The election in 1860 of Abraham Lincoln as president led almost immediately to crisis
with the secession of South Carolina in December of that year.
The issue of whether the southern states were justified in their secession seems to me one
of much more than purely historical interest.
It raises, as I'll attempt to show, the issue of the conflict between two fundamental philosophies
of government, and this issue I think still confronts us today.
I'd like to begin by considering an argument that the Southern states acted too hastily
and precipitously in their secession, for this reason I call the fallacy of anti-secession
that I want to consider whether this argument is correct.
The argument was classically raised in an article that appeared in American Historical
Review in July 1931 by the historian Arthur Cole, which his article was in the form of
I have a question. At Lincoln's election in 1860, an immediate menace to slavery in the states, and his claim was that the Southern states falsely thought that Lincoln threatened the immediate overthrow of their social system, but in fact, Lincoln was not an abolitionist.
He said on one occasion, if he could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would do that.
If he could preserve the Union by keeping all the slaves and slaves, he would do that also.
He offered the Southern states, he supported a constitutional amendment
that would guarantee slavery in the states where it already existed.
So according to this argument, the Southern states were wrong in succeeding in that there was, Lincoln posed no threat or at least no immediate threat to any of the institutions of the Southern states.
It's possible to accept Pol's premises and still reject his conclusion.
This was the line taken by the Southern historian J.G. Derulak-Hamilton in an article that came out exactly one year later in the American Historical Review in July 1932 under the identical title.
The article came out under the...
I liked it better before.
The article came out under the identical title,
Lincoln's election in 1860 and the immediate menace to slavery in the states.
And Hamilton's argument was that even if it was correct that Lincoln didn't favor abolition,
that at the time in 1860, Lincoln was not viewed by most of the people in the United
States as the dominant force in the Republican Party.
The leader of the party was William H. Seward, who became Secretary of State, and he was
a very strong abolitionist, as were other very prominent Republicans such as Thaddeus
Stevens in Pennsylvania and Charles Sumner.
So according to Hamilton's argument, even if Lincoln didn't favor abolition and didn't
pose an immediate threat to the Southern states. The states were still justifying and fearing
that their social institutions were about to be overthrown. Now, it seems to me Hamilton's
argument is valid as far as it goes, but I think in understanding this issue, one needs
to consider exactly the issue of Lincoln's intentions, and it is this that I think poses
the conflict in political philosophies that I spoke of earlier and in analyzing Lincoln's
policies and thus attempting to determine the justification for Southern secession, I'm
going to be relying on the work of two scholars who frequently engaged in debate. One of these
is Harry Jaffa who was a retired, now retired, he was a professor of political science at
at Claremont University in California and he was a follower of the famous political
philosopher Leo Strauss who taught for many years at University of Chicago. His opponent
in the debate, which lasted well over 20 years, was a scholar whom perhaps many of you will
know, Emmy Bradford, who was a professor of English at University of Dallas for a great
many years. I won't disguise my opinion that the two scholars differ very much in what
Nietzsche calls their order of rank, but Bradford seems to me by far the superior figure, really
an outstanding intellect and person of really universal scholarship, whereas Jaffa is much
are much more propagandist for certain philosophical theses of dubious character.
But in spite of their very different evaluations of Lincoln, the two had a surprising measure of agreement on the nature of Lincoln's doctrines.
Jaffa in a book called Crisis of the House Divided pointed out that the basis of Lincoln's political philosophy
found in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, part of that second sentence,
which is, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
That is, the sentence that all men are created equal was, according to Lincoln, the key proposition
in the American system of government.
And he thought that from this statement, all men are created equal, we could immediately
We see that slavery is forbidden, that slavery contradicts the essence of the American principle.
His argument seems to me doubtful, I'm not engaged here in defending slavery, it's just
a question of whether this particular argument works.
What he apparently meant by saying that, Lincoln meant by saying that all men are created equal
was that there isn't any difference in essence between people such as that that exists, say,
between human beings and animals. And so he thought that because human beings don't have
this kind of fundamental metaphysical difference amongst themselves, then slavery is unjustified.
Now, it isn't clear how that argument is supposed to work because it assumes that in order for
For slavery to be justified, you have to have some superior metaphysical essence over the
person you're enslaving.
One could question why is that a case and why couldn't you have a case where you enslaved
someone who was in some respect superior to himself.
It seems like very much a non-sequitur, but that never stopped Lincoln.
But regardless of whether he was justified in his argument, that was what he thought
was the overriding imperative, such that anything in the Constitution that sanctioned slavery
was to be read as in the light of this principle would have effect only as a practical measure.
This is a view of Lincoln that Mel Bradford certainly accepted in a very important article
called Lincoln and the Language of Hate and Fear, which came out in his, which is reprinted
in his collection, Bradford's collection of essays against the barbarians in 1984.
Bradford drew particular attention to Lincoln's speech in Peoria in 1854, shortly after the
passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Remember, the Kansas-Nebraska Act left the question of slavery in the territories up
to the people of the territories.
Lincoln was, of course, against this, and he said that, as he interpreted the Constitution
in the Light of the Declaration of Independence, slavery was, as he said, had to be taken as
in the course of extinction. As Bradford pointed out, there are provisions in the Constitution
that certainly explicitly recognize slavery, such as that the slave trade cannot be prohibited
until 1808, and there's the three-fifths clause which refers to, which seems to be a direct
reference to slavery.
It is true, as Lincoln and his follower Jaffa emphasize, slavery isn't mentioned by name
in the Constitution, but it's certainly implicitly present, and one could hardly think that any
state having slaves would have ratified the Constitution had there been anything prohibiting it.
But Lincoln's view was that in the Constitution that seemed to allow slavery was just there
as a practical compromise to get the states into the Union, but that what the ultimate
The aim of the Constitution was to get rid of slavery. According to Lincoln then, this is the fundamental point here, not the question of justification of slavery.
He was in effect saying that anything in the Constitution would be interpreted according to his particular philosophical views.
who's he wasn't going to be bound by the explicit language of the Constitution, but by his view
of what the essence of the Constitution was.
I should mention that when Lincoln had this view, that to say that all men are created
equal clause overrides whatever in the Constitution seems to allow slavery, it shouldn't be taken
He was seen as if he were some sort of libertarian purist saying he's so shocked by slavery that he wants to establish some sort of immediate Rothbardian free market order.
Quite the contrary, he was himself, and this is one point that historians such as Arthur Cole made,
himself was no particular advocate of rights for blacks apart from ending the technical
legal status of slavery.
As Bradford points out, again, in another very important essay which he called The Heresy
of Equality, which came out, it's reprinted in his essay collection, A Better Guide Than
and the Reason in 1979, Lincoln had no objection at all to any laws in Illinois that severely
restricted the rights of free blacks in that state.
He was not a supporter of black rights to vote, and in fact, Lincoln was himself a strong
supporter of colonization schemes by which blacks would be encouraged to settle in Africa.
The historian James G. Randall, in his book, Lincoln the President, was a pioneer in describing Lincoln's attitude.
So, in fact, Lincoln's attitude could be summarized as saying that he didn't like slavery and he didn't like Negroes either.
Jaffe, in Crisis of the House Divided, has a very tough time trying to explain the passages,
particularly ones in the Lincoln-Douglas debate, where in 1858, where Lincoln clearly indicates he was no friend to black equality.
For example, on one occasion he said that there's a physical, which I hope, there's a physical difference between the white and black races,
which I believe will forever forbid their living on terms of perfect social and
political equality. Jaffa's way of explaining this is, the way is he said,
well, Lincoln began by this phrase, in the sense I quoted, by saying that he had
never said and he did not say and had never in the past said that there is
Equality between the two races. But, Jaffa points out, that didn't preclude Lincoln from saying this in the future.
So, in other words, even when Lincoln says, I've never said this, and I don't say this, and I've never said this, according to Jaffa, that's an indication that he really did believe this, but he just thought it in expedient to say this in the future.
Well, I'm sure under that method of interpretation by which Jeff is here following the footsteps
of his teacher Leo Strauss, according to which in many political writings there's a secret
meaning that has to be uncovered.
I'm sure by that method of interpretation one could really interpret anything any way
one wants, but as Bradford says in one sentence that I like very much, he says, secret meanings
have no place in public documents.
So it's evident then that when Lincoln said that all men are created equal, one shouldn't
– those who think that slavery is wrong shouldn't rush to enlist under his banner
because he was by no means wanting to aid the blacks in any substantial way.
What then did he have in mind when he said that why was he so against slavery if, as
it seems, he didn't particularly wish to advance the cause of blacks?
Well, as Jeff again points out, Lincoln had a peculiar interpretation of what was involved
in the equal rights that he believed that everyone was guaranteed by the Declaration
of Independence.
In Lincoln's view, everyone surrendered all his rights to the government by a kind of Lockean compact.
I don't think this is actually correct interpretation of Locke, but it was Lincoln's view that in true democracy,
people had surrendered all their rights to the government.
And it was in this that their equality resided, that all the rights were given to the government.
and it was the function of the president as the leader of the people to decide how the rights of the, how the purposes of the constitution declaration were to be enforced.
So what in effect your rights meant, the equal rights under Lincoln's view, was in effect anything Lincoln thought they meant or anything Lincoln wanted them to be.
Both Jaffe and Bradford pay particular attention to an early speech that Lincoln gave in September 1838 at the Springfield Lyceum in which Lincoln said that he feared a crisis was ahead for the United States and he thought there was a popular despotism in the offing by which some popular reader would create great
Discontent. At that time the figure of Napoleon was very much in the public mind and there was a great
deal in throughout the 19th century especially early 19th century both in Europe and the United
States there was a great deal of interest in what was called Bonapartism and the fear that there
would be some popular dictator that would arise. So Lincoln in this talk seemed to be suggesting
I think that he was saying, how could we counteract this menace? But at the same time, he manifested
what was clearly an attraction for this type of leadership. He seemed to be saying that
we need a strong leader of almost Bonapartist tendencies to counter this alleged threat
of despotism. So the literary critic Edmund Wilson points out in his excellent book, Patriotic
Gore, which published, I think, in the Oxford in 1965. Lincoln, although warning, seemed
to be himself assuming the role of the despot he was allegedly warning against. And Bradford,
in an essay that also came out in Better Guide Than Reason, called, like, Lincoln, the Declaration
and Second Puritanism pointed out, similar to Wilson, that Lincoln intended the notion
of equality, that's just what Jaffas said as his basic principle, as a means of promoting
this kind of democratic despotism.
In doing that, what, according to Bradford points out, Lincoln, the notion of equality
has no fixed meaning. According to Jaffa, Lincoln didn't favor equality of condition,
he favored equality of opportunity. But what exactly is that? What, as we see today in
affirmative action programs, if people don't finish in the same place, then it would be
He said, well, that shows their opportunities were equal, so it immediately leads to just
a sort of equality, namely equality of condition that Jaffa says Lincoln was against.
So Bradford's argument then is that equality, as Lincoln used it, had no meaning other than
what Lincoln himself wanted to impose, in that like both people, both Jaffa and Bradford
that Lincoln, instead of believing that laws were fixed, the Constitution has certain definite
requirements, thought of the leaders somehow above fixed law and someone who was entitled
because of his superior insight to govern the rest of us.
Jaffa, and in this respect, Bradford doesn't go along with him, although regards Lincoln
as some sort of Aristotelian philosopher, and according to, in Jaffa's view, which I think
is the wrong one, Aristotle thought that the prudence by which he meant the individual
judgment of the wise man overrode any strict moral imperatives. And so, on this view, which
which Jaffa attributes to Lincoln, that Lincoln could do whatever he thought was best because
as a superior person and a leader, he was entitled to decide what was in the long-term
interests of everyone else. This hardly comports very well with Lincoln's professed devotion
to equality, but fortunately reconciling that is his problem and not mine.
Bradford, as one could expect, took a much more critical view of Lincoln's doctrines
than did Jaffa, and as Bradford pointed out in the essay I mentioned on what he called
secular puritanism, a particularly dangerous aspect of Lincoln's policy was the importation
of religious language into his view of constitutional politics.
Freudian himself was not a religious believer, as he said in 1846 in a congressional campaign,
I am not a member of any Christian church. I don't think it's been argued he was a believer
in some other religion than Christianity. But in any event, although he wasn't a religious
believer, he frequently used biblical language, as Bradford points out, in his talks, particularly
When he referred to slavery, for example in 1858 in his famous house divided speech, he used the sentence in the Bible,
a house divided against itself cannot stand, to indicate that the union couldn't remain permanently half slave and half free.
In doing so, as Bradford emphasizes, Lincoln was engaged in a particularly dangerous type of rhetoric, in that his opponents, the southern advocates of slavery, were seen not just as political foes, but as religiously evil or satanic forces,
who could not be dealt with by rational negotiation but had to be crushed.
In his argument, Bradford here relied very much on the work of another great scholar, Eric Vogeling,
who had in the, as early as in his book in 1937, Political Religions, had pointed out very much
The use of religious symbols in political thought in the fascist and communist movements in the 20th century.
And again, Bradford had a particular way with words, and I'll quote in one sentence he mentions, which is in his collection, the reactionary imperative.
He has this in one footnote. He says, I assume here the calculus of Eric Vogtland's New Science of Politics.
That's a characteristic Bradford phrase.
So he was there using Vogtland's analysis and extending it himself to show how the religious,
Lincoln used religious concepts to brand the Southerners as evil and satanic,
and rather than view as, so it was quite definitely not the case that Lincoln was a supporter of compromise, but in fact, quite an extreme radical in his views who, although didn't favor immediate abolition of slavery, was one who thought that what he wanted, this imperative, should be immediately carried out and the Southerners, had they relied, had they accepted the results of the election of 1860,
would have been left entirely in the hands of Abraham Lincoln, and it's easy to see why they were reluctant to follow that course.
I think, as I say, the fundamental issue in the debates over secession between Lincoln and his opponents was not that of slavery,
But one which, again, Bradford put his finger on this time in an essay that came out in his last book, which is called Original Intentions, which was published posthumously.
In that book, he has an essay on the Reconstruction Amendments, where he uses the two terms popularized by the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, which he called nomocratic and teleocratic orders.
A nomocratic order is one of fixed laws, as they rule by very strict provisions.
The view there is that the power of the government is dangerous, that it has to be drastically restricted.
The government can only do what's explicitly allowed in the Constitution.
A teleocratic view, on the other hand, which is quite akin to that of the French Revolution,
is one that subordinates law to some sort of philosophical principle, just as, say, Lincoln,
as an example, when Lincoln thought that equality was the fundamental imperative, any laws that
went, seemed to go against that would be strictly subordinated to this philosophical principle,
And as the previous speaker mentioned, Lincoln in his speech said that if the end is moral,
any means to that end is moral.
Of course, you could take that, Lincoln wasn't, I don't think, much of a philosopher, but
I mean you could take that as, it wouldn't take it the other way, saying if you found
something wrong with the means, then on that principle that would disqualify the end, but
Lincoln clearly didn't want to do it that way.
But this is the key issue here is if you take the telecratic order, then as Bradford very
effectively argued, and I think quite correctly, that then anything at all, you're completely
the mercy of whoever is the alleged champion of the principle behind that order, that only
By having the strictly delimited form of government, can we at all avoid the dangers of despotism?
One need not go as far as Jacob Burkhardt, who said that all power is evil, to recognize
that the nomocratic order is much to be preferred.
And I think if one views the debate between Lincoln and his critics in the light of the
work of Jaff and Bradford, one can see that this is not only an issue of historical importance,
but one that faces us today as we see increasingly attempts by the government to operate entirely
independently of any fixed law and order.
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