A Oddly Necessary Defense of Lincoln

En route to other things, I recently encountered a 2012 article at Capitalism Magazine by historian Allen Guelzo entitled "Abraham Lincoln or the Progressives: Who Was the Real Father of Big Government?"

Given that I have, on multiple occasions in the past few years, encountered people railing against Lincoln, seemingly out of the blue, I decided to take a look at it some time later.

It's a long and academic piece; its 10,500-plus words (excluding the 50 footnotes) require 30-40 minutes to read, but it flows well, is well-argued, and is full of well-documented information for anyone finding himself in the curious position of possibly having to defend one of our greatest Presidents.

As evident from the paper (and comporting with my experience), the attacks come from certain quarters of the big-L Libertarian movement and from Civil War revisionists.

Among the ringleaders is at least one rogue academic, who happily pitches his arguments to laymen from behind the skirts of his doctorate and his employers.

The article is worth reading by anyone who has encountered these attacks and is puzzled by their semi-plausibility; or who knows that they are being pitched to anyone else who is.

I emphatically include myself here: I am not a historian, but I have an academic background and am probably more accustomed than most people to gauging the limits of my knowledge and judging who is (and is not) best at helping me improve it.

Has history looked again at Lincoln and found him wanting? It's certainly easy today, after over a century of improper government, to imagine a President using a national emergency as an excuse to aggrandize his own power. Indeed, it's probably harder to imagine one of the specimens who inherit today's political landscape even deliberating for a moment before doing so, and even loudly "promising" to do so to great acclaim.

On the other hand, today's intellectual scene is littered with such injustices against history as the 1619 Project. Might this be another one of those? I suspected as much and now feel confident in saying that it is.

This article helps integrate many crucial pieces of information with Lincoln's actions, among them his theory of government, the anomalous context of the Civil War, the actions of other Presidents, and the American system of government as a whole.

While it is not possible to do this piece justice with only a few excerpts, I will attempt to pique the reader's interest with three.

The first provides a glimpse at where these complaints are coming from:

Image by Alexander Gardner, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

This new denial of Lincoln blends the traditional agrarian critique of mass society, shaped by Melvin Bradford and Willmoore Kendall, with a voluble and streamlined libertarianism, driven almost entirely by its identification of Lincoln as the Trojan horse that compromised the purity of republican government and allowed the Progressives to work their havoc from within. After all, the driving lever of the New Deal and its massive expansion of government was, according to Murray Rothbard, "strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government"; but Lincoln's Administration was also built on "high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, public works." Ergo, Lincoln was the forerunner of Franklin Roosevelt. Or, if not Roosevelt, Lincoln was at least a clone of his contemporary, Otto von Bismarck, the great centralizer of the German state in 1871, whose social welfare legislation -- the Wohlfahrtsstaat or Sozialstaat -- offered the models of national health insurance, old age pensions, and unemployment compensation adored by Progressives then as well as now. "Lincoln," concludes libertarian writer David Gordon, "Like his Prussian contemporary Otto von Bismarck ... sought a powerful, centralizing state." bold added, footnote omitted]

The author addresses these and other concerns ably.

The second excerpt is an act of justice to Lincoln rare among the critics I have encountered: It helps the reader "walk a mile in his moccasins" as it were, including regarding what has always been a bone of contention about his prosecution of the Civil War:

But painting Lincoln as the ogre of American civil liberties on the strength of ex parte Merryman requires us to ignore, as Taney rigorously did, the nearly complete collapse of civil authority in eastern Maryland in the spring of 1861. Lincoln's reply, in the form of his address to a special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, was to insist that his presidential oath required him to see that the "laws be faithfully executed," and he saw no reason why he should make an exception for John Merryman.

Taney also ignored that the description of habeas corpus in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution is a negative description: "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Although lodged in Article 1, describing the powers and responsibilities of Congress, this language nowhere actually specifies that only Congress may do the suspending. Taney was, in other words, behaving as the original model of an "activist" judge, using a constitutional point as a shield for partisan political motives. (He would, in fact, write to former President Franklin Pierce in June 1861 that he hoped "the North, as well as the South, will see that a peaceful separation, with free institutions in each section, is far better than the union of all the present states ... .")

Lincoln, on the other hand, was on the horns of a real procedural dilemma: With Congress out of session in April and May of 1861, what exactly would Americans have preferred Lincoln to do about riots that were aimed at isolating the national capital? Nothing? And if he had, would anyone believe that he later had any worthwhile defense against impeachment? As it happened, Lincoln took the actions, and Congress, as soon as it had assembled, began to confirm Lincoln's actions retroactively. [bold added, footnotes removed]

I will end with possibly my favorite excerpt, because it shows an understanding very rare today regarding the propriety of the secession in contrast to today's flawed understanding of national sovereignty. In "The Fiction of a Right to Secession," Guelzo writes:

"This is a people's contest," Lincoln declared at the outset of the war. It was not about slavery per se, although it was the protection of slavery over which the seceders were willing to go to war. Nor was it about states' rights, since what right, exactly, had been violated by Lincoln's election? The Constitution, after all, contains no reversion clause. Nor does it specify a process for breakup and secession; and by opposing secession, Lincoln was hardly eradicating a check on the growth of oppressive government, since secession was being practiced precisely so that the Confederate regime could be free to create an oppressive government, built on human bondage and inherited status. [bold added]

I am grateful to Guelzo for sharing his consideration of this line of thought about Lincoln: It sounded bizarre and smacking of motivated reasoning when I heard it the first time: It was good to have this resource around both as a means of understanding and as a reference for others like myself in the future.

-- CAV