Lincoln's Messianism: the Source of Empire

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"Nothing could be more untrue that the soldiers at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives for "self-determination." It was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves." H. L. Mencken

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"If any State in the Union will declare that it prefers seperation...I have no hesitation in saying "Let us seperate." Thomas Jefferson, 1816

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While recently watching a film-hagiography on the subject of that mystical of most mystical of our national myths--- our revered "Sixteenth President", whose day of matyrdom falls on this very day of Good Friday, as it did in 1865, I was dumbfounded by the transformation of so many historical facts into pure myth. Lincoln, the script religiously intoned, was "THE great AMERICAN story." He was "The man who strode forth from the wilderness." As the camera zeros in on Lincoln's Christ-like and depressive eyes the trumpets of Empire blaze from these firey wheels enclosed by their prophetic whiskers. In this moment no viewer can help but feel that any nation who could produce such a mystical incarnation of historical will as the face of Abraham Lincoln--- can do nothing else but assert its divinely-ordained dominance over the rest of mankind. For the personhood and martyrdom of Lincoln can only mean that the United States is ordained to direct the destiny of ALL nations. Of course the last sentence is in no way stated in this piece of cinema, but that is just what makes the conclusion unavoidable. The very next words of the script are Lincoln's own. They are words that helped to create his own special myth: "It is unaccountable that I, a person uneducated--- and with so little knowledge of the world, should have drifted into the apex of this great event (The Civil War)." This charming sophistry was of course totally negated by Lincoln's own law partner Herndon, who wrote that Lincoln's ambition was "a little engine that ran unceasingly". But of what use are 'facts' when a Hegelian 'world-historical' force like Lincoln has asserted itself? Such a power is a delight to the imperial ego, and facts, just like the unpleasant ones coming out of Iraq today, must be mythically bent to fit it. Thus I think Lincoln's deceptive self-description tells us more why about why America is slogging around in Iraq today than is at first casually apparent. For when any nation has once produced "a Lincoln" (Read A Napoleon, A Hitler) (meaning: stood its own first principles on their heads and then called the new principles first principles) then what is left for that nation to do, but to play out its "world-historical" destiny? As a poet recently put it:

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Honest Abe was our first Imperial

Bismark, suspending habeas corpus

To forge the Industrial-Nation State;

Covering Death With his own deathless prose.

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This Lincoln is the man who died for our sins--- though the fact that he was also the man who defined those sins in the first place seems to slip pass most people's attention. And did the great rail-splitter really "drift" into the apex of the very "great event" he claims to have no part in creating? Or does this shorthand simply cover-up the alteration, through the powers of Lincoln's own "deathless" but devious prose, of the terms of the argument? You will certainly believe the latter so if you read Garry Will's Pulitzer Prize winning book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. In this work Wills admits that the American people "had their intellectual pockets picked at Gettysburg." "The crowd departed" Wills says "with a new thing in its intellectual luggage, the new "Constitution" that Lincoln had substituted for the one that they had brought with them." After The Gettysburg Address, Wills argues, no American would ever again be able to read either the Declaration of Independance or the United States Constitution in the way that they been read before 1860. This was because the Declaration of Independance is itself a declaration of Succession, and one which enshrined the right of all peoples to self-determination, holding as an 'inalineable' right of the people to "alter or abolish" their own government. This is a fact that did not sit well with an America that was contemplating (one could justly say-- planning) to become an empire. It sits even less well with the America of today--- where we routinely assume that the very war which turned the United States into a world military power was fought because benevolvant notherners wished to ease or even to "free" black people from their sufferings as slaves. For many people the notion that Southerners just might have had some notion of the Constitution that differed from their own is as impossible to understand as is the reality that we did not invade Nazi Germany to rescue the Jews from Hilter. For such people the 'facts' of history are as nothing next to their religious faith in history's trajectory. For me at least, this is the reason I can see a direct connection between the sleight of hand Lincoln performed at Gettysburg and the tragedies of America in the Phillipines and Cuba, America in Vietnam, America in Iraq, and the fact that America has wasted away her moral capital in the privy chambers of scores of other nations since 1945, all in quest of our ever-more unobtainable 'national security'. I think all this mad interventionism has its source in Lincoln's mad Messianism. If this appeal to history appears to be a "back-formation"--- then consider the following "premonitions" announced in the popular press both before and after the war itself:

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"[The North fought...for all those delicious dreams of national predominace in future ages, which she must relinquish as soon as the Union is severed." (The Boston Athenaeum May 1865)

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"We love the Union because...it renders us the equal of the greatest European Power, and in another half century, will make us the greatest, richest, most powerful people on the face of the earth" (The New York Courier December 1860)

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These citations give away what is already clear to anyone who looks--- that Slavery was at best an excuse for terminating the Constuition of 1788 and replacing it with a mystic devotion to "a proposition that all men are created equal". And if all men and are thus 'equal', and "Freedom" is, as our current President is fond of intoning, "God's gift to man"--- it is but small step to dedicate the nation itself to the realization of this abstraction, notwithstanding its all-too evident collusion with our own 'national interests' all around the globe. In fact, why not have the nation itself conduct this "war on everyone" as a permanent sort of moral crusade? This is the inevitable upshot of Lincoln's sleight of hand at Gettysburg, one which changed the purpose of our nation from one dedicated to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"-- to one "dedicated" to an abstract war on the rest of the world on behalf of an equally abstract "freedom".

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So what are the real Constitutional issues which lie at the root of the Civil War? Briefly, some of the major points are these:

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1.The method of ratification of the Constitution of 1788 confirmed the precedance of the States themselves in the Union, since it affirmed that it would take effect upon ratification by only nine of then thirteen states. This occured on June 21 of 1788 when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the new Consitution. Though the Articles of Confederation specified that the Union it created was "perpetual" the new union created was created exclusive of four states, Virginia North Carolina, Rhode Island and New York. This new union had thus 'seceeded' from the Union of the Confederation in violation of of its one of the Articles own articles which declared that the Articles of Conferation could not be changed without unanimous consent.

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2. The Articles of Confederation exhortation to "perpetuity", repeated five times in the Articles, was dropped in the new Constitution, and no mention of "perpetuity" is made in the new Constitution.

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3. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution read as follows: IX:"The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparge others retained by the people. X: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." (There is no language barring seccesion in the Constitution--- therefore this right MUST be held by the States. Even the Fourteenth Admentment, added after the war, does not specfically bar seccesion!)
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4. In 1787 James Madison himself spoke out during the deliberations at the Constitutional Convention when the Convention considered adding the following words to the powers of Congress: "Congress shall have the right to call forth the union against any member of the union failing to fulfill its duties under the articles thereof." In defeating this suggestion Madison said: "A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a delaration of war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."

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5. The Second Amendment: "A well-regulated Militia being neccessary to the security of a free STATE (there were no standing federal armies at the time) the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." There is only one way to interpret this Amendment and this is that the people of the STATES have the right to defend themselves against the potential tyranny of the federal govenment. Again in Madison's words, "Let a standing Army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger."

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6. Lincoln cites only two clauses of the Constitution which argue against the legality of secession: the supremracy clause and the guarantee clause. The first is negated by the secession of a given state itself, which is no longer bound by the Constitution, and the second charges that the Federal Government "guarantee" a Repulican government to the states and "protect them from INVASION! Both these "guarantees" were negated by the Federal goverment in the war itself--- since the North itself invaded the southern states and also set up government by martial law in them for many years afterward.

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7. Which is the correct emphasis? "We the People of the United STATES do ordain and establish"? Or is the correct emphasis "We the People of the UNITED states do ordain and establish"?

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Lincoln famously asserted that no principle of secession can be valid since it provides for its own negation by allowing a political entity to break into yet smaller units until it has regressed to "anarchy". Yet there are many examples where secession within states has been painless, has enhanced democracy, and permitted otherwise intractable disputes the time to heal before a new reunification is obtained. Two examples from recent history are the secession of Norway from Sweden and the very recent secession of Slovakia from the Czech Republic. In neither of

these cases has the new political entity descended into anarchy. Lincoln's obsession with "majoritarianism" (strange given that sixty per-cent of the U. S. electorate rejected his own candidacy) and his confusion of it with "democracy" has a direct parallel to the current situation in Iraq, where one group, the Kurds, who have repeatedly demonstated, out of all the groups in Iraq, the best ability to govern themselves democratically, are instead being senselessly chained to the Sunnis and the Shiites. But because we, like Lincoln, obsess over the creation of "majorities" instead of allowing for a principle of de-evolution or succession--- the Kurds remain thwarted by their forced inclusion in a supa-state which they neither desire nor need. At the same time the United States becomes bogged down in own misplaced abstractions about "freedom", searching for a formula that will transform cultures which are primarly medieval in outlook into majoritarian empires, in short, into smaller verions of US. It is like trying to land on the moon with a magic carpet, and it is high time we stopped copying the manifold follies of Abraham Lincoln. The fear engendered in states by "secession" is primarly the fear of the loss of of the coercive wealth that they provide to the state. Peripheries will always wish independance, centers wish control. As James Ostrowski notes, "As with all forms of forced association, the stronger party will tend to exploit the weaker. Such is the case with the master-slave relationship. Such is the case with a state that is forced to remain in the Union against its will. Both forms are immoral and should be and are forbidden by the Constitution" (Lincoln's Arguments Against Secession, 1995)

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But isn't the Civil War now "over"? Isn't it only "old news"? I am not so sure. It is a supreme irony that we now observe the "Red" States of the old Confederacy now taking their revenge on the lovers of Empire, (now conviently transformed into 'progressives') in the "Blue" States. But what could be less suprising? When we murdered the Indians of Great Plains we did not stop to consider that the day would arrive when there would be no economic reason to for anyone to venture where they live there unless it would be to see them. Those whose self-determination you destroy have a way of waiting around until the same is taken from you. Then, instead of helping you to "reform"--- they will instead take a crazed joy in cramming your own messianic words down your throat.

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It remains only to speculate what might have transpired for American blacks in the case that we had adhered to the Constitution and allowed the southern states to depart in peace in 1860. Who can say? What can be said is that given advances in technology and economy that were coming in the late-nineteenth century--- slavery was already doomed. What can also be said is that it is hard to imagine that blacks would have become the same source of misplaced pride, anxiety and class-consciousness as they did become among the southerners made poor by Reconstruction, even up until 1939. Would blacks have really have had to wait more than the hundred-years that the North provided for them before achieving full civil rights--- under a peaceful Confederate goverment? Would any strides made in the interim by Northern blacks have been made somehow "invisble" and thus irreproducable by blacks in the south? Would Jim-Crow, which was in part a "reaction" to the indignities of Reconstruction, have proceeded in both North and South in the quite the same way?

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This much seems clear, that without the national appropriation of Linclon's messiansim, we would probably not now be half way around the world trying to design a political system for those who could live more naturally under a religious one.

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Will Morgan