The Colorado Confederatarian

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.

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.

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 opinons 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.
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!

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.

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.

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."

Southern generals were all traitors, whatever their religious convictions. 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. 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.

Why you're not able to post comments above I'm not sure, Mr. Reeb. Squarespace just upgraded, and that might be the issue. Whatever the case, I will post any new comments you've made in a new blog entry, because I assure you it is my intent to make our discussion just as visible to the world as I can.

I will answer you when I have time, though for the next few weeks my responses may be slower in coming, as I have a house full of kids and grandkids. Priorities, you know.