He was well liked by some, but despised by others. Very few people had a neutral opinion, and even some of those who liked him and supported him in his rise to power were disturbed by his odd, self-centered behavior. He seemed unable to show much human emotion for those around him.

Whatever else anyone might have thought of him, he was a masterful politician, attacking corruption while engaging in inside deals that helped him both politically and personally. Unhappy with the location of the Illinois capitol, he essentially moved it to where he was living. But his ambitions extended beyond Illinois, and he needed money and backing to fulfill his dream of rising from his modest roots to the highest office in the land. Washington beckoned, and nothing would stand in his way.

Or, at least, that is what Gov. Milorad “Rod” Blagojevich thought right up until the phone rang at 6 a.m. on December 9, 2008, waking him at his home on Chicago’s North Side, which he had transformed into the de facto capitol of the state of Illinois. That same phone had been his undoing, and at a press conference later that morning, federal investigators outlined a 76-page indictment filed in U.S. district court, which detailed numerous calls made to and from that phone.

In selections from the transcripts of those calls, Governor Blago­jevich repeatedly instructed aides to hold up $8 million in state funds for a children’s hospital until the head of the hospital coughed up a $50,000 donation to Friends of Blago­jevich; discussed using $1.8 billion in state funds as a reward to a public contractor, a road builder, if only he would raise a half-million dollars for the governor’s war chest by the end of 2008, when new campaign-finance rules would go into effect; and tried to tie state assistance to the struggling Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs, to the firing of a writer for the Tribune who had penned editorials critical of Blago­jevich’s conduct as governor.

The press conference was conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who had successfully prosecuted Blagojevich’s predecessor, Republican Gov. George Ryan, on 18 counts of racketeering and fraud. Ryan had had the good sense to decline to run for reelection as the feds closed the net about him, and so he, like felonious former Democratic governors Dan Walker and Otto Kerner, avoided indictment while still in office.

Blagojevich not only ran for reelection in 2006 knowing that he was being investigated but as late as the day before his arrest declared to reporters that investigators were free to listen to his conversations because he had nothing to hide. Still, the transcripts showed that he was looking for a way out of the governor’s office so that he could rehabilitate his reputation—for a run for the presidency in 2016.

Milorad was probably too busy getting his trademark Serbian gangster hairdo coiffed for court that afternoon, but if he had a chance to listen to Fitzgerald’s press conference, the man who had consciously modeled himself on Honest Abe was likely cut to the bone when Fitzgerald declared, “The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.” Of course, Rod shares more with Abe than the Brooklyn-born Fitzgerald would like to think. The railmen who bankrolled Lincoln could teach today’s blacktop bosses of Illinois a thing or two. And as President, Lincoln didn’t need to use financial persuasion to halt criticisms of his conduct; he could—and did—simply sign an executive order for the arrest and imprisonment of “the editors, proprietors, and publishers” of newspapers and prohibit “any further publication therefrom.”

No, if Lincoln was doing anything in his grave on December 9, 2008, he was probably thanking the God he didn’t believe in that Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t invented the telephone until 12 years after his last Good Friday.

Most of Governor Blagojevich’s transgressions were politics as usual here in the Land of Lincoln, but Fitzgerald was compelled to act when it became clear that Blago was attempting to sell Barack Obama’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But what about our new President himself? Time will tell, but some of us in Illinois could not help but chuckle when the President-elect—another politician who modeled himself on Honest Abe—announced that the centerpiece of his New New Deal would be the biggest load of asphalt since the construction of the Interstate Highway System. One thing is certain: The appointment of outgoing Illinois congressman Ray LaHood (R-Blacktop) as transportation secretary had little to do with bipartisanship.

You can take the boy out of Illinois, but you can’t take Illinois out of the boy.

This article was first published in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Self-Evident Lies
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

Mainline Marital Mélange
by William Murchison
When the culture preaches to the church.

Immigration and Marriage in America
by R. Cort Kirkwood
Beyond definitions.

Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmos
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
Romancing the self.

NEWS

School of Rape
by Beverly K. Eakman
From health class to hotties.

REVIEWS

Romancing the Skull
by Jack Trotter

John Carroll: The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited

plus

John Lukacs on George W. Liebmann’s Diplomacy
Thomas Fleming on Christopher Duggan’s The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Ukraine: Life in the Borderland
by Matthew A. Rarey

VITAL SIGNS

Conservatism: City Mouse, Country Mouse
by John Willson

COLUMNS

Sins of Omission
by Roger D. McGrath

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Breaking Glass
by Philip Jenkins

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

In the Dark
Valkyrie, Slumdog Millionaire
by George McCartney

The Hundredth Meridian
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

A Paid Engagement and
Downy Woodpecker, Up Close
by Maryann Corbett

ON THE COVER

Cover art by George McCartney, Jr.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his theological studies in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) three years later, and was tonsured in 1961.  His subsequent rise through the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church—allegedly facilitated by a KGB connection, which he always denied—culminated in his election as Patriarch in 1990.

Aleksy II came to the throne just as the Soviet state was beginning to disintegrate.  The early years of his tenure were dominated by the tremendous task of restoring the moral authority of the Church in a nation devastated by seven decades of lethal anti-Christian rule.

The scale of that devastation defies imagination.  Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church and other denominations under the communists is one of the greatest crimes in history.  Its death toll was several times greater than that of the holocaust.  It had killed more Christians than all other persecutions in all ages put together, with Islam a distant second.  In 20 interwar years (1918-38), the number of churches that remained open in Russia was reduced from 54,000 to under 500—less than one percent of the pre-Bolshevik total.  Some 600 Orthodox bishops, 40,000 priests, 120,000 monks and nuns, and millions of laymen were murdered.

Even in the late Soviet period the Orthodox Church was at best grudgingly tolerated, hindered from playing any role in a society that was drowning in despair, vodka, and cynicism.  Yet Aleksy II’s considerable diplomatic tact and organizational ability were already evident during the 1980’s, when he secured the Soviet authorities’ acquiescence in the return of Holy Danilov Monastery, which has been restored to its old status as the official headquarters of the patriarchate.  In 1988 he used the celebration of the “Millennium of Faith” in Russia to raise the profile of his Church in a manner unimaginable under Mikhail Gorbachev’s predecessors.

The end of communism enabled the Russian Orthodox Church to assume her old role of moral leader amid the collapse of all secular institutions.  A major test of Aleksy’s political savvy came in the summer of 1991, when old Soviet loyalists tried to stage a coup.  The Patriarch contributed to its failure by sternly condemning the shedding of civil blood: “May God protect you from the terrible sin of fratricide . . . Cease at once!”  The army obeyed.  This remarkable fact was a testimony to Aleksy’s steady cultivation of the military and security apparat well before his rise to the patriarchate.

During the ensuing decade the number of self-identified believers in Russia was to grow threefold, and the number of parishes fiftyfold, to 30,000.  But Aleksy’s greatest accomplishment was his role in the 2007 reunion of the branches of the Russian Church abroad and at home.  The reunification, together with the glorification of the Royal Martyrs Nicholas II and his family, the return to Sarov of the relics of Saint Seraphim, and the veneration of warrior saints such as Aleksandr Nevsky and Prince Dmitry Donsky, “signaled the reconsolidation of what had been ripped apart in 1917,” says foreign-affairs analyst James Jatras.  Jatras notes that its counterpart in the civil sphere is “Putin’s careful and deliberate amalgamation of White and Red symbolism.”  This synthesis lends itself to the vision articulated by the late Gen. Aleksandr Lebed: “The Church strengthens the army; the army defends the Church.  And on this restored spiritual axis—the two pillars of our power—we can begin to feel like Russians again.”

While routinely accused in the West of excessively close links to the secular authorities, Patriarch Aleksy took pains to define what is permissible and what is not in the relationship between Church and state.  He rejected any absolutization of governmental authority and insisted that the temporal powers of the state should be recognized as imperative only to the degree that they are used to support good and limit evil.  Aleksy’s position was codified in 2000 by the Jubilee Council of Bishops.  Its “Basic Social Concept”—drafted with his blessing—stated that, “in everything that concerns the exclusively earthly order of things, the Orthodox Christian is obliged to obey the law.”  However, when compliance “threatens his eternal salvation and involves an apostasy or commitment of another doubtless sin before God and his neighbor, the Christian is called to perform the feat of confession. . . . If this lawful action is impossible or ineffective, he must take up the position of civil disobedience.  The Church is loyal to the state, but God’s commandment to fulfill the task of salvation in any situation and under any circumstances is above this loyalty. . . . If the authority forces Orthodox believers to apostatise from Christ and His Church and to commit sinful and spiritually harmful actions, the Church should refuse to obey the state . . . [it] must resist evil, immorality and harmful social phenomena and always firmly confess the Truth, and when persecutions commence, to continue to openly witness the faith and be prepared to follow the path of confessors and martyrs for Christ.”

Christians everywhere would be well advised to reflect on the meaning and implications of those words.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In a deeper sense, though, the Lincoln years and their legacy represent the most significant revolution that the United States have undergone.  We went from being a confederation of republics that minded their own business, and permitted farmers, merchants, and manufacturers to mind theirs, to a global empire run by stockjobbers, moneychangers, and Transcendentalist do-gooders, a Leviathan with wings that is forever busybodying at home and abroad.  From a fairly homogeneous ethnic base—a British core with Northern European accretions—we have morphed into a multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural population in which no one, not even descendants of the oldest stock, knows or cares who he is.  Leftists now rejoice that the White House will be presided over by someone whose middle name is Hussein and actually run by someone whose middle name is Israel.  What a wicked country this was, when we had to be content with people named Washington, Adams, and Jefferson!

No sensible person can deny the reality of the transformation nor the fact that its first phase coincided with Lincoln’s administrations and those of his heirs and successors.  James McPherson and other leftists exult in the revolution, while M.E. Bradford deplored it, but neither doubted that it happened.  But how fair is it to blame Lincoln personally for what happened?  Many of Lincoln’s cronies would have been puzzled by the allegation that the man they knew as a railroad lawyer and courthouse politician could have staged a revolution.  Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s dictatorial secretary of war who breathed the spirit of martial law against any and all opposition, might be imagined to have admired a President whose arbitrary ways and contempt for the Constitution gave him so much power, but Stanton’s early attitude toward Lincoln was little short of contempt, and, while he succeeded in overcoming—or at least concealing—his distaste, he and his boss were frequently at loggerheads.  Like some other prominent players in Lincoln’s government (W.H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Charles Francis Adams, Sr.), Stanton probably did not think Lincoln was up to the job.  Adams, leaving the country to take up his duties as ambassador to England, tried to interest the President in his sensitive mission but could not distract him from his absorption in “the distribution of offices.”  Over a decade after Lincoln’s assassination, he still recalled the “moral, intellectual, and executive incompetency” displayed by Lincoln upon taking office.

In more recent years both Samuel Francis and David Donald (Lincoln’s most respectable apologist) have described an office-seeking money-grubbing politician who blundered his way into revolution.  I am inclined to agree with them, though with this caveat: A man who pursues and attains an office for which he is unfit must bear the moral blame for the disasters that ensue.

If Lincoln’s primary fault was that mixture of ambition and incompetence that has characterized American politicians ever since, he was also a romantic who regarded himself as a Napoleonic character destined for greatness.  Indulging in what David Donald calls “a rare moment of self-revelation,” Lincoln denigrated the petty politicians who would be content with a seat in Congress: “Such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle.”  Routine honors would not satisfy “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon”: “Towering genius disdains a beaten path. . . . It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.”  Though we may question whether he did much to run up the former of these expenses, there can be no doubt about the latter.

Whatever conclusion one may come to about Lincoln’s personal responsibility for the revolution that has transformed America in the past century and a half, we can, at least, evaluate the influence of his rhetoric.  As the late M.E. Bradford has shown, Lincoln, although a religious skeptic, cloaked his political agenda in a lofty religious language that tended to elevate politics above the mundane give and take of interests that found a nearly perfect expression in the Constitution.  Setting aside that document, with its nice adjustment of checks and balances, its weighing of sectional and economic interests, its aspirations toward more perfect union muted by its respect for local peculiarities, Lincoln spoke of the Union with the mystical reverence that Christians reserve for the Holy Ghost.  Before he came along, Yankee politicians like Daniel Webster had been purely pragmatic in overstating American unity: It was simply a canny means of advancing their own sectional interest, and thus, when they found themselves checked by opposition from the West and South, they were perfectly willing to compromise.

Lincoln and the other post-Christian Unionists, however, are a different story altogether.  Invoking the Old Testament’s God of Battles, they sang “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” as they sent 600,000 American soldiers and perhaps twice as many noncombatants (most of them black) to their graves.  Some years ago, when I was debating Lincoln’s legacy, a graduate student asked if I did not think the war that freed the slaves was worth the cost.  He was actually shocked that I did not think that hundreds of thousands of dead slaves would have agreed with him.

Lincoln was not an original political mind, and his rhetoric is an echo of the French Jacobin who treated mass murder as the noblest part of statecraft.  It is in the French Revolution and its aftershocks that ideology began to take the place of religion as the formative rhetoric of Europe and North America.  It hardly matters whether that rhetoric is nationalist—the Jacobins, too, celebrated la patrie—or globalist, communist, fascist, or democratist.  In an ideological regime the citizens are called upon to sacrifice their private interests and the interests of family and friends to some magnificent abstraction like “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the “glorious Union,” the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Aryan race, or the fascist republic of Italy.  To be fair to the Italian Fascists, they were, perhaps, the least dedicated and (if one overlooks their North African adventures) the least bloodthirsty of ideologues.

Like Lincoln, Robespierre and St.-Just, Lenin and Stalin, and Hitler and Mussolini were anything but Christian, and it is the rejection of Christianity that is the hallmark of modern ideology.  Despite recent attempts—as futile as they are foolish—to blame the horrors of modern war on Christianity, the plain truth is that most of these horrors, from the French to the Russian Revolution, from Abraham Lincoln to Pol Pot, were perpetrated by post-Christians, non-Christians, and anti-Christians.  This is not because a cross around the neck is some kind of magic talisman that cures the wearer of the Old Adam’s tendency to act like a rogue gorilla.  Men have learned to behave with some restraint in both pre-Christian and Christian societies, but as Europeans and Americans gave up the Faith, they transferred Christian rhetoric about the Kingdom of God and the Millennium to the political sphere.  That is where Robespierre and Marx, Lincoln and John Brown come in.

Here is one great difference between traditional commonwealths—whether republics, empires, or monarchies—and the modern ideological state.  In ancient Athens or Rome, in medieval France or England, the ruling class interfered rather little in religion.  Yes, as part of a program to gain their citizens’ loyalty, Pericles and Augustus instrumentalized traditional cults, and, yes, medieval emperors and kings, in attempting to unify their realms, struggled with popes over the investiture of bishops.  But it was the rare ruler (a few theology-crazed Byzantines) who either innovated in theology or interfered in religious practices.  During and after the Renaissance, kings and their apologists might speak of “the divine right of kings” and assume the power to make their country either Catholic or Protestant, but even John Knox’s Scotland is a very long way from that American ruling class that makes war on the religion we have inherited from our ancestors and insists that we worship the state and its “commander in chief.”

The hallmark of the Lincoln regime was not the war crimes perpetrated by Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan (among so many other gallant officers who made war on civilians) but Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase’s decision to impose paper money as legal tender and to print the words “in god we trust” on coins.  What a world of hypocrisy and idolatry lies in that single act and that little phrase.

This was far from being the world’s first experiment in fiat money.  The bankrupt states of the Union had tried to cheat themselves out of their debts by issuing banknotes and scrip, and the geniuses of the French National Assembly, even as they were beginning their revolt against civilization, issued large-denomination paper notes known as assignats.  Initially, these notes were backed by parcels of land the assembly confiscated from the Church, but the temporary success of this experiment encouraged these noble dilettantes and small-town lawyers to repeat and broaden the project.  The result was entirely predictable: inflation and financial chaos.  Of course, our own financial geniuses know better, which is why the Fed has decided that part of the solution to our current crisis is to print lots and lots more money.

When Our Lord, on a famous occasion, was questioned whether Jews should pay taxes to the empire, He asked to see a coin.  Pointing to the face on the coin, He told His mockers to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  In those days, Caesar’s things were made of solid metal, and neither Jesus nor Tiberius would have confused the Roman Empire with the Kingdom of God.  Salmon Chase should have known better—he seems to have been one of the few believers in Lincoln’s Cabinet—but, in recommending that “in god we trust” be put on the coin that would one day bear Lincoln’s image, he was actually telling us to worship the almighty dollar and the government that created that idol.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor.

Wait a minute.  Pearl Harbor and September 11 were massive sneak attacks by foreign enemies.  The reduction of Fort Sumter was preceded by a gentlemanly warning, was bloodless, and the garrison was allowed to depart with honor.  It would not have happened at all if Abraham Lincoln had not maneuvered to bring it about.  Think about this.  Why should Southerners (free Americans) permit a fort that had been built with their tax money for their protection to be used as a base to conquer and extort taxes from them, when every other federal post in the South had already been peacefully transferred pending a political settlement of the issues raised by secession?  One can become outraged at Fort Sumter only by placing a higher value on the will of the political party controlling the machinery of government than on the core purpose of a free regime to protect the people.

Nor did Lincoln’s call after Fort Sumter for 75,000 troops to suppress “the rebellion” evoke unity and determination.  The (illegal) call was either a deliberate deception or the most terrible miscalculation in American history, since over a million men would be required to complete the conquest of the Southern people and the destruction of their self-government.  The immediate effect of Lincoln’s mobilization was to drive four more states out of the Union and to put the border states into bloody play.  The long-range effects were military rule in much of the North, a staggering cost in blood, and systematic terrorism against Southern noncombatants.

It is true that Lincoln got a temporary boost of morale from having forced the Confederacy to “fire on the flag,” but that did not last.  The number of Northern men who evaded service in Mr. Lincoln’s war in one way or another was in the hundreds of thousands.  Others signed up for the minimal time allowed: There were examples of whole regiments going home on the eve of battle.  Compared with complete mobilization in the South, no affluent or connected Northerner ever saw service unless he wanted to.  A recent study suggests that Lincoln could not have raised his armies if it had not been for widespread industrial unemployment at the beginning of the war, an immense expenditure on enlistment bounties, and unlimited access to foreign recruits who made up a fourth of the military manpower.  More Northerners voted against Lincoln in 1864 than had in 1860, even though the army was dispatched to control the polls.  Lincoln and his friends never put complete trust in the Northern public and saw conspiracies under every bed.  They behaved with the ruthlessness of a revolutionary cadre.  After victory history was edited to portray a unified righteous North.

It is a wonder that the historian mentioned above would even allow Southerners to fight beside real Americans in later wars, since he equates Lee and Jackson with Tojo and Bin Laden.  Perhaps it has always been this way in Boston, which happens to be the location of the scholar referred to.  But in general it has not always been so.  Franklin Roosevelt had no objection to being photographed with Confederate flags.  Harry Truman chose a romantic equestrian portrait of Lee and Jackson for the lobby of his presidential library.  Dwight Eisenhower went out of his way to correct someone who called Lee a “traitor,” and John Kennedy chose Calhoun as one of the five greatest senators.

For a long time Americans North and South observed a truce.  It was agreed that the war was a great tragedy with good and bad on both sides, from which a stronger and better country had emerged.  In this scenario, Lincoln is the great martyred Peacemaker who would have “bound up the nation’s wounds” and avoided the evils that followed the war.  This is a dubious estimate of Lincoln, but one in which it was useful for all parties to believe.

Things have changed in the last few years.  There is a concerted effort to banish the South into one dark little corner of American history labeled “slavery” and “treason.”  Here in the Lincoln bicentennial, we can note that there has been an accompanying literature that celebrates Lincoln not as the Peacemaker but as the great Hero of Democracy who was justified in using any means necessary to destroy evil (i.e., kill recalcitrant Americans).  This accompanies and justifies America’s turn toward a mission to impose “global democracy” by unlimited force and preemptive war.  Even General Sherman is once more being celebrated as a great military hero for his ruthless campaigns against civilians.  (There has been a countertrend, exemplified by Thomas DiLorenzo’s and Ronald and Donald Kennedy’s best-selling books as well as a number of solid monographs exploring the uglier aspects of Northern motives and actions in the war.  If my e-mail correspondence from above the Potomac and the Ohio is any measure, a great many non-Southern Americans now regard Lincoln as the fount of the excessive centralization and imperial war-making under which we now live.)

During the Civil War centennial, Robert Penn Warren wrote a little book called The Legacy of the Civil War.  He had some critical things to say about the tendency of his fellow Southerners to use the war as an excuse for their shortcomings.  But for our purposes, what he had to say about the American majority is more pertinent.  The éclat of having “saved the Union” and freed the slaves had left Northerners with “a Treasury of Virtue.”  This is the basis of a kind of plenary indulgence that automatically prejustifies the motives of American wars and the goodness inherent in America’s acts to force the world into conformity with America’s ideal version of herself.

The Treasury of Virtue renders Americans immune to simple truth.  The war was one of conquest against other Americans.  It was not a righteous crusade or a family spat.  “Government of the people” would not have suffered if a war of coercion had not been launched against the Southern people.  The opposite is true.  The fundamental purpose of the war was to protect the prosperity of the ruling elements of the Northern states by keeping the South captive as a market and a source of raw materials and exports.  The philanthropic Boston abolitionist Theodore Parker announced that war was being waged for the supremacy of “Northern industry.”  European observers took this for granted.  The primary goal of the Republican Party was permanent installment of Hamilton’s “blessings”—a national debt, a protected market for industrialists, and a collusion between bankers and politicians.  Many Northerners said plainly that they wanted emancipation because “free labor” was cheaper and more disposable than “slave labor.”

Orestes Brownson, a strong supporter of the Union, lamented that the war had been sustained not by patriotism but by patronage, profit, and a trumped-up hatred of Southerners.  The last was exemplified by the bigotry and blasphemy of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and more than a few New England clergymen calling for the extermination of wicked Southerners.  The Republican Party’s war was accompanied and sustained by immense corruption.  Americans seem to have persuaded themselves that the postwar corruption of “the Great Barbecue” somehow mysteriously erupted after Lincoln.  No, it was a creation of the war for the “Union.”  At least one major military expedition was mounted to steal cotton to enrich Union commanders.  Plunder of the government and the South made many of Lincoln’s supporters wealthy.  Lincoln himself encouraged various acts of corruption for political purposes if not for personal profit.

The Lincoln hagiography that is an essential part of the Treasury was a post-assassination creation.  As one Southern wag put it, Lincoln had so many admirers when he was dead because he had none when he was living.  When looked at coldly, the man Lincoln and his career contains much that is tawdry.  The strongest supporters of his cause regarded him as incompetent and temporizing.  The possibility cannot ever be dismissed that they were implicit in his assassination.  One would think that the event would have received exhaustive investigation.  Instead, the alleged conspirators were quickly and secretly seized and murdered by the Army.  Confederates were not angels.  Unlike their conquerors, they never claimed to be.  But by comparison they shine with honor bright, something much of the world has sensed.

In the history books and in popular imagination Americans are in denial.  They cling to their Treasury of Virtue—the belief that the war was waged with righteousness and philanthropic motives and in defense of “government of the people.”  Realities do not register.  In the North, on the whim of an Army officer, people were dragged from their homes and held incommunicado in military prisons, without any formal charges or right of counsel, and with no set duration.  Sometimes these people were guilty of nothing more than a “disloyal” word in private conversation, being the object of some anonymous spite, or even whistling the wrong tune.  Overwhelmingly, the arrests were not for acts but for opinions.  In the case of newspaper editors, they were held until they agreed either to dispose of their presses or refrain from further criticisms of the Lincoln administration.  This “American Bastille” was more oppressive and unprecedented at the time than it seems now.  Republican mobs were also active in punishing dissenters.

In Kentucky and Missouri and the early seized regions of Tennessee and Louisiana, occupation involved executing innocent civilian hostages, uprooting the population of extended regions, and imprisoning women wholesale.  From the first step of the federal army across the Potomac, the people of the South were seen as fair game for looting and vandalism.  (One Northern critic of the war wondered what law gave federal soldiers the right to steal Southern pianos, watches, and silver tableware.)  This soon became systematic policy.  Houses, barns, tools, livestock, stored food, standing crops, children’s pets, schools, churches, convents, libraries—these were systematically destroyed, the houses usually being looted first.  A Georgia lady recalled how Union officers’ wives went through her home and divided up her furniture for shipment north.  This policy was not directed just at wealthy planters, as some recent apologists have claimed, but at the entire population, white and black.  Old men and blacks were tortured, and fresh graves, of which there were many in the South, despoiled to reveal the location of valuables.  “Historians” on public television recently claimed that Sherman’s depredations were limited to “military necessity”—despite his announced desire to make the women and children of the South howl in misery.  Not to mention the bombardment of cities and the deliberate destruction of undefended cities that had already surrendered.  As General Lee wrote, “These people delight to destroy the weak and those who can make no defense; it suits them.”

Since the mid-20th century Americans have been obsessed with race, and it has become de rigueur to declare that the war was about slavery and nothing but slavery.  Earlier generations knew better.  Emancipation was a byproduct of the conquest of the South.  The mass of the Northern public and army was far more antiblack than antislavery, and the destruction of the South was as hard on the black population as on the white.  The notion that soldiers in blue and emancipated slaves rushed into each other’s arms with shouts of Glory Hallelujah is pure fantasy.  Ambrose Bierce, who fought for the Union the entire war, said the only emancipated slaves he saw were the concubines and servants of Union officers.  He respected Southerners but had only contempt for the foreigners in his army.

Nor was slavery (domestic servitude) in 1860 at all the horror that it is now imagined to be.  In 1860 in New York City there were women and children working 16-hour days for starvation wages; 150,000 unemployed; 40,000 homeless; 600 brothels (some with girls as young as 10); and 9,000 grog shops where the poor could temporarily drown their sorrows.  Half of the children did not live past the age of five.  Further, half of the free black people in the country were in the South and generally lived better than the despised free blacks of the North.  One Southern Unionist testified to his belief that half of the black population of his state had perished in the deprivations and dislocations of invasion.  In Louisiana free blacks pleaded in vain that their hard-won property not be destroyed.  Federal soldiers had been told that no black people could own property in the South.  New England shippers got rich in the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil right up to the war, and Bostonians owned slave sugar plantations in Cuba even after the war.

A Southern planter who reflected on the circumstances in which he had been born, observed everyday life around him, and examined his Christian conscience saw no reason to accept the hatred and abuse of strangers who claimed moral authority over him.  The abuse had been going on for 30 years before the war and was a main cause of secession.  A great man of the North, John Adams, had observed that the only distinction between the slaves of the South and the poorest workers of the North was in the label.

Secession should have been an occasion for constitutional negotiations such as the Confederate government sought, especially by a President whose position had the support of less than 40 percent of the people.  Instead, Lincoln declared that the solemn, open, deliberative, democratic acts of the people of 11 states were merely “combinations” of criminals too numerous to be put down by the marshals.  He supported his position by a false American history and the transparent lie that the “people” did not really support their states.  On the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, the Constitution died as a governing document.  It became a mere rule of thumb for politicians and lawyers, who continue Lincoln’s heritage of twisting it to suit their ends.  After all, the Constitution defines treason against the United States as waging war against “them” (the states), not as resisting the federal government.  Lincoln’s very intent to coerce required that Southerners be deprived of citizenship and their states destroyed.  It was Lincoln who was engaged in a rebellion to overthrow the Union.  He had to dispense with the real Constitution because it disallowed not only a war of coercion against Americans but most of the acts of central power in favor of private profit that his party was determined to make permanent.

In fact, Lincoln’s campaign to “retake the seditious states” could only rest on the tacit assumption that the Southern states, resources, and people were and always had been the property of the federal government—or more properly, of the politicians who had got control of the federal machine.  And that the South existed not for herself as a self-governing part of America but for the benefit and disposition of the North.  Consent of the people could only be given one time, and they were ever after bound to obey the federal machine.  Thus, the primary principle of the Declaration, that governments rest on the consent of the governed, was abolished.  A Northern critic of the war remarked, “If this war is right then the Revolution was wrong.”  The Union could not have been preserved under such assumptions, any more than a marriage can be properly preserved by battery.

Lincoln’s pretty words in the Gettysburg Address managed to have it both ways—he was, he claimed, preserving the sacred old Union and at the same time promulgating a “new birth of freedom” that was somehow necessary to save government of the people.  But these were not the arguments normally used by the spokesmen of his party to justify their war.  They spoke instead of conquest and authority, of empire and punishment of disobedience, of the removal of obstructions to their designs.  This is not a Southern accusation; it is the overwhelming evidence of their own words, both public and private, evidence refused by the American consciousness.  Lincoln’s icing has been mistaken for the cake.  Karl Marx agreed enthusiastically with Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the war to be a rebellion of “slave drivers” against the “one great democratic republic whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued.”  Marx, like many other supporters of Lincoln’s war, also regarded it as a rebellion against progressive German immigrants who somehow were better Americans than the Southern sons of patriots and founders.

It is unlikely, but if Americans could ever come to recognize and admit how much counterfeit is contained in their Treasury of Virtue, they could have a more realistic view of themselves and play a more humble and responsible role in the world.  They would realize that they are not above history or immune to sin.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis.  Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing.  Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches . . .

Two thin men?  What normal person would make such a comparison?  To our elites, thinness is a sign of moral virtue.  Here is a President who goes to the gym every day and shoots hoops with the best of them: A penumbra of health radiates from his person like the glow of sanctity.  Evans and Wolffe don’t just acknowledge the cosmetic superficiality that got Obama elected: They celebrate it.  According to Newsweek, Obama is the New Lincoln because both are thin, geniuses at stagecraft, and write a lot of their own material—a rationale that also makes Obama the New Michael Jackson.

The Lincolnian legacy was constantly reiterated by the Obamaites as they readied themselves for Inauguration Day, and “a new birth of freedom” is their theme song.  As to what this freedom consists of, it depends on whom you ask.  Obama is the perfect demagogue; his followers project their own hopes and desires onto the blankness of his expression.

Since we live in an age from which greatness has been banished, it’s only natural for politicians, ideologues, and common demagogues to reach back into the past for models to serve as masks for their nostrums.  Lincoln, the self-educated rail-splitting backwoods boy, born in a lean-to, who rose from nothing to become a larger-than-life figure in our history—Obama sees himself in our 16th president, as he admits in a 2005 essay in Time, and his cultists lap it up.  It’s pure Madison Avenue.  As Peggy Noonan acerbically remarked,

Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family.  He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency.
You see the similarities.

Beyond the Stalinesque cult of personality promoted by the mainstream media, there is a real sense in which Obama’s kinship with Lincoln, the politician, is all too apparent.  The left’s love affair with Obama will continue long after they realize that he’s simply a shill for big business, just like Lincoln.  Honest Abe was the perfect embodiment of Whiggish economic principles: subsidies for politically connected industries, starting with the banks but not ending there.  With Lincoln, it was the railroads who collected government favors and tax dollars; in Obama’s time, it will be the road builders.  In both scenarios, the banks are showered with governmental largesse.  Obama has often been likened to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the shadow of a Second Great Depression looms ever larger, and yet Obama’s New New Deal will no doubt resemble the corporate welfare state championed by Lincoln rather than the WPA-style work brigades romanticized by Obama’s leftist supporters.

Lincoln abolished hard money, introduced the greenback, and laid the foundations of the seminationalized banking system that is presently crumbling all around us.  Furthermore, Lincoln set up a tariff wall behind which the “trusts” were sheltered, and these monstrous economic institutions sprouted and flourished like rampant weeds, choking their economic and political competitors and effectively running the country.  Think of the Great Emancipator as the host at a gigantic orgy of corporate welfare: Favored businesses were heavily subsidized—not just the banks but the railroads, which were lavished with land grants.  The machinery of government loomed larger than ever before in America.  At the heart of it beat that great engine of government-created inflation, the regulated central banks, to finance it all.  Wherever Lincoln trod, the old free and independent spirit of American enterprise was stamped out: The Post Service was monopolized, the tax burden grew much heavier, and “sin” taxes were slapped on tobacco and whiskey.

Obama set about further centralizing and outright nationalizing the banking system before he even took office: He spoke in favor of the bank bailout and, together with John McCain, issued a statement that, in effect, gave the federal government a blank check to take whatever measures it deemed necessary, by administrative fiat, to shore up the collapsing walls of the Lincolnian central-banking edifice.

Taxation was the Great Emancipator’s tool of choice in his effort to weld together a strong centralized mercantile state, and the tariff was a major aspect of his economic program.  His nomination at the Republican National Convention over his better-known and more experienced rivals was made possible, in part, by the support of the key Pennsylvania delegation.  As the center of the ailing iron and steel industry, Pennsylvania was angling for higher tariffs, import quotas, and other special privileges.  One of Lincoln’s first acts was to erect the highest tariff wall in our history, doubling tariff rates and later imposing import quotas.

Labor, a major Obamaite constituency, is already agitating for a higher tariff wall, and this fits right in with Obama’s industrial economic policy, which will pick winners and losers in the marketplace—and protect corporate favorites in the name of “national security” and the “war against recession.”  While protesting that he wants to lift the tax burden on most of us, Obama has promised to push for a tax hike on the “wealthy”—if anyone is left who fits that description by the time he begins his term.  And you can bet us nonwealthy types will be asked to make “sacrifices” for the good of the country, in the name of “unity”—as state and local governments hike tax rates to pay for his gigantic public-works program, another Lincolnian favorite.

For insight into Obama’s Lincolnian character, Newsweek turned to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—“a self-described ‘student of Lincoln’ and author of two [pretty awful] books on the Civil War”:

He has been impressed by Obama’s use of Lincoln as a prop.  But he is waiting to see if Obama is sincere in his emulation.  “Obama’s got a liberal voting record, and I don’t know of any substantive issue where he’s ever broken with his leadership,” says Gingrich.

Yet the Republicans preempted any grand gesture of bipartisanship when McCain signed on to that joint endorsement of the bank bailout—and arguably threw the election to the Democrats, perhaps deliberately.  A few weeks after the election, Chris Matthews opined on Hardball that if only McCain had opposed the bailout, the outcome might have been different.  The Republicans, in short, never gave Obama the chance to “reach out” across the aisle, having broken with their stated principles of small government and fiscal responsibility long before the election.

Doris Kearns Goodwin has been all over the talking-heads circuit, babbling about the “team of rivals” that Obama-Lincoln has assembled, one that will “unite the country” in this time of crisis, which in no way resembles the Civil War, and her bromides have been wielded like a bludgeon in order to stamp out a possible rebellion by Obama’s more sincere followers who are attracted to his ostensibly antiwar stance.  The appointment of Hillary Clinton to head up the State Department is a hard pill for many of those followers to swallow, and they finally did so only at the particularly loud insistence of leftist bloggers and print-world opinionmongers, as well as their televised counterparts over at MSNBC.  Even the news that Obama is reconsidering a specific timetable for withdrawal—oh, and that “residual force” we’re leaving behind, just in case, will number as many as 70,000—did not phase them.  There was not a peep out of the leftist-led “antiwar” brood, or the Hollywood liberals perched around Arianna Huffington and her faux-Drudge website.

With the prospect of the auto industry collapsing, and deflation easily outpacing the government’s efforts to stem it, President Obama will have his hands full with domestic economic matters and will be excused by many “progressives” for ceding the foreign-policy realm to Hillary and her menagerie.  Those whose preferred policy stance in the Middle East is stasis will have reason to celebrate, and the bipartisan group behind the push for confronting Iran will have a strong voice and a majority vote in the corridors of power.  Of course, one vote—the President’s—is all that’s needed to launch an attack, but it’s a thousand-and-one little decisions, usually made by subordinates, that pave the road to war.

Obama’s identification with Lincoln is all tied up with the issue of race and the idea that an Obama presidency is somehow the fulfillment of the Lincolnian dream of a land where the descendant of slaves could attain the highest office in the land.  But of course there is nothing Lincolnian about this dream: Setting aside the fact that Obama is not the descendant of slaves, we must acknowledge, as Obama does in his Time essay, that Lincoln himself did not believe in racial equality and even advocated sending African-Americans back to Africa.  But no matter.  Mythology is not amenable to fact-checkers.  History can always be made to fit into the Procrustean bed of ideology.

In the Bizarro World in which we live, where up is down and the laws of nature and man are stood on their heads, Wall Street’s victorious champion is hailed as a populist hero, even a “progressive.”  As unprecedented sums of money poured into his campaign coffers, from every corporate interest—with particular generosity shown by the bankers—Obama was hailed as the great egalitarian whose triumph would strike a blow for the ordinary man.  He is the avatar of the new plutocracy, the perfect oreo—a creamy patrician center sandwiched in dark, crunchy populism.

Our time calls for real leaders, but what we are getting are manufactured heroes, draped in historical allusions and set up on a pedestal for us to worship.  The priests of the Obama cult intone their prayers and burn incense at his altar, while the Remnant looks on, bemused and not a little frightened, hoping he will not do too much harm.

The potential is there, however, for very great damage.  If Obama is ambitious, his advisors are even more so: They might fall into the trap of believing in Dear Leader’s greatness, and their own.  They might even come to believe in the Obama-as-Lincoln myth—in which case we are all in some very big trouble.  Lincoln, after all, suspended habeas corpus, jailed his opponents, and closed down newspapers that displeased him.  I was struck by the audacity of the Time article comparing Obama with Lincoln, in which “humility” was listed as one of our new President’s many virtues.  If one can say anything about the 44th President, it is surely that pride bordering on arrogance oozes from his every pore.  He acted as if he were already President throughout his campaign: The swearing in, as far as he was concerned, was just a formality.  Hubris—the abiding sin of mankind, and the flaw that has brought down more than one of Barack Obama’s predecessors—promises to be the leitmotif of his administration.  And pride, as we all know, is what goeth before destruction.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle [the Revolutionary War].

This was all the more remarkable because Lincoln was a nonbeliever.  His first law partner, John T. Stuart, stated that Lincoln

was an avowed and open infidel . . . and sometimes bordered on atheism. . . . [He] went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I ever heard; he shocked me.

Ward Lamon, another law partner and friend of Lincoln, relates that,

[a]s he grew older, he grew more cautious. . . . The imputation of Infidelity had seriously injured him in several of his earlier political contests; and, sobered by age and experience, he was resolved that the same imputation should injure him no more.  Aspiring to lead religious communities, he foresaw that he must not appear as an enemy within their gates; aspiring to public honors under the auspices of a political party which persistently summoned religious people to assist in the extirpation of that which it denounced as the “nation’s sin,” he foresaw that he could not ask their suffrages whilst aspersing their faith.  He perceived no reason for changing his convictions, but he did perceive many good and cogent reasons for not making them public.

Herndon concurred:

Lincoln was very politic, and a very shrewd man in some particulars.  When he was talking to a Christian, he adapted himself to the Christian. . . . I could state facts about Mr. Lincoln’s jokes on and gibes at Christianity and committee of ministers, who waited on him while President of the United States, and before, that would shock a Christian people.

On August 12, 1861, as Ft. Sumter was being attacked, Lincoln issued a Proclamation of a National Day of Fast.  He was explicit on who started the war:

And, whereas, when our own beloved Country, once, by the blessing of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation.

Lincoln then broadened the blame to all Americans.  They were sinners who had offended God, and the war was His retribution:

[I]n sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him, and to pray for His mercy,—to pray that we may be spared further punishment, though most justly deserved.

For Lincoln to call upon people to pray to God to end the war was all the more extraordinary, as it contradicted his personal beliefs.  According to Herndon, Lincoln

believed that both matter and mind are governed by certain irrefragable and irresistible laws, and that no prayers of ours could arrest their operation in the least . . . what was to be would be. . . . [T]he laws of human nature are persistent and permanent and could not be reversed. . . . In proof of his strong leaning towards fatalism he once quoted the case of Brutus and Caesar, arguing that the former was forced by laws and conditions over which he had no control to kill the latter, and vice versa, that the latter was specially created to be disposed of by the former.

Throughout his presidency, Lincoln maintained that God alone was responsible for the war.  In his September 3, 1862, “Meditation on the Divine Will,” he wrote:

God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds.

Lincoln continued in the same vein in an October 26, 1862, letter to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney:

We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial.  In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out his great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to his will . . . but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light which he affords me I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise.  If I had had my way, this war would never have been commenced; If I had been allowed my way this war would have been ended before this, but we find it still continues; and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.

As the war dragged on from one bloody encounter to the next from Manassas to Antietam to Shiloh with no end in sight, the President’s unbelief, both in God and his own rhetoric, was evident in private correspondence.  His letter of November 24, 1862, to Carl Shurz is petty and childish in its attempt to evade responsibility:

I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not.  And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better.  You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already.  I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me.

Nonetheless, Lincoln continued to repeat his accusation against God on public occasions.  In a proclamation on March 30, 1863, designating another National Day of Fast, he wrote:

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People?

With victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, some in the North thought the war would soon end.  But in an August 26, 1863, letter to James C. Conk­ling, Lincoln disagreed, reiterating that God, not he, determined when there would be peace.

Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph.  Let us be quite sober.  Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.

In his Proclamation of Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863, Lincoln left any question of a timetable in the hands of “our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens”:

I . . . fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.

As the number of dead and maimed mounted, and an official policy of total war was pursued against Southern civilians, Lincoln persisted in denying any responsibility for his own acts.  He was a victim of circumstance, and circumstance was determined by God.  In his April 4, 1864, letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln declared

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.  Now, at the end of three years of struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected.  God alone can claim it.

He continued bizarrely asserting that the death of over 600,000 Americans would be a testament to God’s righteousness.

If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Lincoln assiduously promoted the idea that, while he was blameless for the war, its death and destruction served some higher good.  As he wrote to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney in a letter dated September 4, 1864:

The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.  We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best and has ruled otherwise. . . . Surely, He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.

By March 1865, the war was fast coming to an end.  But in his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, Lincoln ominously insisted that God might want the bloodshed to continue indefinitely.

The Almighty has His own purposes.  “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offences cometh!”  If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Loving God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” . . . [W]ith firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

Through use of such rhetoric about a righteous and triumphant God, Lincoln exploited religious feelings in the North to carry out a four-year war against Southern civilians.  Women, children, the sick, and the elderly were targeted; homes and cities burned; crops destroyed; and domestic animals slaughtered.  Lincoln’s influence on the North validated Voltaire’s observation that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Jaffa school has an unfortunate tendency to talk as if Lincoln agreed with men who didn’t always agree with each other: Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton.  Unanimity among such strong-minded men of genius would be almost miraculous.

I know of no evidence that Lincoln ever read or mentioned, let alone studied, The Federalist (though Krannawitter opines that he “echoes” Federalist 49).  In fact Lincoln hardly seems aware of the whole ratification debate, the most crucial controversy in American history.

Though Lincoln was largely right about slavery, he was wrong about secession—a separate question, as most Northerners once understood.  During his war, millions of Northerners who opposed slavery also recognized the right of a sovereign state to secede from the Union.  This led Lincoln to crack down on dissent, closing down hundreds of newspapers (many permanently) and having a few thousand war critics arrested.  His excellent biographer David Herbert Donald calls his presidency the worst period for individual liberties in American history.

Lincoln’s knowledge of history was shaky, too; in his First Inaugural Address and ever after, he insisted that the states were not, and had never been, sovereign.  “The Union,” he said in that speech, “is much older than the Constitution.”

So much for the Articles of Confederation, which says plainly that “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence . . . ”  And so much for the Declaration of Independence he so often appealed to, which claims for the 13 former colonies the full status of “free and independent states”—or as Willmoore Kendall put it, “a baker’s dozen of new sovereignties,” as opposed to Lincoln’s “a new nation.”

New Jersey and Pennsylvania were sovereign states, just as France, Russia, Prussia, and Holland were.  Independence, sovereignty, and autonomy were almost implied by the term statehood.  A state was not a subdivision, like a province or county, of a larger entity.

Northern Abolitionists, if they meant what they said, should have welcomed the secession of slave states; and some of them did.  But for Lincoln “the Union” was sacred, its terms beyond compromise or negotiation.  When Southern cannons killed a horse at Fort Sumter, he launched a war that would kill 600,000 young men.  As a result he has received a deification any Roman emperor might envy.

I have sometimes been accused of hating Lincoln; the charge is false.  He had qualities that command my esteem and almost affection.  The only American President I really loathe is Franklin D. Roosevelt—liar, adulterer, warmonger, friend and benefactor of Stalin and the Soviet Union, betrayer of Christian Europe, father of the nuclear age, enemy of the U.S. Constitution, and a few other things.  What’s more, it’s personal.  Several members of my family had to fight in his accursed war; I thank the Lord none of them was killed, though my older cousin Jack was terribly wounded and came home from France permanently mad.  (In his lucid moments I never heard him suggest he’d been fighting for freedom.)

Lincoln, we should also remember, was a passionate segregationist, a fact Krannawitter barely touches on, though it might interest our new President to know that the Great Emancipator’s preferred solution was to abolish slavery and to remove all “free colored persons” from the United States.  In 1862 he proposed an amendment that would authorize Congress to pay for this huge project.  “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” he wrote in his State of the Union Message to Congress, “that I strongly favor colonization.”  Nor was this a sudden enthusiasm; he had been arguing for it since the early 1850’s.  As President, Lincoln did in fact create colonies for black freedmen in Haiti and what is now Panama, giving up on the cause only when these fizzled out.  Very few blacks were attracted to such schemes; the United States was the only homeland most blacks had ever known, and it was naive—indeed, utopian—to think they could easily leave it and adapt to Africa.

In August 1862, Lincoln became the first president to invite blacks to the White House; the purpose of this little celebrated historical event was to urge them to lead their liberated brethren (“the African,” as he often called them; he would have thought “the African-American” a contradiction in terms) to exercise their freedom by settling abroad.  Separation was best for both races, given a physical difference that would make assimilation impossible.  (To white audiences he often expressed his horror at racial “amalgamation.”)

For months we have been hearing that the election of a black man to the White House was the fulfillment of Lincoln’s dream.  It would be truer to say that the election of a mulatto was a cruel mockery of his actual dream of a unified, and white, America.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Most of the commentary and reporting on the federal government’s financial-sector interventions remarked on the supposed irony of a “pro-market” administration embracing an expansive role for government in response to the crisis, but throughout its tenure the Bush White House consistently geared its policies and regulations to suit large financial firms.  Adopting costly measures to socialize the risk of lending institutions and shore up large, overleveraged banks at public expense, the Bush administration stayed faithful to its state-capitalist roots, shaping policy according to the particular interests of major corporations and the financial industry.    With the bailout, the confusion of public and private interests can be said to have reached a new level, but the cooperative relationship between Washington and Wall Street did not fundamentally change—it merely intensified.

Economic centralization and consolidated power are thriving in the wake of the financial crisis, as both tend to increase when the public is panicked and willing to cede more power and control to the very institutions that have already egregiously abused what power they previously possessed.  Opponents of the bailout were fragmented and easily cowed by market turmoil.  No common set of principles or objections animated the odd right-left alliance of convenience that voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and the slightest pressure was sufficient to break the limited resistance of many House members to the bill.  Paradoxically, many of the opponents of the largest Wall Street bailout came from the party of Lincoln.  In a rare moment of clarity, even if they lacked the language to describe it, a majority of House Republicans recognized that state capitalism and the free market were in conflict and that the interests their party leaders served truly had no connection to their purported principles.

There is scarcely any coherent opposition to the collusion of government and what Lord Bolingbroke and Jefferson identified as “the moneyed interest.”  They were referring to the combination of financial and commercial power that found its political defenders among the Whigs of both Britain and America.  Today, the moneyed interest enjoys the support of the leadership of both U.S. political parties.  Those who expect anything different from the newly inaugurated protégé of George Soros and Warren Buffett are bound to be disappointed.  Nor is there much more awareness of the severe dependency to which government policy, past and present, has reduced American citizens and which will facilitate ever-greater consolidation in the future.  One of the crucial reasons for this lack of awareness is a general loss of understanding of the relationship between economic and political independence.  Most Americans believe that they are enjoying economic liberty when they yoke themselves to increasingly large-scale firms.
Over 40 years ago, Canadian philosopher George Grant said that American conservatives must oppose economic centralization if they seriously hope to pursue political decentralization.  The opposing tradition, the Country tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, always held that this alliance of wealth and government has been antithetical to political and economic liberty as well as to the proper functioning of constitutional government.  That tradition also held that permitting this collusion privileged the interests of a relative few with access and ties to the centers of power.  When Jackson fought the Bank and other Southerners later declared their fear of “bank rule,” they were opposing the same sort of collusion in another form.

Over the last few months, we have become all too familiar with the phrase “too big to fail,” which acknowledges that economic centralization on such a large scale, whose efficiency and virtues we have heard praised for decades, represents a grave threat to the health of the national economy during a normal correction.  Having become dependent on a few large institutions, we are told that we must prop up the same institutions and trust the same government that singularly failed the public.  Instead of seeing the necessity of more broadly distributing wealth and power, Lincolnists insist that the collusion that helped create the current crisis must be deepened rather than abandoned.

It is perhaps fitting that the only other man elected president from Illinois has already embraced many of the tenets of Lincolnism.  Barack Obama’s attempt to connect himself to Abraham Lincoln goes well beyond his publicity stunt of announcing his candidacy at the statehouse in Springfield.  Obama, like many of his predecessors, embraces state capitalism, which is why so many of his early appointments have won praise for their “centrism” and “pragmatism.”  From what we can gather so far, Obama’s Treasury Department is likely to be even more active in intervening in the financial sector.  As head of the New York Federal Reserve, Obama’s nominee for treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, endorsed each of Secretary Henry Paulson’s and Chairman Ben Bernanke’s bailout decisions, and Obama himself supported the bailout legislation in the early fall.  One of the consequences of the bailout debate in the months since the financial crisis became particularly acute has been that the Democratic Party, already reconciled to financial interests during the Clinton years, has become even more closely allied to Wall Street.

Given Obama’s appointments and his own record, it’s a safe bet that the Obama administration will be as wedded to Lincolnism as the past three administrations.  Though his top nominee for U.S. trade representative, Xavier Becerra, is known for having second thoughts on his support for NAFTA, President Obama is not going to renegotiate NAFTA in any significant way, and he will likely attempt to resurrect the Doha round of international trade talks.  As the global recession unfolds, we can expect Obama to modify and institutionalize the ad hoc G-20 coordination of economic policy that began at the tail end of 2008, and we will see an attempt to use existing international institutions to secure the interests of multinational corporations.  An ambitious internationalist such as Obama will pursue a more coordinated global state capitalism, building on the example that the WTO has already provided and spreading Lincolnism worldwide.

In his April 2007 Chicago Global Affairs Council speech, Obama famously said that the security of the United States is inextricably tied to the security of every other nation; practically speaking, this was a theoretical justification for intervention everywhere.  Obama’s statement also revealed his view of international relations in terms of extensive interdependence.  With respect to economic policy, this special emphasis on interdependence implies that his administration may push for coordinated, transnational mechanisms for bailing out failing multinational firms.  As we become more and more dependent on foreign investors to buy our debt, we may be told by future administrations that stabilizing vulnerable European or Chinese or other foreign financial sectors will be necessary to the functioning of our own economy.

Lincolnism’s corporate-government alliances also create incentives for firms with vested interests in foreign and domestic government contracts to support policies that promise to bring them additional business.  The most straightforward example of the state taking on additional, unnecessary risks to “open new markets” is the ongoing push for NATO expansion ever eastward for the benefit of defense contractors.  Corporate-government alliances also create opportunities for the government to co-opt corporations in the name of national security, which we have seen most recently in the use of telecommunications companies to conduct illegal surveillance operations and the subsequent granting of immunity to the firms that helped the government break the law.

Healthy republican government and Lincolnism are entirely incompatible.  Through its support for concentrated wealth, Lincolnism establishes an oligarchy that dominates the polity, whether formally or informally, and makes self-government impossible.  Classical republicanism requires the subordination of private interests to the good of the commonwealth.  A republic must not become captive to one faction, whereas it is advantageous to both state and private factions to reduce citizens to dependency on one or both.  For all of Lincoln’s misleading rhetoric of preserving “government by the people,” Lincolnism has always meant the rule of the few who are qualified primarily by their wealth and proximity to power.  It is natural, then, that such an oligarchic, state-capitalist system fears above all things the mobilization of a populist protest against its misrule and usurpations.  This fear acknowledges the basic illegitimacy and misrepresentation at the heart of the entire enterprise, which is vulnerable to losing all credibility once critics begin to probe beneath the surface.

Lincolnism today is the attempt to maintain the antithesis of the Country tradition, that of the Court, in a country whose people are still somewhat attached to the ideals of Jeffersonian republicanism insofar as they believe that they, and not the princes of Washington and New York, ultimately control their government.  The good news for populists is that the Wall Street bailout was such an obvious and transparent swindle that many more citizens have become suspicious of the federal government’s exploitations of crisis and invocations of emergency powers.  The instinctive revulsion of at least a plurality of the people at the prospect of the bailout suggests a healthy level of distrust of both government and corporate leaders.  Lincolnists consistently frame government giveaways and gifts to private interests as vital for the national interest and the common good.  In so doing, they conceal the antirepublican character of the ideology of the first Republican president.

This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Rendering Unto Lincoln
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue
by Clyde Wilson
Abe’s indulgence.

Obama as Lincoln
by Justin Raimondo
Mask and mirror.

Lincolnism Today
by Daniel Larison
The long marriage of centralized power and concentrated wealth.

NEWS

The Financial Crisis
by William J. Quirk
How it happened, and why it is still happening.

REVIEWS

Strippers to the Rescue
by Stephen B. Presser

William J. Quirk: Courts & Congress: America’s Unwritten Constitution

plus

Tom Landess on Russell Kirk’s Eliot and His Age
Matthew Roberts on The Iliad, Herbert Jordan, trans.
Tom Piatak on John Zmirak’s The Grand Inquisitor

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Carolina: The Class of ’59: Intimations of Mortality and Posterity
by Clyde Wilson

VITAL SIGNS

The New Republic: Lincoln and God
by Joseph E. Fallon

COLUMNS

The Bare Bodkin
by Joseph Sobran

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Letter to the Bishop
by Joe Ecclesia

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

The American Interest
by Srdja Trifkovic

In the Dark
Frost/Nixon
by George McCartney

The Hundredth Meridian
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Seneca Visits Athens
and
Icarus Fell From Heaven
by Joseph O’Brien

ON THE COVER

Cover art by George McCartney, Jr.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.