Regarding Stephan's comments on Marco Bassani's excellent JLS article on the great Southern secessionist and champion of states' rights, Thomas Jefferson, one of the comments in Joe Sobran's article today (July 12) is related and especially telling. Joe explains how Lincoln and his administration viewed THE STATE as inalienable, and in possession of the "right" to do whatever it wants to enforce this supposed inalienability, even if it meant killing hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. To Lincoln it was not individuals who possessed inalienable rights to life, liberty and property; it was "the Union," which he always spelled in capital letters and claimed that it had some kind of mystical importance. By "Union" he meant the government in Washington, NOT the voluntary compact of the free, independent, and sovereign states that the founders believed in.
This is the main point of all my Lincoln wiritings: Lincoln was the anti-Jefferson, and the purpose, and effect, of his war was to overthrow the Jeffersonian ideal. Keep in mind that the reasons Abe and the Congress gave for their invasion of the southern states were twofold: 1) to continue to collect federal tariffs; and 2) to destroy the secession movement or, as they deceptively put it, "to save the union." They did this while pledging support of a constitutional amendment to protect slavery forever, something that no one devoted to natural rights could ever do.
To argue that, if he were alive in 1861, Jefferson would have abandoned his beloved Monticello and joined the likes of "Beast" Butler and Generals Burnside and Sherman in waging a war of extermination on his fellow Virginians (and all other Southerners) is nonsense of the highest order. Yet, that is exactly the implication of everything Harry Jaffa has ever written on the subject. (His life's work, and that of all the other Claremontista neocons, is devoted to perpetuating the lie that Lincoln was a Jeffersonian).
