The American Spectator

Print Email

Text Size

Buy the Book

(Page 2 of 2)

IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL in rural Illinois we were taught to revere "the Prairie Flower of the West" like a plaster saint. We took pilgrimages to his two-story home and his tomb in Springfield and visited his log cabin lodgings in New Salem. He was Moses, Julius Caesar, Mark Twain and Ragged Dick all in one. What we never heard, as grade school or college students, was much explanation of Lincoln's politics. What, besides preserving the Union, did he stand for?

This would have meant getting into ideas like natural rights versus states' rights, and that was beyond our teachers. Fortunately Thomas L. Krannawitter, assistant professor of government at Hillsdale College, has stepped into the breech. Riding to old Abe's defense, Prof. Krannawitter, who in his review of The Real Lincoln calls its author, "a giddy, careless, half-educated boy," debunks the idea that President Lincoln was the bogeyman of states' rights, favoring centralized government, empire, and mercantilism over equal natural rights and free market economics.

Important though the issues of slavery, individual natural rights, and state sovereignty were, there were more important matters to consider. Government of the people, by the people and for the people was on trial for its life, and there was no reason to think the American experiment would not go the way of the French Revolution. (Ironically, the American Revolution was no revolution at all, since no government was deposed. It was rather a textbook secessionist movement, writes DiLorenzo.)

In fact, King Abe's detractors were convinced the American experiment had already degenerated into a Napoleonic dictatorship. By denying the Southern states their legitimate and natural right to secede, Lincoln was more of a tyrant than Robespierre or Napoleon. In Abe's defense, Krannawitter argues there was no constitutional right of secession. True, but there was also nothing in the Constitution to prevent a state from seceding (despite what a majority of pro-Union justices wrote in Texas v. White). Had the Founders tried to insert such a clause, we would still be operating under the Articles of Confederation. Arguably the right of secession or "separation" was enunciated in the Declaration of Independence where Thomas Jefferson argued that whenever the consent of the governed is withdrawn it is the right of the people to "abolish" that government and "to institute a new government."

The issue, then, was the natural right of a people to withdraw from a voluntary union versus the importance of keeping the great democratic experiment alive. Lincoln chose the latter, thereby preserving the union and ending the peculiar institution of slavery.

Krannawitter argues that if Lincoln is not great, then no politician is, and without great politicians we sink into the deep funk of cynicism, throwing up our hands at the political process, while despots take charge (sort of like the liberals on the Supreme Court are doing currently). I don't know. I happen to think cynicism an important quality and cynicism directed toward politicians essential. Essential, that is, if we hope to keep the great democratic experiment alive.

topics:
Economics, Books, Constitution, Law