abraham Lincoln. Ohn th’ contrary, they merely th’ result of two thangs: 1) th' truth of Barnum’s dictum that “there is a sucker born every minute”; and 2) th’ same kinda irrational hero worship we’ve recently observed in th’ fenomenon of “Honest Obe”, Barack Obama. See, wut happens is, folks git in th’ grip of some bad idear or of some intense emoshun that is fixed upohn some charismatic feller, ‘n it makes ‘em do, say ‘n write all sorts loopy thangs. Now, t’ be shore, thar are more dispashunate treatments of our “American Caesar” out thar ohn th’ library bookshelves, but so much of what has been written has indeed been marked by th’ kinda Messianic fervor in which th’ Claremonsters are complicit. All of it started, it seems with th’ propergaindists of the day who made all these loopy comparisons ‘twixt Lincoln and Our Lord. Outfits like Claremont simply carry ohn th’ tradition. Reeb continyurs:

Lincoln’s fame is deserved. He did not run for President simply to hold the office. Rather, he sought the office in order to deal with the nation’s greatest crisis.

“Infamy”, I thank, is th’ better word. Truth is, Lincoln was little more thin a corrupt and venal railroad lawyer who stumbled into th’ presidency much in th’ same way Bill Clinton did, ‘n thin further stumbled into th’ destruction of th’ old constitutional order - sorry, I mean th; “Declaration of Independence-inspired transformation of our nation” - for which he has become famous. As fir that “greatest crisis”, well, it all centered around a secession. You know, like what th’ 13 original colonies did in the late 18^th century. Ohn th' other haind, it cud be argued that th' real “crisis” wuz that Washington DC had become London.

When the Civil War ended, the nation finally ended slavery, the institution that massively contradicted our nation’s principles.

See? “Contradicted our nation’s principles.” Whenever y’all see such verbiage from a Claremonster, know right away that it is code language havin’ t’ do with they radical egalitarian readin’ of th’ Declaration of Independence, which I tawk about in this blog entry linked above. Buried somewhar in-att blog entry is a lank t’ a piece by League of the South’s Mike Tuggle, which is must readin’, so I’ll lank it here fir y’all. Th’ Declaration of Independence ain’t a governin’ document in th’ first place, but as Tuggle shows th' bottom line is-att it dohn’t really say wut th’ Jaffian egalitarians say it do. Reeb:

Not only that, the end of slavery invigorated commerce and caused a steady rise in the standard of living for millions of Americans. Whereas the nation once had enslaved nearly half of its population and had provided limited opportunities for much of the other half, after war’s end it turned its energies to an industrial revolution that made America rich and powerful.

‘L, there’s a lot t’ unpaick here. First of all, Reeb apparhs t’ have committed the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy here, as he fallaciously posits *causation* in the neck-sus of slavery’s abolition and “invigorated commerce.” Nor do Richard menshun th’ fact that an “invigorated commerce” wuz *alreddy* ohn th’ rise before slavery’s abolition. Maybe it wud have been even MORE vigorous had not th’ humble Tyrant from Illinois launched a devastatin’ war-att took 600,000+ lives and laid waste t’ th’ South. I wunder why that seems not-ta have crossed ol’ Richard’s mahnd. Wutever th' ainswer, Reeb seems-ta assume-att th’ industrial revolution wuz a positive good fir America, but us neo-agrarian Southern types wud say he’s begged th’ question in a big way. A discussion of-att thar particular issur, however, would take us beyond th’ scope-a this here discussion. He goes ohn:

Millions of Americans admire Lincoln for his statesmanship, yet some on the extreme left and right accuse him of hypocrisy, offenses against the Constitution and even tyranny. These charges are false.

‘N th’ fallacies continuer: “Millions of Americans admire. . .” Argumentum ad populum. “. . .some of the *extreme* left and right”. Poisoning the well. (We certainly kin write off what th’ “extremists” have t’ say.) Ho-hum.

But the charges ain’t false. Lincoln, in fact, wuz a hypocrite. Here are just a couple of exaimples: 1) In 1848, he wrote:

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. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movements.

My wut a diffurnce 13 years made. Almost makes one thank that by 1861 ole Abe came under such strohng outside influences that it made him compromise his principles in a big ol’ way. Power? Money? A “legacy?” All three?

2) Joseph Fallon writes of Lincoln ’s religious hypocrisy (combined with demagoguery) here. Lincoln wuz much like Bill Clinton is-iss regard.

‘N further, is the charge false-att Lincoln committed “offenses against the Constitution and even tyranny?” ‘L, it’s funny ol’ Richard wud say so here, since he contradicts himself in a paragraph below, where he writes-att Lincoln “exercised ‘extra constitutional’ power to protect freedom.” Well, a power exercised “extra” (= “outside of”) th’ Constitution is by definition “against” the Constitution, and is tharfore an exercise of “tyrannical” power. Reeb hems and haws ‘bout this below, mentioning only one specific, that of the arguably constitutional act of suspendin’ habeas corpus durin’ wartime. But ol’ Richard fails t’ give us th’ whole panoplee of Abe’s ururpations. Here is list fir th’ uneducated. Next, Richard writes:

The black power movement and remnants of Confederate sympathizers would seem to have little in common, but in fact both have denounced Lincoln. Both believe that Lincoln didn’t really care as much about freeing Americans of African descent as he did in wielding power. Their common error, to put it charitably, is to ignore the circumstances in which Lincoln’s statesmanship was employed.

“Remnants of Confederative sympathizers?” Yes, “we few. We happy few.” Like Henry V’s raggly army at Agincort. Like the 7,000 non-bowers God has reserved for Hisseff. I giss we kin accept the label, speshly since accordin’ t’ a recent Zogby poll 1 in 5 Americans believes in th’ right of a state t’ secede from th’ Union. Not a bad percentage after almost 150 years-a Yankee propergangder and us bein' whittled down t' a "remnant." But I die-griss.

So, Reeb’s a- tellin’ us att th’ next few paragraphs’ll be devoted t’ enlightnin’ all us Confederate remnants and black lefty boobs-att Lincoln didn’t really mean what he wrote t’ Horace Greeley in 1862:

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." **If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union;** and what I forbear, I forbear because I don't believe it would help to save the Union.

Naw, we cain’t take Lincoln at his word here. Need-ta “explain”, rather, them “circumstances in which Lincoln’s statesmanship was employed.” So here he goes:

In his campaign against the spread of slavery following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Lincoln found himself in the middle between passionate abolitionists who disregarded public opinion, and pro-slavery men who were determined to spread slavery wherever they could.

There was no majority in favor of the abolition of slavery, but many Americans were determined to prevent domination of the country by slavemasters. This position was grounded in the judgment that slavery was wrong and, though too powerful to be abolished, must be prevented from spreading.

We need to understand that when slavery was legal most people were slow to turn against it. Lincoln walked a fine line in the North between those few who favored abolition and many more who hated slavery because it had brought Negroes into the country.

Lincoln contended that slavery was wrong because it denied the fundamental rights of human beings, and that its expansion ultimately threatened the rights of whites no less than blacks. Color may have been an excuse but it hardly limited the desires of slave masters.

Lincoln was reviled by northern Democrats for declaring in his 1858 Senate campaign in Illinois that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln invoked that Biblical passage to condemn the efforts of slavemasters to make slavery national. He did not call for the abolition of slavery where it existed.

Lincoln did not originally support full civil rights for those held as slaves for such a goal was not yet possible. It was enough that slavery should be restricted to where it already was.

Fortunately, more Americans opposed than supported the spread of slavery and even more the attempt at secession by 11 southern states. While both abolitionists and Democrats wavered in the face of rebellion, Lincoln never abandoned his determination to preserve the Union or his commitment to the ultimate extinction of slavery.

After hundreds of thousands of Americans became casualties in a terrible conflict, it became clear to Lincoln that the war could no longer be fought simply to preserve slavery. As a war measure, as well as to propound a greater purpose, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in rebel states and thereby encouraged them to abandon their masters and even to join the Union Army.

Now, it’s anybody’s giss as t’ how any of th’ foregoin’ mixture of historical fact ‘n Reeby interpretation gainsays th’ “Confederate remnant/black power movement’s” belief-att “Lincoln didn’t really care as much about freeing Americans of African descent as he did in wielding power.” The letter t’ Greeley says it all, really, and nothin’ ol’ Richard writes above proves anythin’ other thin’ th’ fact that Lincoln wuz a politician’s politician, able t’ employ lofty abolitionists demagoguery ‘n shrewd political tactics (e.g., the Emancipation Proclamation) in order-ta achieve one goal, ‘n one goal alone, th’ defeat of th’ Confederacy ‘n thus th’ restoration of “national authority.” **National authority** - that wuz th word he used t’ describe his sole concern in his letter t’ Greeley. Not “justice”. Not “equality.” Not “liberty.” Not "abolition". ‘N certainly not “the rule of law.” But “national authority” – whose marriage t’ monied interests had already been consummated. Lincoln knew wut wuz at stake here, ‘n att’s why he no longer believe in th’ right of secession as he did in 1848.

Lincoln was no usurper, but he did not hesitate to use his powers to preserve the Union. When the Maryland state legislaturemet to vote for secession, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and arrested all those who intended to take that fateful step. The loss of Maryland would have isolated the nation’s capital behind rebel lines.

Yesirree, Lincoln wuz a usurper, par excellence, as the DiLorenzo article ‘bout Lincoln’s abuses lanked above does show. His actions in Maryland in preventing a *legal* secession is yet one more instance.

In his trenchunt essay Hijacking the Conservative Movement, Joe Sobran notes how even some of Lincoln’s staunchest modern supporters implicitly acknowledge that he “usurped” th’ existin’ constitutional order:

Claiming sovereignty for the Federal Government, Lincoln felt justified in violating the Constitution in order to “save the Union” — by which he meant “saving” Federal sovereignty. One of the best-kept secrets of American history is that many if not most Northerners thought the Southern states had the right to secede. This is why Lincoln shut down hundreds of newspapers and arrested thousands of critics of his war. He had to wage a propaganda war against the North itself.

Were you told this in your history classes? Neither was I. We are still being told that Lincoln’s cause was the cause of liberty; just as we are told that he was the friend of the black man, though he wanted the freed slaves to be sent abroad, leaving an all-white America. Lincoln had a dream too, but it wasn’t Martin Luther King’s.

Lincoln achieved what the Princeton historian James MacPherson calls “the Second American Revolution,” giving the Federal Government virtually full authority over the internal affairs of the states. Columbia’s George Fletcher credits him with creating “a new Constitution.” A third historian, Garry Wills of Northwestern University, says he “changed America,” transforming our understanding of the Constitution.

Mind you, these are not Lincoln’s critics — they are his champions! Do they listen to themselves? They are saying exactly what Jefferson Davis said: that Lincoln was abandoning the original Constitution! But they think this is a high compliment. Lincoln himself claimed he was “saving” the old Constitution. His admirers, without realizing it, are telling us a very different story. (Emphasis ol' Jones'.)

A usurper he wuz ‘n will always remain. Continyun ohn, Reeb writes:

As political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa has written, President Lincoln in dealing with rebellion exercised extra constitutional power to protect freedom, in contrast to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who may have been more scrupulous but was dedicated to preserving slavery. That made all the difference.

‘N so, from th’ horse’s mouth we git an admission that Lincoln’s actions were “extra constitutional.” I’d say “case closed” in favor of th’ Confederate’s argument and end my response right here, but I have t’ commint as well on this Jaffareebian argumint that “freedom” is what ensued from all this. That has t’be th’ most laughable part of th’ Claremonster’s apology. Freedom for whom? Well, yes, fir th’ slaves, but as th’ title of an absolutely indipensibel book by libertarian economist/historian Jeffery Hummel suggests, it wuz at th’ same time Emancipating Slaves (and) Enslaving Free Men. Hummel is one of a number of scholars who convincin’ly argue that slavery’s days in th’ South were numbered 'n that any war to free the slaves wuz unnecessary. That war was launched, rather, to force th' secedin' states baick into th' Union, as Lincoln sed it was all about in his letter t' Greeley. But wut happened wuz, yes, the emancipation of the black man, but principally the loss of liberty fir th’ South, as H. L. Mencken noted:

But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—"that government of the people, by the people, for the people," should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.

But this here loss of freedom, as Hummel argues, would come t’ be felt by th’ entire nation, ‘n more so as time went ohn, th’ centralizin’ nature of Lincoln’s War destroyin’ th’ old federalism ‘n usherin’ in th’ age of th’ American Empire. We all know wut happens t’ liberty in empires, ‘n today we observe our liberties fadin’ away further under th’ “rule” of both th’ imperial Dems ‘n th’ imperial Repubs, who are equally plagued by th’ Lincolnian pathology.

Naw, freedom wasn’t the result of wut Lincoln did. Statism wuz. A statism that wuz t’ receive additional infusions of power under such American strongmen as FDR. Lincoln and Franklin: two peas in a pod. I jus' laff, tharfore, when I see Repubniks git so exercised whin Obama puts ohn th' Lincolnian mantle.

In lite-a all this, I jus’ have t’ laff as well at Reeb’s concludin’ paragraph:

This Thursday, Feb. 12,we should honor Lincoln on the 200^th anniversary of his birth, for he well deserves the titles of Savior of the Union and Great Emancipator. He saved America for freedom.

Keep yir version of “freedom”, ye damn fool libruls ‘n no-account neocons. We secesh remnants will keep ours - and practice it whether y’all make it legal or illegal – while we take the long, long view of history, at th' side of others whom ye’ve marginalized, such as th’ Serbs. As General Robert E. Lee wrote, “it is history that teaches us to hope,” and it is in akkordance with such hope that we look forward t’ the day that either we or our descendants daince on y’all’s graves.

Naw, Richard, count me out. Ohn Thursday, Feb. 12 'n th' follerin' Monday, I plan t’ fly th’ First National, have me some Rebel Yell whiskey, ‘n smoke me a Fonseca Cubano Limitado CEE-gar in honor of th’ Foundin’ Fathers (includin’ Lee’s relative, George Washington), th' anti-Federalists, th' Southrons and they beloved Confederacy (with special honor goin’ to’ South Carolina), and of men such as Lee and Jackson, each of whom, like I've sed before, wuz four times th’ man Abraham Lincoln wuz.

IV. Reeb's first reply to my 2-10-09 blog entry, dated 2-12-09.

I read your reply which turns out to be nothing more than a long-winded rant. Unconstrained by space, you succeed only in denying, not disproving, what you prefer not to believe. Lincoln's view of the Declaration and the Constitution was exactly the same as the leading founders, particularly the framers of the Constitution. At the end you salute the anti-federalists, which makes perfect sense, as you evidently share with them a hostile attitude toward the achievement of the Federal Convention of 1787, which was to establish a central government with powers dependent upon the people, not the states, and grounded in the document which made the case for our independence. You have swallowed Calhoun's argument hook, line and sinker. Your endorsement of secession for the purpose of perpetuating slavery has nothing to do with the Constitution, which compromised with slavery only out of necessity. No leader of any political party ever endorsed secession, not Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, J.Q. Adams, Jackson, not to mention Clay or Webster. Many southerners opposed secession but were intimidated by ultras who could not make the simple distinction between opposing the spread of slavery (the Republican position) and advocating its abolition. Secessionists and abolitionists were brothers under the skin for the latter acquiesed at first in secession in order to avoid the moral taint of continued association with slavery. But their stance freed no slave, and the southern position was no different. Slavery would not have "withered away" inasmuch as its custodians were determined to take all over the country and into Latin America, beginning with Cuba. It is silly to imagine such withering, for no despotism has been ended without strenuous opposion, most often by war. Hitler approved of the slaveocracy and regretted its defeat in the Civil War. Imagine if the South had won. America could not have provided the decisive edge in the two world wars and the Cold War. Your thinking is as small as that of the anti-federalists, whose fear of tyranny was counterproductive because they could not distinguish between the energetic government established by the Constitution and genuinely oppressive government. It's too bad that Lincoln did not arrest every man who agreed to lead armies for the secessionist movement. That was plain treason. But the horrendous leadership of James Buchanan gave the secession respectability it did not deserve. Nation wrecking never deserves it.

I will give you this much. At least you quoted every sentence in my article. That way a fair-minded reader can see how you have misrepresented it. But I fear it just means you are unimpressed with the truth.

V. Jones' first response to above.

Welcome to the Colorado Confederatarian, Mr. Reeb, where I, Snaggle-Tooth Jones, gladly accept comments critical of my arguments, even though neither you nor your fellow Claremonster John Andrews extend to me the same courtesy over at "Backbone" America. I will be responding to your reply above in due course. Tonight I have some other matters to address on this blog.

VI. S. Jones' second response to Reeb's 2-12-09 reply, dated 2-14-09.

As promised, my rejoinder to the comment Richard Reeb posted here. (Text of Reeb's comment is in bolded italics.)

I read your reply which turns out to be nothing more than a long-winded rant.

Mr. Reeb, it would appear you are unfamiliar with what a “rant” is, so let me help you out. A “rant” is defined as a “harangue; a loud bombastic declamation expressed with strong emotion”. With the *possible* exception of the last couple of paragraphs of my response, where I in essence tell you what I think of your Yankee view of “freedom”, nowhere did I “rant.” And even then those last paragraphs were only slightly rant-like. Rather, I refuted your lame article, coolly and with specificity, point by bloody point.

Unconstrained by space, you succeed only in denying, not disproving, what you prefer not to believe.

Yes, well, you’ll obviously have to forgive my being “unconstrained by space.” You see, it is my blog, after all, for which I pay a fee, and I’m therefore entitled to be just as “long winded” as I want to be. As for your contention that I’ve merely denied, not disproved, what I prefer not to believe, objective readers can decide for themselves whether or not that’s true, just as they can judge the merits of my response to you here. Like I said, and as I told you I was going to do in the mail I sent you after I read your article, I not only “denied” what you alleged in your article, I showed you exactly *why* I denied it, point by point. I demonstrated not only factual error on your part, but pointed out several instances of illogic as well. Maybe you should take another look.

Lincoln's view of the Declaration and the Constitution was exactly the same as the leading founders, particularly the framers of the Constitution.

Well, sez you, along with the rest of the Claremont Cult. But to so allege only begs the question. A number of commentators have noted that Lincoln seems unfamiliar with the arguments made in the Federalist Papers. If he wasn't, that proves fatal to your argument. Regadless, critics and supporters of Lincoln both have amply shown how Lincoln totally morphed the old constitutional order, destroying the delicate balance of the original federalism and putting the country on the course to super-centralized government. In so doing he paved the way for American strongmen like FDR.

At the end you salute the anti-federalists, which makes perfect sense, as you evidently share with them a hostile attitude toward the achievement of the Federal Convention of 1787, which was to establish a central government with powers dependent upon the people, not the states, and grounded in the document which made the case for our independence. You have swallowed Calhoun's argument hook, line and sinker.

Yes, indeed I do salute the anti-Federalists and Calhoun, and that’s also why I see the Confederate constitution as something of a corrective to the Federal constitution. History has proven the anti-Federalists’ fears to be warranted, and thank God for their agitation on behalf of the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. Even with the delineation of those rights, we’ve seen how the Federal behemoth has whittled away at them, especially in the area of states’ rights.

As to your assertion that the federal government crafted in Philadelphia was “dependent upon the people, not the states”, well, that’s just more Claremontian hoo-haw. It was the states, not the “people”, who debated the new constitution. It was the states that ratified it. Two, perhaps three, of those states ratified it expressly on the condition that they reserved their right to secede. And in his struggle to outline the character of the new nation, James Madison wrote in Federalist 39:

First. In order to ascertain the real character of the government it may be considered in relation to the foundation on which it is to be established; to the sources from which its ordinary powers are to be drawn; to the operation of those powers; to the extent of them; and to the authority by which future changes in the government are to be introduced.

In examining the first relation, it appears on one hand that the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation; but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act therefore establishing the Constitution, will not be a national but a federal act. . . .

Each State in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body independent of all others, and *only to be bound by its own voluntary act.* In this relation then the new Constitution will, if established, be a federal and not a national Constitution. (Emphasis mine.)

The Founding Fathers’ and Framers’ sometimes use the term “confederation” in reference to the new constitutional entity, and indeed the creation of the “Confederate” constitution, in addition to being the chief governing document of the seceding states, was an attempt to restore American federalism as originally created.

Moreover, even the astute observer of the new American government Alexis de Tocqueville understood the nature of the order. It "was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right to do so."

As one commentator correctly observes, “Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation or the Constitution’s ratification process allowed the American people to form a national government. Before the states could have made themselves into a nation, they would have had to cease to exist at some point in time. They never did that.” Thomas Naylor opines on this matter in a must read article.

Besides, it bends credulity to think that the Framers would have in essence foreclosed the possibility of secession in the new constitution, *when America itself was born in an act of secession.* Here’s something I regularly throw in the face of the Jaffaites: if the Southern secession from the Union was illegal, so was the American colonists’ secession from England. In response, they typically reach into their magic bag of Jaffian apologies and present some distinction between a “revolution” and a “secession”, the former being justified and the latter being unjustified, while minimizing the fact that America’s revolution was also a “secession” and the Confederate’s secession was in some sense a "revolution." How convenient. And sophistical.

Then of course there was this fellow who opined on the right to secession/revolution:

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. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movements. (Emphasis mine.)

The notion that the federal constitution came about by an action of the “people” and not the states is a legal fiction that was invented by Lincoln & Co. in the second half of the 19^th century and is perpetuated by the likes of Harry Jaffa and other Lincoln worshippers today to counter the confederalist argument that, as states voluntarily entered the Union, they may voluntarily leave it. But that Lincolnian/Jaffian legal fiction won’t bear a moment’s scrutiny in light of both constitutional history and express statements made by some of the leading political luminaries and legal commentators of the day, a few of whose utterances I will quote below.

Your endorsement of secession for the purpose of perpetuating slavery has nothing to do with the Constitution, which compromised with slavery only out of necessity. No leader of any political party ever endorsed secession, not Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, J.Q. Adams, Jackson, not to mention Clay or Webster.

First of all, Mr. Reeb, I personally don’t endorse “secession for the purpose of perpetuating slavery”, as such, and I’m not going to allow you to score cheap rhetorical points here. I endorse the right of a state to secede, period. In 1861 the secession was partly bound up with the issue of slavery. The threatened secessions of certain New England states c. 1807 and South Carolina in 1832, however, were not. In all three cases, those states had the right to secede, whether or not you want to recognize that right.

Of course, it’s entirely irrelevant that “no leader of any *political party* ever endorsed secession”, and besides that you’re quite wrong. Thomas Jefferson did in fact endorse the right of secession. His remarks on the subject are well-known, and I’m surprised that you seem aware of them. Or of J.Q. Adams sentiments made known during the Texas annexation controversy:

The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several states of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bands of political associations will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.

In 1825, Constitutional commentator (and abolitionist) William Rawle wrote in his famous treatise, A View of the Constitution, “It depends on the State itself to retain or abolish the principles of representation, because it depends on itself whether or not it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases a right to determine how they will be governed.”

The foregoing gives the lie to your argument, Mr. Reeb, that no person of note in early American history believed in the right to secession. While he wasn't 100% consistent on the issue, Jefferson is the most important witness here, and in light of the fact that he authored a secessionist document called the Declaration of Independence, it only makes sense that he would later indicate in various quotes that a state in fact may legally secede from the Union. See The Legality of Secession.

Many southerners opposed secession but were intimidated by ultras who could not make the simple distinction between opposing the spread of slavery (the Republican position) and advocating its abolition. Secessionists and abolitionists were brothers under the skin for the latter acquiesed at first in secession in order to avoid the moral taint of continued association with slavery. But their stance freed no slave, and the southern position was no different.

True, many Southerners did oppose secession and were thus intimidated. Many Northerners, on the other hand, vociferously defended the right of secession and opposed Lincoln’s war. Many of these opponents were not only “intimidated”, but persecuted by Lincoln’s mad regime. And yes, the planting class political elites did use the abolitionist phenomenon to whip up war fervor in the South, but to reduce the cause of the war to agitation of the planting class on the Southern side and of the abolitionists on the Northern side is to engage in the most simplistic sort of analysis. The causes of separation had been brewing for decades, and were mostly unconnected with the issue of slavery. Surely you know this.

Slavery would not have "withered away" inasmuch as its custodians were determined to take all over the country and into Latin America, beginning with Cuba. It is silly to imagine such withering, for no despotism has been ended without strenuous opposition, most often by war.

Again, sez you. Scholars such as Hummel say otherwise, and both common sense and the observation of historical trend indicate otherwise. You’ll forgive me for preferring the judgment of scholars such as Hummel and the dictates of common sense and empirical observation over your ideologically-driven opinion on the matter. The fact is, slavery was on the way out everywhere. It was abolished in Brazil by 1888, and in Nigeria, the last holdout, by 1910. The pressures to abolish it were external, as you know, and internal, as you’ve admitted above in your observation that there was even opposition to slavery in the South. The South could have not long withstood these pressures, and regardless, with the rapid evolution of farming technology, the economic rationale for slavery would eventually have been destroyed. So, the only one being “silly” here is you, especially when you say that “no despotism has been ended without strenuous opposition, most often by war.” First of all, you’re equivocating here with respect to the word “despotism”, applying to the phenomenon of American slavery when it really doesn’t apply. Then you ignore the obvious fact that, in Western slavery’s case, it was EVERYWHERE abolished peacefully. Everywhere, that is, except in the United States, via a wholly unnecessary war that was initiated by a man who expressly said that he did not have the abolition of slavery in view when he invaded the South.

Hitler approved of the slaveocracy and regretted its defeat in the Civil War.

Roll eyes. Now why am I not surprised to see you play the Hitler card? Shall I invoke Godwin’s Law now, Mr. Reeb? Talk about grasping for straws. OK, so Hitler approved of slaveocracy. He also hated the Communists. Does that make him a conservative? Karl Marx approved of Lincoln’s war, and the likes of Hugo Chavez and General Pervez Musharraf have invoked Lincoln in defense of their own heavy-handed actions against the people. So there.

Imagine if the South had won. America could not have provided the decisive edge in the two world wars and the Cold War.

Of course, here you assume that there would have been two world wars and a Cold War had the South won. Doesn’t it dawn on you that hypotheticals such as this one would entail corresponding changes in the course of world history? Moreover, do you really suffer from such a lack of imagination that you can’t acknowledge that a confederation of republics in the United States could have presented just as much of a deterrent effect to European despots as a unified nation could?

Your thinking is as small as that of the anti-federalists, whose fear of tyranny was counterproductive because they could not distinguish between the energetic government established by the Constitution and genuinely oppressive government.

Please tell me again, in light of the previous response, whose thinking is “small.” Regarding the anti-Federalists, as the article I linked above argues, their opposition to the federal order has been vindicated. Our so-called “energetic” government is quickly becoming oppressive government, as the anti-Federalists feared it would. If you don’t believe so, your are either wholly oblivious to the facts or living in some alternate mental universe.

It's too bad that Lincoln did not arrest every man who agreed to lead armies for the secessionist movement. That was plain treason. But the horrendous leadership of James Buchanan gave the secession respectability it did not deserve. Nation wrecking never deserves it.

Ah, so you reveal yourself to be more of a “radical Republican” here, eh? Well, that’s telling, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m tempted to respond that it’s too bad the Rebs didn’t finish it at First Manassas, when they had a clear path to Washington DC and beyond. But there was a lot of confusion and fatigue after that rout, and besides, as someone pointed out over at Chronicles a day or so ago, the Confederates weren’t interested in destroying DC. They just wanted to be left alone.

No matter. Not only did Lincoln NOT arrest the likes of Lee, but they became heroes of sorts to many Northerners. It’s only with the advent of political correctness, which you pseudo-conservative ideologues at Claremont have imbibed deeply, that Christian men such as Lee and Jackson have become men who should have been arrested instead of men fighting for what they believed to be a noble cause, and hence emulated.

I felt it necessary to quote every sentence in your article, because your article was nonsensical from first to last, and accordingly deserved a complete refutation. As for the charge that I have “misrepresented” your “truthful” article, well, I see you are woefully short on specifics here. It’s awfully hard to “misrepresent” an article when the entire article is reproduced, is it not Mr. Reeb? Clearly, your gripe with me is really that I have laid bare the deficiencies of your argument, and so you’re reduced to grasping for straws in the form of making unsubstantiated sweeping assertions. Pitiful

VII. Reeb’s first reponse to my 2-14-09 above, dated 2/16/09. (Incorporated into my 2-17-09 reply.)

Thank you for your lengthy and considered response. Let's turn the question of the nature of the American Union. From The Federalist No. 39: "The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government. If the plan of the convention, therefore, be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible."

This passage makes it clear that Publius, like Lincoln, understood the Constitution to be based on the republican principles of the revolution (expressed in the Declaration of Independence). That means that the Constitution, however characterized by compromise out of the necessity of accommodating the slave states, is a document for securing, as it says in the Preamble, "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The purpose of the Constitution, in other words, is to put into practice the principles of the Declaration. Freedom and slavery are incompatible.

Another quotation from the same number speaks to the national/federal question:

"The difference between a federal and national government, as it relates to the OPERATION OF THE GOVERNMENT, is supposed to consist in this, that in the former the powers operate on the political bodies composing the Confederacy, in their political capacities; in the latter, on the individual citizens composing the nation, in their individual capacities. On trying the Constitution by this criterion, it falls under the NATIONAL, not the FEDERAL character; though perhaps not so completely as has been understood. In several cases, and particularly in the trial of controversies to which States may be parties, they must be viewed and proceeded against in their collective and political capacities only. So far the national countenance of the government on this side seems to be disfigured by a few federal features. But this blemish is perhaps unavoidable in any plan; and the operation of the government on the people, in their individual capacities, in its ordinary and most essential proceedings, may, on the whole, designate it, in this relation, a NATIONAL government."

Publius acknowledges, as he must, that the proposed constitution is a mixture of national and federal features, and it is no coincidence that the central issue for him, a nationalist, is the operation of the government's powers directly on the people. Notice the language he uses to describe the federalism: "the national countenance . . .[is] disfigured by a few federal features," which he calls a "blemish." Just as compromise with slavery was necessary, so too was compromise with state pretensions to national governance.

In your obvious preference for the anti-federalists over the Federalists, it is clear that your quarrel is not merely with Lincoln, but with the framers of the Constitution. In that respect, you are indeed a follower of Calhoun, whose interpretation of the Constitution and his "Disquisition on Government" go to extraordinary lengths to transform the true character of the Constitution and of government as such in the public mind. That was necessary to lay the groundwork for his secessionist doctrine, which has no support in the Constitution. That the people acted through state conventions merely means that the framers of the Constitution relied upon existing modes and orders, nothing more. For it took nine states to make it law, not 13, as in the Articles of Confederation, which truly was a federal system.

You have not refuted my point about the position of every prominent leader on the national government's supremacy in its areas of jurisdiction. As for Jefferson, he was criticized by his friend James for the extreme position in the Kentucky Resolution, which he wrote. Madison, the author of the Virginia Resolution, never affirmed the right of a state to interpose its authority between the federal government and the people. Jefferson, by his actions regarding the Louisiana Purchase and the embargo, showed that he governed on a national, not a federal basis. The comments of William Rawle are of no relevance here.

You concede my points about secessionist intimidation and abolitionist agreement with states' rights doctrine. The first was powerful in the south but the latter was weak in the north. As for your claim that the doctrine was invoked regarding non-slavery issues, that is only partly correct. Many southerners opposed the Alien Act of 1798 because they feared it would enable the federal government to deport slaves. And South Carolina opposed the 1832 tariff because it would price British manufactures of southern cotton out of American markets, cotton produced by slave labor, the backbone of the southern economy. Southern ultras misrepresented Republican views on the extension of slavery, calling it abolitionism, in order to divert attention from their own agenda, which was, again, to take slavery to all states and territories, and even to Latin America, beginning with Cuba. That is hardly the stance of a region that would acquiesce in the imaginary withering away of slavery. That's no "sez you," but the policy of the Democratic party, north and south, the former holding that the people a right to establish slavery in the old Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, contrary to the Missouri Compromise.

Granted, slavery was abolished peacefully in the Western world, especially in countries such as Great Britain that did not have millions of slaves in the country. No reasonable person in 1860-61 would have imagined that the Southern slavemasters had any intention whatsoever of abolishing slavery. In any case, the necessary condition for its abolition is the principle that "all men are created equal" in their rights "to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The South's spokesmen were arguing that slavery was a "positive good" and that equality was a "self evident lie." The necessary corollary to this is that the Negro is not a human being. It would have helped if the South decided that abolishing slavery was in its own interest, but it was unlikely to as long as its attitude was so hostile even to gradual emancipation.

Your point about Hitler and Marx is fair. But Hitler, knowing the outcome, genuinely regretted it. Why is that? Because the slaveocracy and National Socialism both reject equal rights and believe in the right of a privileged class to rule. As for Marx, he believed that the full development of capitalism was necessary before there could be a socialist or communist revolution. So extinguishing the Southern plantation system was necessary for the industrial development of the United States. But Marx, like slavery apologists, looked upon the factory system as cruel to the workers. Marx in The Communist Manifesto, idealized feudalism, which the plantation system resembled more than did the industrial north. George Fitzhugh condemned the northern system before the outcome of the Civil War enabled it to reach its full potential. Marx also held that only the working class was entitled to political rights, with the Communist party as its vanguard. Government by the people, as in the United States and Europe, was supposedly a sham that obscured the real rule by the captains of industry. On this point, Fitzhugh and Marx were as one.

I am confident that a disunited America would not have been effective in the major conflicts of the 20th century for the same reason that the framers of the Constitution rejected the Articles of Confederation. A government that must depend upon requisitions from sovereign states is no government at all.

If the anti-federalists' fears have been proved right, like AIDS it took a very long time for the usurpations they warned about to occur. It is ironic, is it not, that the greatest example of judicial tyranny was the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which in defiance of precedents, history and constitutional principle, denied that Congress had power to keep slavery out of the territories. The same court held that "the black man has no rights which the white man was bound to respect." But consider what Publius writes in The Federalist No. 42:

"The regulation of foreign commerce, having fallen within several views which have been taken of this subject, has been too fully discussed to need additional proofs here of its being properly submitted to the federal administration. It were doubtless to be wished, that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808, or rather that it had been suffered to have immediate operation. But it is not difficult to account, either for this restriction on the general government, or for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed. It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government, and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren!"

Publius condemns the foreign slave trade in no uncertain terms, just as Jefferson had done in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. The federal government's powers over foreign and interstate commerce are inseparable, and its authority over federal territories is exclusive. In any case, it is clear that blacks have the same God-given rights as whites, which they did not enjoy simply because state laws were passed in violation of those rights.

Arresting southern generals would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in a lost cause. For while the Union struggled at first, its greater manpower and superior resources made its victory almost inevitable. Of course, the rest of the story is an improvement in Union generalship.

I know that Lee and Jackson were Christian men, but we judge men in public life by their actions, not their religious convictions. The Bible obviously takes slavery as the way of the world, but it makes no distinctions between races as far as the authority of its teaching is concerned, and the New Testament is imbued with what St. Paul called "the spirit of liberty." The Lord said, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

Again, I commend you for quoting my comments in full. I take part in this discussion in the hopes that you will eventually see the light.

VIII. Jones' brief reply to a certain snarky comment above, dated 2-17-09.

I take part in this discussion in the hopes that you will eventually see the light.

Well, I at least credit you for at least being willing to take part in that discussion. That's more than I can say for any number of online personalities I've challenged.

As for me, I will take place in this discussion in hopes of convincing you - and others who may be looking in - that there is little if any light on your side to be seen.

IX. Reeb's second response to my 2-14-09, dated 2-17-09. (MY 11-10-09 REPLY FOLLOWS IMMEDIATELY.)

Another point needs to be made about secession. There is serious difficulty likening southern secessionism to the American revolution, and no less Madison's and Jefferson's protests against the Alien and Sedition Acts. In the latter two cases, the object was freedom, not slavery. No shots were fired in 1775 to save slavery but indeed many understood at the time that the same natural rights principle that undergirds the rights of the whites must be extended, sooner or later, to the blacks. That's why all the northern states ended legal slavery by the time of the Federal Convention of 1787. That's why Virginia wanted to send the foreign slave trade. Granted, it's easier to make these decisions when you have few slaves or, in the case of Virginia, all the slaves you need, but the principle of equal rights for all was the ultimate basis. The secessionists of 1860-61 rejected the principles of the revolution.

Madison and Jefferson feared that the right of the people to express their opinions about the government was at risk and believed that the federal government was at that time the greatest threat to their rights. Nevertheless, Madison explicitly grounded his protest in the right of the people to "freely examine public characters," which goes well beyond state rights.

As for states' rights as propounded by the secessionists, it was not grounded in individual freedom but in the power of the state to govern according to what the most powerful members of society determined. It was the rule of a corrupt plantocracy, that denied the rights of poor whites no less than blacks held as slaves. One can see a resemblance between the founding generation and the southern rebels only if one ignores the principles which animated the former and were rejected by the latter.

Having read the above three paragraphs several times now, I’m left scratching my head wondering how what you’ve written here is actually relevant to the question of whether or not the American revolution was an act of secession. Claremontistas are fond of finessing the revolution/secession distinction in order to show why the American revolution was justified while the Confederate secession was not, I know, but I’ve never been able to see that argument as anything but sophistry. Same with your argument here. As I’ve said previously, it MAKES NO DIFFERENCE, Richard, that the motivations of the Southern secessionists were somewhat different than those of the Colonial rebels. It also MAKES NO DIFFERENCE that the North was more amenable, generally speaking, to abolition than was the South. The issue is whether or not a state, having come to the conclusion that it can no longer abide the situation, has a right to secede from the Union. And everything, from the conditions under which the states entered into the Union in the firsat place, where certain states expressly reserved the right to secede, to the comments of Jefferson, Rawle, et al., points to the conclusion that a state may in fact secede from the Union, just as the colonies could secede from the British empire. As to the question of rebellion vs. secession, this seems to me an instance of the either/or fallacy. Acts of secession can be acts of rebellion and vice versa.

X. S. Jones response to Reeb's 2-16-09 and 2-17-09, dated 2/17/09.

This will be my third response to Richard H. Reeb on the question of Abraham Lincoln and his war to keep the seceding Southern states in the Union. Mr. Reeb's initial article and my first response to it can be read here. He replies in a comments box there. My second response can be read here. The following is Reeb's comment there interspersed with my answers. Mr. Reeb's comments are again noted in bolded italics:

______________________________________________________

Thank you for your lengthy and considered response. Let's turn the question of the nature of the American Union. From The Federalist No. 39: "The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government. If the plan of the convention, therefore, be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible."

This passage makes it clear that Publius, like Lincoln, understood the Constitution to be based on the republican principles of the revolution (expressed in the Declaration of Independence).

So far, well and good. The aim was republicanism. As we shall see among other things, however, the question is whether or not we were able to "keep" the republic pursuant to Franklin's warning, and what role Lincoln may have played in our inability to keep it.

That means that the Constitution, however characterized by compromise out of the necessity of accommodating the slave states, is a document for securing, as it says in the Preamble, "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The purpose of the Constitution, in other words, is to put into practice the principles of the Declaration. Freedom and slavery are incompatible.

And here is where the Claremont school, and you following it, begin to go astray. Once again you merely assume that the Declaration of Independence is an egalitarian manifesto. In my previous responses I have demonstrated to you amply why it is not and egalitarian document, but you nevertheless leave that point unaddressed. You've assumed here what you should have proved.

Furthermore, when you note the provision from the Preamble that one of the purposes of the new constitution is to secure "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity", you appear to assume the Framers were including any Africans freed from the yoke of slavery. If so that is an odd construction to be sure, but more than that, it flies in the face of the facts. The facts are that there was much public discussion in the early decades after ratification as to what might be done with freed slaves. The overwhelming consensus at the time was that they should be repatriated to Africa. And this was because, as some of the Founders in essence noted, the new American republics were the continuation of a *Euro-Anglo culture* here in the new world. It was evident to them, or most of them at least, that the two cultures could never co-exist. It is with that backdrop that the words"ourselves and our posterity" should be understood. Now, they were wrong about that, of course: as Sen. James Webb argued wrote in a somewhat different context, the American system became "so populist and assimilative that other ethnic groups have gravitated toward it." And many American blacks did successfully assimilate into the system, though there is a question as to whether or not the modern black community's love of socialism has impeded that journey.

Getting back to the main point,however, neither the Declaration nor the Constitution can be invoked as egalitarian documents. They were, as you've noted, republican. And republicanism, unlike deomcracy, gives a place to rule by elites. The elites of that day were white Euro-Anglo-Celts, and the presumption of the Framers was that the blessings of liberty were to be secured for "ourselves and our posterity" - meaning white Euro-Anglo-Celts.

Another quotation from the same number speaks to the national/federal question:

In your obvious preference for the anti-federalists over the Federalists, it is clear that your quarrel is not merely with Lincoln, but with the framers of the Constitution. In that respect, you are indeed a follower of Calhoun, whose interpretation of the Constitution and his "Disquisition on Government" go to extraordinary lengths to transform the true character of the Constitution and of government as such in the public mind. That was necessary to lay the groundwork for his secessionist doctrine, which has no support in the Constitution. That the people acted through state conventions merely means that the framers of the Constitution relied upon existing modes and orders, nothing more. For it took nine states to make it law, not 13, as in the Articles of Confederation, which truly was a federal system.

Why you continue to belabor something I've already acknowledged is quite mystifying, Mr. Reeb. Yes, I am not a fan of the federal system created by the Framers, precisely because it went awry in the way the prescient anti-Federalists (and their progeny such as Calhoun) said it would. Yes, with Patrick Henry, "I smell something rotten in Philadelphia. Yes, I stand with Jefferson, who, though he supported the new constitution, exhibited quite a bit of angst over it all. Likewise, I stand with him against those same men, the Federalists, when they attempted that Alien and Sedition law nonsense.

You have not refuted my point about the position of every prominent leader on the national government's supremacy in its areas of jurisdiction. As for Jefferson, he was criticized by his friend James for the extreme position in the Kentucky Resolution, which he wrote. Madison, the author of the Virginia Resolution, never affirmed the right of a state to interpose its authority between the federal government and the people. Jefferson, by his actions regarding the Louisiana Purchase and the embargo, showed that he governed on a national, not a federal basis. The comments of William Rawle are of no relevance here.

Well, again, I will let objective readers decide whether or not you've been adequately refuted. I've quoted Madison on the issue of whether or not the federal system is a creation of the states or "the people." I've quoted Jefferson, J.Q. Adams, and Alexis de Tocquville on the right of a state to secede, and I've referenced the fact that three ratifying states did so on the basis of an express reservation of that right. Rawle's comment is revelant for precisely the reason that the comments of all early constitutional scholars are - they stand in closer hermeneutical proximity to the original document than we do. (You now, "we" people who are infected by intervening ideological diseases, such as Jaffianism.) Tocqueville's comment is relevant because he is widely regarded as an accurate chronicler of early American culture and politics.

Once agan, then: "Sez you."

You concede my points about secessionist intimidation and abolitionist agreement with states' rights doctrine. The first was powerful in the south but the latter was weak in the north.

And you ignore my point that there was much opposition to the war in the North. Moreover, it was not just abolitionists in the North who supported states' rights. Many non-abolitionists in the North did as well.

As for your claim that the doctrine was invoked regarding non-slavery issues, that is only partly correct. Many southerners opposed the Alien Act of 1798 because they feared it would enable the federal government to deport slaves. And South Carolina opposed the 1832 tariff because it would price British manufactures of southern cotton out of American markets, cotton produced by slave labor, the backbone of the southern economy. Southern ultras misrepresented Republican views on the extension of slavery, calling it abolitionism, in order to divert attention from their own agenda, which was, again, to take slavery to all states and territories, and even to Latin America, beginning with Cuba. That is hardly the stance of a region that would acquiesce in the imaginary withering away of slavery. That's no "sez you," but the policy of the Democratic party, north and south, the former holding that the people a right to establish slavery in the old Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, contrary to the Missouri Compromise.

I'm curious, Mr. Reeb: did the institution of slavery exist in the North in 1798, the first decade of the 19th century when certain New England states amost seceded from the Union, and in 1832? The fact is, the early secession movements where not principally centered around the issue of slavery. Even in 1861 - 1865 slavery was a subsidiary issue, as that famous utterance of Lincoln in his letter to Webster Greeley amply demonstrates. The facts are what they are about the right of a state to secede. You must muddy those facts with the issue of slavery, because if you don't your whole case falls immediately to the ground, like a house of cards.

Here's the focal point: based on the facts I've outlined, the secession of the Southern states was just as legitimate as the secession of the colonies from Great Britiain. Those *are* the facts, and that is *the* issue.

Granted, slavery was abolished peacefully in the Western world, especially in countries such as Great Britain that did not have millions of slaves in the country. No reasonable person in 1860-61 would have imagined that the Southern slavemasters had any intention whatsoever of abolishing slavery.

A shocking claim, given what know about the views of influential people such as Lee and Jackson.

In any case, the necessary condition for its abolition is the principle that "all men are created equal" in their rights "to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The South's spokesmen were arguing that slavery was a "positive good" and that equality was a "self evident lie." The necessary corollary to this is that the Negro is not a human being. It would have helped if the South decided that abolishing slavery was in its own interest, but it was unlikely to as long as its attitude was so hostile even to gradual emancipation.

And again, the observation of historians such as Hummel and the historical/economic circumstances are simply against you, irrespective of the pro-slavery rhetoric emanating from certain circles in the South. Even you note that the rhetoric came from the "ultras." If countries such as *Brazil and Nigeria* were soon forced to see the light, certainly the Confederacy ultimately would.

Your point about Hitler and Marx is fair. But Hitler, knowing the outcome, genuinely regretted it. Why is that? Because the slaveocracy and National Socialism both reject equal rights and believe in the right of a privileged class to rule. As for Marx, he believed that the full development of capitalism was necessary before there could be a socialist or communist revolution. So extinguishing the Southern plantation system was necessary for the industrial development of the United States. But Marx, like slavery apologists, looked upon the factory system as cruel to the workers. Marx in The Communist Manifesto, idealized feudalism, which the plantation system resembled more than did the industrial north. George Fitzhugh condemned the northern system before the outcome of the Civil War enabled it to reach its full potential. Marx also held that only the working class was entitled to political rights, with the Communist party as its vanguard. Government by the people, as in the United States and Europe, was supposedly a sham that obscured the real rule by the captains of industry. On this point, Fitzhugh and Marx were as one.

You've missed my point entirely here, and have accordingly gone to great lenghts to make an entirely irrelevant argument. My only point was that it was inane to bring up Hitler. It's why I mentioned Godwin's Law.

I am confident that a disunited America would not have been effective in the major conflicts of the 20th century for the same reason that the framers of the Constitution rejected the Articles of Confederation. A government that must depend upon requisitions from sovereign states is no government at all.

And I am confident, as I argued before, that you suffer from a great lack of imagination in this regard. Moreover, you seem unaware of Washington's warning about "foreign entanglements." The Founders did not intend for America to be "effective in resolving major conflicts" overseas.

Publius condemns the foreign slave trade in no uncertain terms, just as Jefferson had done in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. The federal government's powers over foreign and interstate commerce are inseparable, and its authority over federal territories is exclusive. In any case, it is clear that blacks have the same God-given rights as whites, which they did not enjoy simply because state laws were passed in violation of those rights.

On the contrary, the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were passed only a few years after ratification, were one of the first indications that the anti-Federalists were right. And what relevance Dred v. Scott and the Commerce Clause has to this discussion is anyone's guess. So allow me to redirect your focus to the clear right of a state to secede from the Union - for *whatever* reason, as long as, in keeping with the sentiments of the Declaration, it was a last resort.

Arresting southern generals would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in a lost cause. For while the Union struggled at first, its greater manpower and superior resources made its victory almost inevitable. Of course, the rest of the story is an improvement in Union generalship.

Yeah, well too bad the legislatures of 11 states put the kibosh on any attempt to arrest Southern generals. You may or may not be right about the inevitability of the Northern victory. Gallagher and Hummel aretwo historians who don't agree, and as just about everyone agrees, had the Rebs run up that corridor to DC in the wake of First Manassas, it would have been over from the near get-go.

Too bad, as well, the Yankees had to hightail it out of the South in 1877. Also too bad that the secessionist cause isn't dead. As Jeff Davis noted, "The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert it's self, though it may be at another time and in another form . . . . The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered upon a new and enlarged arena.”

I know that Lee and Jackson were Christian men, but we judge men in public life by their actions, not their religious convictions. The Bible obviously takes slavery as the way of the world, but it makes no distinctions between races as far as the authority of its teaching is concerned, and the New Testament is imbued with what St. Paul called "the spirit of liberty." The Lord said, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

I do judge Lee and Jackson by their actions, and that's why they are Christian heroes to me. I judge the deist/atheist Lincoln by his too, which is why he is an anti-hero. As for the Bible, there is no justification anywhere in its pages for what Lincoln did. The Pauline "spirit of liberty" has nothing to do with politics or political philosophy. In fact, the New Testament is decidely a-political, focusing on a Kingdom that is "not of this world."

Again, I commend you for quoting my comments in full. I take part in this discussion in the hopes that you will eventually see the light.

No problem, Mr. Reeb. And as I said in a comment under my second response, while I credit you as well for being willing to take part in this discussion, my purpose in taking part in it is in hopes of convincing you - and others who are looking in on our debate - that there is little if any light on your side to be seen.

XI. Reeb’s comment dated 2/20/09, responding to my 2-17-09, WITH MY REPLY DATED 11-9-09 INTERSPERSED.

As there is no place below your latest rejoinder to reply, I will continue the discussion here. Unfortunately, your comments treat my points more with disdain than with reasoned argument. But I will soldier on nevertheless.

Contrary to what the founding generation understood about the republican constitution they produced, you have emptied it of all meaningful content. You're right that the Declaration is not an egalitarian document, for the founders were not egalitarians. But they were liberals who embraced liberty and equality, the central ideas of the Declaration of Independence, as the lodestars of our nation. It proves nothing than slavery existed in 1776 and 1787, for other less gross violations of those principles than slavery also existed, such as primogeniture and entail. But that generation set to removing inconsistencies, as Lincoln was to say years later, "as far as circumstances would permit." It is remarkable that those prominent southerners who held slaves set down the "self-evident truth" "that all men are created equal [in their]. . . rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," knowing that the conflict between eternal principles of political right and pre-republican institutions and practices would come sooner or later.

First of all, I have treated your points with no more disdain than you have treated mine. It's true we disdain each other's views, but let's try to be big boys and not get our feelings hurt. That's what "soldiering on" is all about, is it not?

Like you did in the section above, the bulk of what you write here doesn’t seem to track with what you assert in the introductory sentence. *How* have I emptied what I wrote about constitutionalism and republicanism “of all meaningful content”? And how in the world does what you write in the rest of the paragraph speak to that? There seems to be no logical connection between the two.

Your reading here of Southern slave owners who hypocrtically opined about liberty and equality is by no means evident. There is ample evidence that they were talking about themselves as bearers of a particular culture and political tradition. Here's Jefferson on the matter, for example:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [Negroes] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be . . .pari passau filled up by free White laborers. If on the contrary it is left to force itself on, human Nature must shudder at the prospect held up.

John Jay:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people-a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.

And Hamilton wrote that the Republic depended:

. . . essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment, on a uniformity of principles and habits, on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family. The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.

Howard Sutherland writes in response to the kind of egalitarian reading you espouse, Mr. Reeb, that:

(it is) wrong, to assert that America has no "biological fathers to provide an ethnic basis" for our nationality. A look at the Founding Fathers themselves dispels that myth. They were not deracinated lawgivers who appeared ex nihilo to create a new synthetic state in a largely empty continent; certainly they did not see themselves that way. They were representatives of the propertied class of Great Britain's former North American colonies. The vast majority were members of families already long established in America, many for over 150 years by the time of the Constitutional Convention. They were overwhelmingly of British descent, the substantial majority of English descent. The very few delegates who were not American born were all British born. The colonies-become-states whence they came were English settlements, already long enough established to have given rise to a distinct (Anglo-)American people: the people who fought for and, with French help, won independence for the thirteen colonies. The United States that they formed of their newly independent states was thoroughly English in culture, law, tradition and religion. In scholarly invocations of natural law and assorted Enlightenment philosophers, the most important influence on the Constitution (and the Declaration of Independence) tends to get lost. The Founders’ understanding of law and its application to free men owed more to the English Common Law, as it had developed by their day and as they applied it in America, than to any other source.

Already by 1776, an American nation had evolved, as nations will, in the Thirteen Colonies of British North America. The Founders were members of that distinct, ethnically British, nation, as they well knew and often said. The Founding Fathers and their fellow Americans of 1776 are the biological fathers of scores of millions of today's Americans. One of the extraordinary things about the United States of America is the relative ease with which it has absorbed immigrants since independence. To claim, presumably for that reason, that the American nation has no original ethnic basis of its own is, however, nonsense.

Ergo, the Declaration of Independence is in no way a manifesto, however implicit, for the liberty and equality of black slaves. Jefferson -- AND EVEN LINCOLN FOLLOWING HIM -- believed the blacks ought to be free, but free somewhere outside of the United States, as the new nation brought into being by that document was not meant for them, but for the posterity of Englishmen basically. And most certainly the Founding Fathers would have been aghast at seeing the Declaration read as a manifesto for war against slaveholding states.

The corruption of equality of right into equality of condition is the unwelcome contribution of late 19th and early 20th century progressives, such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, not to mention Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the years following. See the most recent issue of National Review for the article by Allen Guelzo, which makes the case that Lincoln, like the founders, rejected egalitarianism in favor of free labor as opposed to slave labor, free enterprise as opposed to government control, and self government as opposed to dependence on the government.

I have no issue with what you say in the first sentence above. As to Allen Guelzo, you mean the Claremont Fellow Allen Guelzo? http://www.claremont.org/scholars/id.171/scholar.asp . The Allen Guelzo some call a “Lincoln Cultist”? http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/21686.html

I know that comes across as something of an ad hominem, but try to understand that a central question in our disputation here, Mr. Reeb, is that of the reliability of the Lincoln scholarship produced by the Claremont school. This doesn’t mean that Guelzo doesn’t write a fine National Review article. I would think most Claremont scholars would write fine articles worthy of National Review (if you get my drift). It’s just that the name Guelzo raises red flags to paleocons/paleolibertarians like me, prompting us to say, “Consider the source.” What’s more, your digression here regarding what kind of egalitarian Lincoln might have been is somewhat off point.

You're correct that many of the founders and those who followed them thought that expatriation to another land was the most practical solution to what appeared to be the impossibility of assimilation by Negroes in a predominately white society. Jefferson favored emancipation as the only just solution but feared that whites could not overcome their prejudices and blacks could never forgive their maltreatment. But Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin were more sanguine, for they, after all, lived in communities where there were free negroes who, despite facing massive prejudice, had opportunities that those enslaved in the South did not. And that made all the difference. True, Lincoln clung to the colonization idea at least two years into his presidential administration, but when he realized that many blacks had concluded that prospects were better for them in a society based on equal rights than some foreign land where such a principle had little support, he came around. Reasonable people can disagree about the best way to deal with this perplexing problem, even if time has shown that it can succeed.

My understanding is that Lincoln actually “came around” in large part because of the impracticality and expense of repatriation. Do you really wish to contest that?

You're right, too, that too many blacks have accepted socialism or some variation of it as their best hope, when the evidence is solidly against it, as the life and works of men like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and others demonstrate.

Lincoln argued that republican freedom had already assimilated many Europeans as well as Anglo-Saxons, and that mix had been present from the beginning of the nation. "E pluribus unum" remains the only basis for citizenship, in contradistinction to such liberal nostrums as "diversity" and "multiculturalism."

It’s good we agree on *something*. And you forget Walter Williams. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams111799.asp

;)

Your position regarding the Constitution is indefensible. You have admitted that your quarrel is really not with Lincoln so much as the men who framed the Constitution. The anti-federalists had some legitimate concerns, but they were lacking in the political prudence which is the common property of the founders and Lincoln. This means to adapt one's principles, as only true principles can be, to the changing circumstances of human affairs, precisely the position that Chief Justice John Marshall took in defending the Constitution against attempts to destroy it by erecting the remains of the federal system it replaced.

You say it’s indefensible. I say it is quite defensible. All we have to do is read what the Antifederalists predicted would happen, and then observe in history that it did. Their worst fears came true, and the Lincoln presidency played a major role in it. The line of centralization and American imperialism is this: Constitution/Federalists – Whigs – Lincoln/Republicans – Wilson – FDR – Modern Neocons/Liberals. What's left of the Jeffersonian tradition is currently over here on the margins, where I live.

That Alien and Sedition Act "nonsense," as you call it, was remedied not by resorting to secession but to the ballot box, a lesson that was lost on those who lost the 1860 election. Republicans wished to end slavery by preventing its spread, a process not unlike the claims of southerners after they lost the war.

My only point about the Alien and Sedition Act/Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions was that the latter was an instance of the Antifederalist/Jeffersonian tradition of opposing the abuse of federal power. It would come to manifest itself in a number of ways, including but not limited to the Whiskey Rebellion, the Nullification controversy, and secession. I grant that in and of itself the opposition manifested through the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions was not an instance of secession. However, Jefferson assured Madison that if the Alien and Sedition Act was not effectively countered, "(we should be) determined . . . to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government . . . in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.”

Obviously, anyone can be mistaken about the specious virtues of secessionism,

Just as they can about the specious virtues of union and centralization.

as New Englanders showed when they contemplated such a fatal step at the Hartford Convention during the second war with England. Not less mistaken were the fervid opponents of slavery, who fell back on the same useless remedy when confronted with what appeared to the unsurmountable power of the slaveocracy. But events showed that Lincoln was right. Acquiescing in secession, as abolitionists did, freed no slaves.

Well, it comes as no surprise that to me that you despise the idea of secession for reasons other than the preservation of slavery (the sole exception being when the 13 colonies seceded from Great Britain). Is this, you are wholly inconsistent, and your inconsistency here vitiates your entire argument. But otherwise, you are a very devoted Unionist. I’ll give you that.

Yes, indeed, there was plenty of opposition to Lincoln's war policy in the North, primarily in the Democratic party, earning them the entirely appropriate label of Copperheads. They were precursors to those who vociferously opposed the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. Lincoln was fighting a war on two fronts, which shows what he was up against but hardly demonstrates the virtues of his opposition.

I’ll accept your analogy as far as it goes. But certainly you must realize that many of us over here on this side of the fence opposed the Vietnam War and oppose the Iraq War. And history is proving our opposition to be justified. By our lights, the Cooperheads being linked with opponents of those wars serves as no detraction to them.

It is remarkable that the events leading up to the Civil War are a blank slate to you.

It is remarkable that you don’t see they aren’t a “blank slate” to me.

Absent any federal restriction, slavery moved west from the coastal southern states, and in time inserted itself into Missouri, causing a sectional crisis. Later, it thrust itself into Texas, leading to annexation without a treaty and a war with Mexico without a valid declaration. Not to mention efforts to introduce slavery into California, precipitating another crisis when the majority of that state opted for freedom. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed for the express purpose of removing the question of slavery in the territories, an attempt which failed utterly, as shown by the illegal and violent efforts made on its behalf in Kansas by slaveholders and ruffians from neighboring Missouri. Then there was the Dred Scott decision, that held that there was a constitutional right of property in a slave, which denied the power of Congress to limit slavery in the territories, opened up all of America to slavery, and famously declared that "black men have no rights which white men are bound to respect."

Yes, yes. Once again, thanks for a pointless history lesson. I’m well aware of all this. How it relates to the principal issue on which we disagree, however, is anyone’s guess.

The Republican party formed for the purpose of stopping the expansion of slavery throughout the country, the platform on which the party ran in 1856 and 1860, and which was thoroughly misrepresented as abolitionism by southern ultras, a point which you have conceded. It took the bias of southern historians and, later, "value-free" ones, to rewrite the story of what really was at stake in our nation's greatest crisis.

Surely you’re aware, from both the historical facts of the matter and from a proper appreciation of the cynicism that is due when one looks at political parties, that this wasn’t the only purpose of the GOP’s formation. You conveniently omit, for example, the economic purposes of its rise to power. Purposes which stand at the very heart of the sectionalist disputes between North and South.

Secession is not a solution to any national problem, for it destroys the only institution capable of dealing with them.

Really? Tell that to West Virginia. Or to the former Soviet states. Or to the original 13 colonies. Talk about begging the question, Mr. Reeb.

As to what southern spokesmen said about slavery, let me remind you that Calhoun denied the truth of equality, as did his followers up to and into the Civil War. Slavery was no longer a necessary evil, as the founding generation reluctantly conceded, but a "positive good," given the alleged natural inferiority of blacks to whites. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the confederacy, declared that the cornerstone of the new regime was the allegedly scientific finding that the differences between the races were ineradicable and that Jefferson had been ignorant of this knowledge. There was nothing marginal about this southern opinion; it was official.

You somewhat oversimplify the issue here, put your point is taken nonetheless. Yes, many influential Southerners held that equality between whites and blacks was impossible. As did many influential Northerners, Lincoln included. That’s precisely why he wanted to repatriate them. In fact, as I noted previously, Tocqueville thought Northern racism was far more virulent than Southern racism.

And yes, Southern statesmen such as Stephens and Calhoun saw slavery as a positive good (while others such as Lee and Davis did not). So what? As I always say, the South was wrong about slavery, but right about secession. And secession, Mr. Reeb, is the issue you and I are debating here, not slavery per se.

Consequently, I again maintain that there was no evidence whatsoever that southern slavemasters had any intention of abolishing slavery. When Lincoln offered border states leaders the opportunity to do so, they refused. And that was to be gradually phased in over 40 years!

Fine. “Maintain” away. But you obviously missed my point, which is that regardless of the intent you mention, the fact remains that slavery was indeed a doomed institution. I’m likewise sure slaveholders all around the world did not intend to free their slaves when the forces of abolition came upon them, but free those slaves they did. It would have happened in the South as well, quite likely, as I’ve said, by the turn of the century. Had the North lost and Lee become the 2^nd president of the CSA, I’m quite sure that abolition would have been on his agenda.

Your point about Hitler may have been that the offensiveness of one's supporters does not disprove one's cause, which I readily grant. But it is a fact that Hitler admired the South for the same reasons he rejected liberal democracy and embraced national socialism: the inherent inferiority of some races to others.

Yeah, well, and I reiterate that Lincoln’s war and his unionism were very popular with Karl Marx and other European socialists. So, I don’t know what points you hope to score by your use of Hitler, since they are easily countered by pointing to Marx, as I have shown .

It does not take much imagination to believe that confederacies are less capable than national governments for providing for the common defense. Where are our NATO allies in Afghanistan? Indeed, NATO never was called upon for defense until we were attacked on September 11, 2001. What made the alliance meaningful was that it was headed by the most powerful government in the world. In The Federalist Nos. 18-20, Publius shows that confederacies throughout history have failed, and were invariably dominated by the most powerful member of the alliance. The biggest confederal farce of all time, of course, is the misnamed "United Nations," that brings together nations altogether lacking in common interest.

Of course, if confederations aren’t interested in, to quote J.Q. Adams again, going forth in search of monsters to destroy, they have less to worry about when it comes to the common defense. They typically don’t have to learn the hard lessons of “blowback”, as this nation is now learning. Moreover, confederacies, even small ones, can defend themselves quite well if they put their mind and resources to it. Switzerland is a case in point.

And again, I think you suffer from a serious lack of imagination here. I can well imagine a big confederacy of sovereign states with a common culture entering into a defense pact administered by a truly limited “federal” sort of government. America really never got the opportunity to test that theory, however, and what we got was not only a powerful “standing army” and such, but a tyrannical government too. So, I’m with Calhoun against Andy Jackson on this one: “The Union; next to our liberty the most dear; only to be preserved by respecting the rights of the States.”

You completely ignored the point about how the founding generation considered slavery, an abomination in their view. Your resort to "whatever" as a reason for secession (any reason or no reason), indicates just how seriously you take the viewpoint of the men who vouchsafed to you a form of government which, as Lincoln said, "conduces more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tell us."

I didn’t ignore it, Mr. Reeb. I merely dismissed it as an irrational argument. And I don’t believe I’ve defended the position that secession may be an option for “whatever” reason. Rather, what I argued was that if a state believes it has a reason to secede, it may lawfully do so. The American revolutionaries believed they had such a reason, however strongly the Crown and Parliament believed they did not. States don’t typically seek to withdraw from the security of a union just for any old reason. There is typically a perceived “chain of abuses” involved.

Southern generals were all traitors, whatever their religious convictions.

Sez you, the Radical Republican and Claremontista, if you’ll excuse that redundancy. Most Northern statesmen, and a goodly number (perhaps the majority) of the American people besides, however, did not take this position.

And as to Christianity, St. Paul may have said that Christ's kingdom is “not of this world," which is literally true, but those words were uttered in this world and influenced the course of human history for the next two millennia.

And which never gainsaid the fact that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. You are dangerously close to “immanetizing the eschaton” here, an act that should be eschewed by anyone who calls himself a “conservative.”

How could they not, given the Divine source, and the amazing dedication of the Lord's apostles? We know with hindsight that teaching men "to love one another as I have loved you" served to discredit the brutal regimes that dominated the early Christians' world, and provided a basis for human conduct in the free republics that were founded after the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. We are the better for their efforts. Slavery is a relic of the ancient world which Americans courageously ended in a conflict unprecedented not only for its human cost but for its demonstration of whites' sacrifices for the sake of blacks for whom they had little or no affection. Justice literally triumphed in the conflict, however much an assassin's bullet and a whole region's century-long intransigence delayed the hopes for full emancipation.

Meh, pious piffle. And virtually indistinguishable from what liberals do with the Bible in their very bad habit of immanentizing the eschaton.

Your turn.

XII. Richard Reeb's response to my 11-9-09 reply, dated 11-11-09.

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [Negroes] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781.

These remarks of the principal author of our Declaration of Independence are worth quoting here because they point to the dilemma caused by proclaiming the principle "that all men [not states] are created equal" in a new nation in which half the population was held in bondage, an institution based on race. It led many to believe, including Jefferson himself, that however free by nature the African may be, there was no place for him in a society dominated by Europeans. It led Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, in the debates with Abraham Lincoln in 1858, to conclude that America was founded on the white basis for white men only. Yet, as I have repeatedly pointed out, and you have ignored, steps were taken to the end of abolishing slavery in the North and prohibiting it in the Northwest, based on the principle of equality. When Jefferson said that black men were destined to be free, he was of course holding that the Negro was a man no less than the Caucasian, however different their apparent endowments at that time. The low opinion which Jefferson honestly expressed about blacks was not surprising given the conditions in which those unfortunate folks were held. Jefferson, then, saw as a dilemma what you refuse even to consider. There would be no dilemma in the absence of the nation's commitment to equality in rights. Americans would have continued slavery without any qualms whatsoever. Yet they always had qualms. When black revolts occurred in the 1830s and abolitionists rose up in sympathy with them, it forced slaveholders to rethink their position. Whereas heretofore they had referred to slavery as a "necessary evil," they henceforward followed the lead of John C. Calhoun who contended that in fact slavery was a "positive good." The first term acknowledges that slavery is wrong, because evil, but necessary because it was the inheritance of America's pre-revolutionary past. The second term tries to overcome the dilemma by the claim that slavery is actually beneficial, to the slave as well as to the slavemaster. To do this, one has to deny that the Negro is a man, and thus unfit for sharing the society of his natural betters, the whites. This didn't keep slavemasters and their sons from seeking out the "society" of black women, who were forced to accept their owners' unwelcome affections. And this was not without consequences, as Lincoln pointed out to Sen. Douglas, in the demographics of the time. Mulattoes were rare north of the Mason-Dixon line but they were to be found everywhere south of it. Indeed, the governor of South Carolina was proud of his beautiful black mistress, showing that sexual relations between the races were not all that "unnatural."

This is doubtless, by your lights, completely irrelevant to the issue of the allegedly sacred right of secession, except for the massive fact that slavery was the whole reason for southerners resort to it in 1860-65. New England's contemplation of secession was misguided and reckless but hardly borne of a despotic temper. And certainly Jefferson's flirting with secession was grounded in his determination to preserve the natural rights he felt, rightly or wrongly, the states in 1798-99 were protecting better than the federal government. And the patriots of 1776 certainly had it right when they concluded that they were better protectors of their natural rights than a monarchy 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

One cannot defend a tactic, which is all that secession is, without regard to the end being served by it. If a man throws a baseball at a speed of 90 mph at another man, he is justified in doing so as long as he is playing baseball, and more specifically if he is a pitcher and the other man is a batter. But there is no right to throw 100 mph pitches at anyone else. What you are calling secession in reference to the momentous events in 1776 was everywhere called a revolution or a war of independence, never secession. Americans were not merely pulling out of the British Empire; they were founding a new political order based on principles that radically distinguished them from the old mother country. Sure, they kept many of the same political institutions and much of the English common law, but on a radically different basis in which the dominant element was the majority, not the privileged few. Yes, there were a privileged few remaining after the Revolution, but their status was increasingly drawn into question, whether it was huge Dutch estates in New York or sprawling plantations of Virginia.

In order for you to account for the steady democratization of American society, you have to resort to some sort of conspiracy theory or perhaps the unwelcome and ineradicable presence of egalitarian ideologues who perversely misunderstand the meaning of the word “equal” in the Declaration. I maintain that the political errors of egalitarians derive from human nature which, as Alexander Hamilton observed in the sixth Federalist paper, is torn between the “love of power and the desire for preeminence and dominion” and the “jealousy of power and the desire for equality and safety.” These passions may distinguish men into political parties, but just as often may be found within the breast of one man. Those resentful of the distribution of society’s honors and offices often talk the language of equality but just as often betray a despotic temper when they rise to leadership. James Madison referred to egalitarians in the tenth Federalist as “theoretic politicians” who imagine that an equality in rights requires an equality of opinions, passions and interests. I trust you are as opposed to that point of view as I am, but believe that the way to check its influence is not to cling to a confederal form of political union in which the central government is not only limited in its powers, but dependent upon the member states for its operation. That view was rejected by the framers of the U.S. Constitution not only because it rendered the nation incompetent in its relations with other nations, even defenseless, but it permitted local governments to oppress the weaker elements in society, whether they were the merchants in the North or the Negroes in the South. This was not based on a desire to flatten human differences but to ensure that justice was done to all persons in the nation’s jurisdiction.

Democratization is one thing, social leveling is another. The common man in America has an equal chance with the rich and the proud, but he has no right to their earnings. The rich and the proud are entitled to their earnings but not to the uncompensated labor, not to mention the suppressed liberty, of allegedly inferior Africans or any other race. What has facilitated socialism is not the existence of a sovereign national government but the erroneous thinking of disaffected intellectuals. Secession would have left the nation deprived of the talents of a significant portion of its citizens but would not have arrested egalitarianism. It certainly would not have checked the egalitarianism implied in the superstitious idea that slavery is a “positive good,” namely that all black men were equal to each other, or that all white men were equal to each other, Slavery became, under Calhoun’s tutelage, an affirmative action program for whites based on the premise that the necessary condition for their success was the subordination of the blacks. That is doubtless why industrialization was so despised in the South, for it would elevate or in any case place people in the social structure based on their talents rather than their race.

This is enough. Most of what you have written here amounts to quibbles or counter assertions, rather than counter arguments. That is understandable, given the fact that most of my points have gone unanswered. Thanks for engaging me in this extremely important discussion.

XIII. Jones' final reply to Reeb's 11-11-09 response

That is understandable, given the fact that most of my points have gone unanswered.

Yes, well, Mr. Reeb, we will let the objective reader analyze this lengthy exchange and form an opinion on the veracity of that claim. And inasmuch as your final reply here only raises issues that were formerly raised and rebutted by me, I see no warrant for the kind of point-by-point response I have given above. Rather, in conclusion I will respond to three points.

1.You write,

And then you conclude with the same question-begging egalitarian reading of the Declaration of Independence that I have previously dealt with. Thomas Fleming writing at Chronicles recently penned an article showing how the egalitarian reading doesn’t wash. I quote a lengthy excerpt here that establishes the point:

When Abraham Lincoln tried to explain the issue between North and South, he said it was the test of the conception on which America had been founded, "a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Lincoln, inadvertently revealing the principle on which a revolution was being organized, probably imagined he was only restating the Lockean platitudes that Mr. Jefferson had inserted into the Declaration. The words were, after all, the same, though the meaning had changed. It is true that Jefferson's unfortunate political myth was not without risk. As Calhoun so acutely pointed out, only Adam and Eve were created; the rest of us are all born and and never into a state of equality. If it had been so interpreted, the Declaration would have been repudiated by the conservatives and moderates who controlled the states and the Continental Congress. John Adams and George Washington would have vigorously dissented; Henry Laurens and the Pinckneys would have been furious. The calm acceptance of the Declaration's restatement of the Social Contract is all the proof we need that such conventional language posed no threat to as established order that rested on slavery and patriarchy.

The Social Contract theory developed by English Whigs was nothing more than a tool by which a party made up of powerful aristocrats and wealthy merchants hoped to appropriate some of the crown's authority and to use it in their own interests. Kings did not, they argued, receive their power directly from God nor inherit it from Adam. The power of government was conventional, derived from early men who agreed to sacrifice some of their independence for the sake of security and tranquility. If a ruler or a ruling class abused the authority with which it had been entrusted, the heirs to the first parties of that contract could reassume their natural authority. And who were those heirs? Adult male Englishmen, for the most part, though from time to time other European males might be accepted into the body politic. Good English Whigs were as untainted by egalitarian fantasies as the staunchest Tories, though by the late 18th century some radicals had begun to speak of the rights of man. They were fools of course, and none but fools were persuaded by William Goodwin or Tom Paine.

Opponents of the American Revolution gleefully seized on what they took to be the hypocrisy of slaveowners proclaiming the rights of man. Samuel Johnson, ever a sound Tory, wondered, "How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?" I think there is no one alive in America who admires Dr. Johnson more than I do, but this complaint is, to use his own language, mere cant. Why not put the same question to Miltiades and Leonidas? There is no irony in the fact that it is precisely slaveowners who prize liberty the most.

The conventional reading of the Declaration was socially conservative, for the most part. Some abolitionists, in candid moments, knew they had no constitutional ground on which to stand. William Lloyd Garrison referred to the Constitution as a "covenant with death" and a "pact with the Devil." On the other side, Chief Justice Roger Taney was a solid Jeffersonian, who's refusal (in Dred Scott) to acknowledge the civil rights of African-Americans was rooted in neither racism nor Toryism. There are several false moves in some of the opinions that make up the Dred Scott decision, but the central point is indisputable: The only parties to the American contract - the Constitution - were free white male citizens, and, for slaves or former slaves to avail themselves of constitutional protections, it would require a constitutional amendment.

So Lincoln's appeal to natural equality as the underlying justification for the war is, at best, a mistake and, at worst, a lie. His argument, however, is significant in revealing the revolution that was taking place, transforming the federal republic established by Washington, Adams and Jefferson into a Jacobin state based on the social and political equality advocated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A theory of hypothetical equality in a state of nature was now a justification for eliminating the natural and artificial particularities on which the social order rests.

The point at issue has nothing to do with the morality or immorality of slavery. Slavery could have been outlawed without any reference to natural equality or natural rights. What happened, in the event, was not the preservation of the Union but a radical reinvention of the federation of the United States as a centralized unitary state based on a principle of equality that dissolves all the intricacies and complexities of human society into naked individuals, equal to each other in all important respects and powerless to resist the great god of the national government.

(Thomas Fleming, "The Algebra of Equality", Chronicles, Vol. 35, No. 4, April 2011, pp. 10-11.)

All pretty much what I’ve argued in the exchanges above.

2. This is doubtless, by your lights, completely irrelevant to the issue of the allegedly sacred right of secession, except for the massive fact that slavery was the whole reason for southerners resort to it in 1860-65.

Yes, it is irrelevant, and will always be so. And there isn’t anything “alleged” about the right to secession, as I’ve amply demonstrated. I’ve already responded to the reasons for the pro-slavery rhetoric in the secession ordinances. That was never a causus belli, however much you want it to be. Slavery was constitutionally recognized, and the right to secession follows from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the logic of how the Union came into being, the express reservation of secession rights on the part of three ratifying states, certain arguments made in the Federalist Papers, and the utterances of early statesmen and constitutional commentators, including Thomas Jefferson. Slavery in the South would have died peacefully in its own time. There was no justification for the North’s invasion on either legal or moral grounds.

3. What you are calling secession in reference to the momentous events in 1776 was everywhere called a revolution or a war of independence, never secession. Americans were not merely pulling out of the British Empire; they were founding a new political order based on principles that radically distinguished them from the old mother country.

It matters not what it was “called”, but what it was in its very essence. The American colonists, to be sure, were not “merely” pulling out, but pulling out they were. That’s called “secession.”

And the Confederates were merely re-founding that new political order, as the American Revolution had been corrupted by Northern politicians. Lincoln and the Radical Republicans were to finish that job in the illegal invasion and conquest of the South, with the coup de grace administered in Reconstruction.

Funny thing happened, though. Though the constitutional order was thereby destroyed, the South refused to be Reconstructed, and the Yankee finally tucked tail and ran in 1877. The spirit of resistance to the Yankee lives on, not only in millions of the descendants of Confederate men and women, but increasingly in Middle Americans everywhere in "Bitter Clinging Country" who see that something is dreadfully wrong there at Rome on the Potomac, and that maybe, just maybe, the South was right. That is why I predict that American conservatism will “go South”, and that nullification and secession will again be the political fights of the day. I see signs every day that American conservatives are starting to see through the GOP, that “party which never conserves anything”, which you and your fellow Claremontistas represent. And when those Americans finally “jine” us neo-Confederates in the fight for liberty, localism and confederalism, what oh what will you there at Claremont do on that day?

It has been a pleasure, sir.

THE COLORADO CONFEDERATARIAN