01.20
So, yesterday I posted about how, looking at history, you could conclude that Obama was very Lincoln-like in his policy and his politics. I was intrigued, then, by a link on Drudge Report today about how Lincoln might not have been thrilled with an Obama presidency. I read the article by Leonard Pitts and while it started off good, he ended up in a massive contradiction that ruined the whole premise of the article. I was left wondering how in the world a Pulitzer Prize winning syndicated columnist could miss this. Here’s what I’m talking about:
Of course, Lincoln freed no slaves. That’s the myth. His Emancipation Proclamation was a military measure to demoralize and destabilize the rebellious South; it covered states he did not govern but did not apply in slaveholding states that remained under his jurisdiction.
This is a good recounting of the historical fact of Lincoln’s “emancipation”. It didn’t free a single slave, and Pitts is right to point that out. But, he then goes on to praise him for his obsession with the “Union”, and that’s where his logic gets all backwards:
We would be a very different nation, a lesser nation, without his political genius, his dogged faith in the unsundered Union, his refusal to accept less than Union…”
…
He also abhorred slavery. But he was willing to countenance it if doing so would have vindicated his primary goal: to save the Union.
For him, nothing mattered more. Lincoln held with an indefatigable fervor to the belief that there was something unique, something necessary to preserve, in the union of American states, this government of, by and for the people.
Do you see what I mean? He says that nothing mattered more to Lincoln than preserving the Union, because he believed in government “of, by and for the people.” How in God’s name can you have a government “of” and “by” the people when those people don’t want to be governed by you anymore? Preserving the Union was only an issue precisely because those in the Southern states no longer consented to participating in governing, or being governed by, the Union. What Lincoln preserved wasn’t government of the people. No, he created government over the people. Therefore, I must once again pull out Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”
Less than one hundred years later, Lincoln might as well have been lighting Pacific Railroad cigars with a rolled up Declaration of Independence.
