Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

Last night I started reading the book my wife gave me for our anniversary, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War, by William Marvel. I haven’t gotten far into it, but I already know that it’s going to be good. Here are some choice quotes from the preface:

The preservation of the Union remained Lincoln’s principal focus throughout the entire first year of the conflict, and at his inauguration he stood willing to consign the nation’s four million slaves and all their descendants to perpetual servitude to maintain that union … He viewed his sworn duty to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” as a responsibility to retain all the unwilling members of that union by force, if necessary, and he insisted on doing so even if it meant arbitrarily reinterpreting or blatantly violating the Constitution he had sworn to defend. In arrogating such extraordinary authority to the executive branch, he created precedents that permanently jeopardized the liberty the Constitution promised to all Americans, and most of those precedents predated any hope that they would be offset by the freedom his actions would incidentally provide for the enslaved minority. Having been liberated from the antiquated ideology about race and slavery, the modern student finds it irresistible to condemn the Southern advocates of secession because of the obnoxious institution that underlay their impulse. The byproduct of the war, emancipation, has come to dominate the memory of the conflict so thoroughly that no contradiction now seems apparent in the establishment of federal power to impose universal, involuntary military service as a measure for ending involuntary servitude.

and even better …

Let us suppose there were no grounds for secession. If it was unconstitutional, did the opponents of secession have the right to combat it with equally unconstitutional measures? Was the president’s subsequent response any less illegal than the actions of the secession conventions, merely because his excesses followed their chronologically? Beyond the question of right, was it wise to meet secession with extralegal force? Was the preservation of the national borders worth the precedent of the chief executive unilaterally initiating warfare, arbitrarily suspending civil liberties, jailing thousands on suspicion or political whim, using the military to manipulate elections, and even overthrowing the legitimate governments of states?

I think I’m going to like this guy.

I have, for several years now, viewed Lincoln not as the great emancipator, but a tyrant who finally set the machine in motion that has culminated in the expansion of the federal government at the expense of the state governments, reduction of civil liberties, and many other ills that infect us today. Worse yet, I believe that he seized upon the idea of emancipation for political ends, not of moral compulsion (since it can be easily demonstrated that in the time leading up to the war, he was quite content to not forcibly end slavery) … and now we, as a nation, tend to look at the war as a moral victory rather than a political one, which prevents us from truly understanding the broad range of forces that converged in the 1860s and led to conflict in the first place.

I do disagree with the author on one fundamental point, however. It would seem from my reading thus far that Marvel believes that secession was not something the founding fathers would have looked favorably upon, nor was it within the range of rights still held by the states after joining the union. At best, he seems to find support for secession to be ambiguous. I, on the other hand, believe that secession is naturally understood as an option in any voluntary union wherein the states essentially retain the majority of their sovereign power and only cede the bare essentials to the federal government (which is, in my opinion, clearly what the original signers of the Constitution intended). One way or the other, though, I think that we both share the opinion that the final results of the Lincoln presidency and those who followed in his path is a radical change in the operation of the federal government that does violence to the principles outlined in the Constitution.

We shall see if I’m right. After all, I’ve only read about 80 pages now …