 |
|
The Neo-Unionists’ Rope of Sand by Joseph R. Stromberg
I. E Pluribus Multi The recent publication of Professor Tom DiLorenzo’s book, The Real Lincoln, has caused great unhappiness in the House of Lincoln and for good reason. Lincoln is commonly taken as the true "founder" of the U.S. imperial state and its matching ideology. Efforts to trace a path between Lincoln and the actual "founders" (to use that word) only yield a web of rationalization, wilful misreadings of the record, and wrongheaded assumptions about late 18th-century American political practice, values, and ideas. Even as the South undergoes a Third (and final?) Reconstruction, many Northern historians and other literati are deeply shocked to learn that there remain those who even now do not accept the official theory of the war of 1861-1865 and the received gospel of the union. More re-education is necessary! Things are said to have been "settled" by Mr. Lincoln’s war, as if being shelled, blockaded, defeated, occupied, and reconstructed, would in the nature of things produce genuine intellectual conversion in the South: an argumentum ex sledgehammer. Even worse, there are non-Southerners, too, who have failed to learn the great historical "lesson" Mr. Lincoln taught with blood and iron – and more of those last, in fact, than Chancellor Bismarck needed in unifying Germany. Sundry Neo-Conservatives have sprung to their PCs to trample out the "Neo-Confederate" vineyard with its many wrathful grapes. Along with most eminent Civil War historians, they hold that all opposition to the received view of Mr. Lincoln’s war must rest, in the end, on the post-1865 works of disgruntled ex-Confederates, who, having lost, had the nerve to say that questions other than slavery helped bring on the war. Between the shaky bridge of ideas between Father Abraham and the original Founders, the Revolution, etc., on one hand, and the presumptively cranky ravings of ex- and Neo-Confederates, on the other, the choice seems clear. Tom DiLorenzo’s ideas were refuted "fifty years ago" by Professor Harry Jaffa, says Professor Mackubin Thomas Owens. To this I reply, that Jaffa’s ideas were refuted somewhat earlier: by John Taylor of Caroline, in the 1820s. My point is that the running argument over the basis of American political life dates from the "Founding" and goes back into the revolutionary period itself. The "states rights" position did not surface suddenly post-1865 in Confederate memoirs, nor was it grounded in a one-man reinvention of the Constitution by John C. Calhoun in the 1830s, as Jaffa holds. By the same token, centralizers and continental mercantilists did not emerge with the Whig Party and Henry Clay (Lincoln’s model statesman) but built upon the program associated with Alexander Hamilton. II. A Debate Older Even Than Neo-Conservatism These sides and their arguments have long existed. But which was closer to the truth of things? Such matters are not "settled" for theory or history by the outcome of a war. Reason does not yield to Grant and Sherman, even if Lee did. The nationalist, or Unionist, position characterized men who wished to retain the forms of the British Empire, while substituting themselves for George III, Parliament, and the British bureaucracy. They wanted an American empire and American mercantilism. Their opponents, for various reasons, wanted to retain the colonial autonomy they had enjoyed under "benign neglect" prior to 1763. Decentralists wanted only the loosest possible federal connection (using "federal" in its classical meaning) and mainly in foreign relations. Their program was not "about slavery" but, rather, grew from their inherited values, institutions, and prejudices. Indeed, there were a good many slaveholders in the "Federalist" (= Nationalist) camp in 1787. The decentralists, rightly or wrongly, wanted decentralization. Maybe they thought they could manage their own affairs. Most historians dislike them for that. In any case, certain weighty questions, which came into focus in 1861, had a history reaching back behind the Lincoln-Douglas debates. To be fair, it might be said there were more than two camps in late 18th-century America: There were local mercantilists; but the national mercantilists, with their "modernizing" ideas about the blessings of public debt and their firm belief that commerce needs constant subsidy, regulation, and pushes in the right direction (that of the mercantilists and their friends), were a bigger problem than local mercantilists. All these things bear directly on the Secession War and the case for Lincoln, because they go directly to the nature of the union. Early nationalists, who were strongly mercantilist, made certain claims about the history and outcome of the revolutionary and early constitutional period. Their foes, the so-called "Antifederalists" (genuinely federal as opposed to national), fielded counter-arguments in the interest of local autonomy. The nationalist school - from James Wilson, Joseph Story, James Madison, and John Marshall, through Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Lincoln, and Francis Lieber, down to Jaffa, Samuel Beer, and many other contemporary American historians - have done very well rhetorically. They - the above list is not exhaustive - believe they have won every battle. Hence their shock that unbelievers still roam the land. The problem is that the nationalist "case" is but a rope of sand. III. Can You Get One People for the Price of Thirteen? The merits or otherwise of the nationalist case are central to the campaign against "Neo-Confederate" heretics, who decline to go marching through either Georgia: the nearby one, or the former Soviet one. If metaphysical "ideas," destiny, and so on called forth a single American (when? 1776? 1789? 1865?) with a singular "sovereign" authority to set the general government "over" the states; or if, alternatively, there factually existed from some time or other such a single, undivided American people "in the aggregate" – it becomes much easier to deny the right, power, or capacity of any smaller political society to withdraw or secede from a union established by, or in the name of, such a hypothetical, unitary people. The smaller societies may only appeal to an operationally meaningless "right to revolution," which Professor Jaffa offers us in high jest. It is a grand joke, and one pioneered by Lincoln during the Mexican War, when he said that, "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better." Lincoln was a noted frontier humorist, but the phrase I have italicised reveals the crafty lawyer at work. This is an offer you can’t re-use. On the Unionist argument, the abstract singular people have a walk-on part in the play. They ordain and establish the great national state in its majesty and retire, forever, to the wings (perfection being "perpetual"). Thenceforth, the machinery "goes of itself," and woe betide him, who falls between the gears. Just as it matters whether or not there was One People, so, too, does it matter whether there were instead, thirteen peoples organized into thirteen political societies - fourteen if one counts Vermont: completely irregular and self-created. One could easily imagine thirteen existing colonies, with a long history of separate political existence, sending their delegates to meet to discuss and coordinate resistance to the King of England, who, on the American revolutionaries’ most popular argument – an argument intended to take Parliament out of the loop - was the only thing giving unity to the British Empire. One might well imagine them sending their delegates to meet to discuss declaring their independence. One can imagine them setting up a regular Congress of their representatives to coordinate their warlike activities after independence was declared. They might even set up, for limited purposes, a Confederation to handle some of their affairs, all without taking out any first or second mortgages on the future of local self-government. They did just these things, and the evidence of plurality is everywhere, as Forrest McDonald has rightly noted. The sheer thirteenness of the undertaking is overwhelming. It is right there in the public record. Only a nationalist, his steely eyes scanning time and space for the metaphysical One, could miss it. There is an added bonus: at no point in this story do we really need the concept of "sovereignty." IV. Peoples, Agreements, Agents, and So Forth Even less do we need the hoary "social contract." If sovereignty is a snare, the social contract is sheer delusion. All through the debates in the Constitutional Convention one finds speakers, nationalist and anti-nationalist alike, using rather undigested social contract language and creating general havoc and confusion with it. Notions ran amok. Some asked: Did the Declaration of Independence throw the people, distributively or collectively, into a "state of nature"? Did the Revolution throw the colonies/states into a "state of nature" vis-à-vis one another? And so on. None of these questions had much to do with what the conventioneers were actually doing: namely, exceeding their instructions to propose amendments to the Articles and, instead, cobbling together a new federal scheme. To achieve that goal, nationalists had to by-pass the existing amendment procedure under the Confederation and propose a new arrangement – to whom exactly? – to the states! If anyone threw any people or peoples into anything resembling an unhistorical and hypothetical state of nature, it was the nationalists who did so by their tactics. Madison was at his devious best in the convention, arguing that the Articles formed, after all, a mere "league," a "treaty," from which any single party could withdraw, when the agreement’s provisions were violated. In effect, the states were invited to secede from the union of 1781 so as to enter a new one consisting of nine or more states. Madison undertook some fancy footwork to show that this precedent could not possibly apply to the new union under the Constitution. Madisonian indirection reached a high point in the Federalist Papers, where, assisted by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, he famously set forth his "partly federal, partly national" ideas on divided and distributed sovereignty, which have sown confusion ever since. But the whole exercise depends critically on his assumption that, either One People already existed before ratification of the new grocery list - by conventions which only spoke, and could only speak, in the name of specific states; or, alternatively, that such conventions could, somehow, alienate the jurisdictions and rights of their constituents, even though this drastic proposition was not, on the face of it, on the printed agenda, and when the nationalists in those conventions worked overtime to urge that consolidation into a new, singular people was not intended. As M. E. Bradford, among others, has pointed out, it is the ratifiers’ intentions that matter. If the nationalists were running a continental swindle, the swindle cannot decide the character of the union. That North Carolina and Rhode Island remained aloof while eleven states implemented the Constitution and set up the new ballgame, is a difficulty for the nationalists’ single-people theory. For some months the newly minted U.S. government had to treat North Carolina and Rhode Island as independent, foreign powers, as indeed they were. That, in the end, those states ratified out of a blend of sentiment and pragmatism, does not overthrow the fact that few then thought that those states could rightfully be coerced into the new union. If there existed, metaphysically, One People, those states were in "rebellion" against a majority and could have been forced to "ratify." This might be called ratification-by-conquest. Unfortunately, such a procedure clashes with the normal sense of "ratify" and puts one in mind of the fourteenth amendment. V. Clashing Tides of Nationalism Nationalists have differed with one another about the time and manner in which the One People came to be. John Marshall and James Wilson affirmed primordial unity, while Madison, Judge Joseph Story, George Ticknor Curtis, Hermann Von Holtz, George Bancroft, and Claude Van Tyne – whose writings stretch over a century – settled for a kind of Hegelian unfolding of the single people. Destiny, the Weltgeist, whatever, demanded it. Interestingly, paladins of Neo-Unionism like Professors Jaffa, Beer, Walter Berns, and Richard Morris, are more rabid on this point than most of their forebears. They espy One People at the very moment of the Declaration of Independence, or even earlier in the first stirrings of the Revolution. The One People in question – from whose loving, fraternal embrace no one can rightfully escape - came into being in 1865 on the basis of the "right" of conquest and by no other means. That is precisely how Franks, Bretons, Alsatsians, Basques, Italians, and latter-day Gauls (the majority) became One French People. It is how Prussia converted Bavarians, Saxons, and other minor folk into One German People, albeit with far less violence than in the French and U.S. cases. Knowing this saves a lot of time. VI. The Union Created Instantly Ex Nihilo For the Instant Nationalists, the fact that on July 4, 1776, representatives of the Colonies termed themselves "united" outweighs their claim to be "free and independent states." But this seems a rather feeble and indirect way to announce the arrival of a new, single, "sovereign" power in the world. This interpretation entirely dodges the possible meanings of "united": e.g., united in the struggle against England, united as Americans, etc. It tells us nothing about political arrangements as of that date or in the future. In addition, the One-Shot Declarationists pretend to believe that the Continental Congress next "authorized" the colonies to draw up constitutions for themselves as states. In the actual document, the word is "recommend." This is hardly the language of a supreme "national sovereign" addressing inferior political societies. Let us review some other opinions. Judge Samuel Chase said in Ware v. Hylton (1796) that colonial delegates had announced "not that the United Colonies jointly, in a collective capacity, were independent States, but that each had a right to govern itself by its own authority, and its own laws without any control from any other power on earth. I have ever considered it as an established doctrine of the States that all laws made by the legislatures of the several States after the declaration of independence were the laws of sovereign and independent States." In 1840, Judge Joseph Story conceded that the colonies had been "separate and independent of each other in their original establishment, and down to the eve of the Revolution." Moreover, the Continental Congress "organized by a voluntary [!] association of the States, and continued by the successive appointments of the State legislatures, constituted, in fact, the National Government," etc. This is fair enough. "Government" in this sense having no higher function than management services for which original parties have contracted, there is no reason to contest Story’s language here. The states could as easily have hired doorkeepers, dogcatchers, and janitors without making those worthies "sovereign" over their employers. Of the Confederation, Story writes that, "the union thus formed, was but of a temporary nature, dependent upon the consent of all the Colonies, now become States, and capable of being dissolved, at any time by the secession of any one of them." Carl Becker wrote in 1922 that the Declaration presupposes "a conception of the [British] empire as a confederation of free peoples submitting themselves to the same king by an original compact voluntarily entered into, and terminable, in the case of any member, at the will of the people concerned." Note the distributive theme. Such things are lost on the Neo-Unionists, who leave the bulk of the document unread, in favor of endlessly dwelling on their five favorite words. A reading of George III’s instructions to his peace commissioners in 1778 is also instructive here. Basically, the king was tired of the whole thing and said, in effect, give the Americans anything they want – the status quo of 1763, all their separate colonial self-government, bake them a cake, just get them to stay in the empire, however minimally, so we can make a few bucks off rent-seeking regulations on their external trade. Not a bad deal, really. More than one Southern writer has observed that, had we made peace with George III, we would have now greater practical local autonomy than we got by signing up with our own proto-nationalists. The real mistake, as B. B. Kendrick said in his 1941 presidential address to the Southern Historical Association, was for the Southern states to ever enter into any union with the Northern states. Such is the wisdom of hindsight. Instead we confederated twice. But just when did the basis of union cease to be "voluntary" (Story’s word) and become, well, less than voluntary? The milder school of nationalists have settled for claiming that the Single People come into existence via the 1786 Constitution itself, that is, the Constitution under which we allegedly live. Naturally enough, it is Little Jamie Madison who provided the appropriately mushy, middle-range theory to explain such a happy outcome. Madison accomplished his feat, among other means, by fudging the distributive and collective meanings of "the people." This is a staple tactic of the nationalists and need not keep us long. It is enough to say that where "united colonies" or "united states" can be taken as plural, or where such phrases are ambiguous, nationalists seize on them as singular. Professor Jaffa is a master of this dark art, always taking "union," not as a concept to be explained, but as having always referred to a political trap: the involuntary, ironclad union, which factually resulted from the success of Lincoln’s armies. Madison’s attempts in the 1830s to refute John C. Calhoun’s theses on the union provide much entertainment by showing how much he had confused himself and others. In passing, I must also mention Richard B. Morris’s famous essay in the Columbia Law Review (October 1974) on "sovereignty" over coastal sea-beds, often cited by Neo-Unionists as tying down forever the premature birth of the imperium – a body born before its own conception, in a reverse time-flow whose implications would stump even Dr. Einstein. Only if we grant Professor Morris plenary sovereignty over the English language and a truckoad of "implieds," and a take as gospel truth bald assertions about the Oneness of the union cited from a number of proto-nationalists, can his essay be seen as dispositive. But perhaps we are on Neo-Platonist ground with the union as eidos, or eternal form. Origen of Alexandria believed in the heavenly pre-existence of souls. Perhaps Neo-Unionists believe the union has existed from "time out of mind" in pre-created anticipation of an historical-salvational mission. But that comes near to Gnosticism, and I would never lumber Neo-Unionists with that, especially those of them who claim to have read, and understood, Eric Voegelin. So we come back to our more limited hermeneutical task. Nationalists could contend, I suppose, that anti-nationalists, too, read the evidence selectively; but Neo-Unionists seldom try to demonstrate that particular anti-nationalist readings are wrong. They prefer to sail above all that, gliding through high-minded clouds of inexorable and ineluctable inevitability in the Airbus of History. VII. Evolutionary Nationalism We have noted some problems for the Instant Coffee version of unbreakable union. But now we must ask how – in the evolutionary school’s progressive nationalist story – far-seeing geniuses could overcome the horrors of entrenched local self-government and narrow particularism? There are problems here as well. I shall look at just one of them here. If One People did come into being via irresistible, quasi-Hegelian processes, why do the latter always lead only toward centralization and unity? Why can Southerners not claim that they, too, underwent a comparable evolution into a separate, Single People sometime after 1789? If a singular American people sprang up in the 18th century and seceded from the British Empire, how is it that a Southern people cannot come into being thereafter with an equally good claim to independence? What is the difference between the two cases? I do not think that Professor Jaffa’s contrast of illegal secession vs. an airy-fairy (operationally useless) "right of revolution" is much help here. Nor does slavery explain everything, since the Virginians – to name just one lot - had that institution at the time of their first secession. I suppose we could convert Lord Dunmore into a great emancipator for promising freedom to those Virginian slaves who would fight for English rule against the American revolutionaries. If slavery taints everything and everyone within several centuries and hundreds of miles of its sphere, why support even retrospectively the American Revolution? Clearly, the British must have been the liberators in the piece. And why does the taint of slavery not disqualify certified nationalist heroes like Madison, John Marshall, Edmund Randolph, and other Southern Federalists from serious consideration? And if they are all right, then why are Jefferson Davis and others, who acted in the same American political tradition as those earlier figures, disqualified? Must we morally abort both causes? On the Neo-Unionist view, we must not. Slavery had to be endured – such is the cunning of reason - through Confederation and Constitution so that, after 620,000 deaths and other destruction, the "saved" and reinvigorated U.S. state apparatus could bestride the globe, handing out moral directives to the Serbs, the Afghans, evil axles, and the like. But when did the American people, plural or singular, ever sign on for perpetual war for perpetual moral smugness? But No, they don’t need to: the machinery "goes of itself." With such machinery on the loose, one almost wishes for the return of Ned Ludd. VIII. Hotel Columbia: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave It is a persistent pretended argument of Unionists that "unanimity" clinches the case. It is said to matter that the colonies issued a "unanimous" declaration in 1776. This is less than a tautology. By definition, any agreement is the unanimous act of those doing the agreeing. It tells us nothing about the agreement, the status of those agreeing, etc. No charter of unlimited, organic unity arises from the mere agreement to something. Lincoln held that, hypothetically, the states collectively could agree to dissolve the union, but that one state could not withdraw on its own. This undermines his own assertions about a single, aggregated people, but perhaps that people – via those ratifying conventions, which spoke only for separate states – agreed to subject its/their Oneness to some new rule, perhaps under the amending power. Why should this be so? The states were competent to confederate, withdraw to form another federation, and yet suddenly they are found incompetent to leave the latter? If Single Peoplehood decides the case, we might expect to find more evidence of such a people than appears to be available; or, if thirteen distinct peoples knowingly made themselves into a new people, we need to see more evidence of that than is usually offered. The theory of a clever swindle by Mr. Madison and his allies cannot decide things, either. It would have to be shown that the state conventions could alienate, unawares, the separate jurisdictions and rights of their constituents permanently and irrevocably. Madison liked to claim that ratification through conventions rather than through legislatures made the second confederation more solid and solemn. This squints toward his idea that thirteen peoples consciously amalgamated themselves. In fact, certain new provisions in the Constitution would effectively amend each state constitution. No legislature could amend its own constitution. Conventions were therefore needed, on existing American theory and practice, to consider the new plan – not for the unheralded purpose of alienating each state’s birthright. Such alienations are commonly achieved only by organized war. I can think of one such war. Lincoln did not "save" an existing union; he fashioned a new, involuntary one by his characteristic methods. But it is not thought polite to question the program or the means; hence the outcry against DiLorenzo’s book. IX. The Snare of "Sovereignty" and the Delusion of Social Contract I have hinted that the critique of Old Unionism and Neo-Unionism need not hinge on the much- mooted concept of "sovereignty." Sovereignty is an entirely modern notion resulting from the European state-building process, which set in around 1500 A.D. Bertrand de Jouvenel put it in context and ably deconstructed it in On Sovereignty. The problem with sovereignty is that it announces an open-ended, illimitable claim, by a state, to the subject’s life, liberty, and property. Taking this theoretical monstrosity away from kings and awarding it to "peoples" gains us nothing, for the people never rule in person. All you get is republican or democratic time-servers, plunderers, and bureaucrats operating in the name of the people. Giving such a class of people theoretically illimitable access to citizens’ life, liberty, and property has not worked out very well. World War I showed how monstrous the claims had become. There is another way to set up the problem. 16th-century Spanish Scholastics grounded politics on natural law. As they saw it, society and property simply exist. There is no need to invent them or organize them out of nothing. People in society will desire some degree of protection of life and property. Kings and governments can serve this purpose. If they go beyond this modest role, they behave unjustly and remedies may be sought. The remedy does not involve "dissolving society." It is a practical matter. Least of all does this analysis require anyone to be "sovereign." You must look outside politics for metaphysics and ultimate ends, and even for law itself. How the kings or governments came to be does not much matter, provided they stay within the law. They are certainly not the source of the law. Modernization shunted such views aside. In 19th-century France, Frédéric Bastiat worked within the same tradition of analysis. In America, John Taylor of Caroline discovered much the same point of view. Quite rightly, Taylor held that in British North America we had never signed on for the theory of sovereignty so dear to absolute monarchs and international lawyers. Over time, thirteen or so political societies had grown up with their own rights and jurisdictions. This was simple, empirical fact. On our theory, no one, save the king, connected these societies or held jurisdiction over them. Then we got rid of the king and Parliament, with their competing claims to sovereignty. None of this bound us to take up abstract sovereignty as theory. On achieving independence, we were "sovereign" solely in the sense that we recognized no external superior. The relation was entirely negative and could equally well be expressed by such terms as "self-government," "political freedom," or "independence." There was no need for the notion of sovereignty with its endless implications. There were some who did celebrate sovereignty. People in power were drawn to it. Taylor’s approach to such issues emerged from his critique, in Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820), of the decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall. Marshall’s whole system, said Taylor, consisted of deducing implications from the theory of sovereignty. Sovereign states, by definition, had powers X, Y, and Z. The United States (plural) were "sovereign" (independent) in their foreign relations. Therefore, – switching gears – the federal government had the power to charter a bank, build a road to the moon, or create artificial life forms. (The last two examples are not Taylor’s). On this line of attack, implied federal powers were beyond number, restrained only by a few negative clauses, which could, on the same theory, be dispensed with during sovereignty-threatening emergencies. Taylor rejected this reasoning. He contended that we never had or needed the European theory of sovereignty. To the extent that England had adopted it (see Blackstone), we were not bound, having served the Crown its dismissal papers. We existed, empirically, as thirteen or so political societies. However those had arisen – this was an historical question, the individuals composing those societies enjoyed natural rights. They were prior to the societies and the societies were prior to whatever governmental arrangement they had made or inherited. Nobody was "sovereign" – not the state bureaucrats, and much less their common agent, the federal government. Mr. Madison and his friends had insisted that everything not "delegated" was retained, either by the states as political societies or by the people composing those societies as individuals. The amendments supposedly nailed this down beyond all dispute. For Taylor, any power whatsoever in the hands of Congress derived solely from the Constitution to which the states had agreed. It did not exist as an inherent feature of "sovereignty" or as a deduction from such features. Alongside Taylor, few may claim the title of strict constructionist. One who can is Raoul Berger. He rejects Justice Sutherland’s claim (1936) that the king’s "royal prerogative" in foreign affairs mystically lit upon the presidential shoulders (by way of intervening institutions) as a consequence of the declaration in 1776. For Berger as for Taylor, there are no powers outside those delegated. When the Federalists sought to take back their promises, shortly after securing ratification, Taylor turned his considerable talents to sorting things out via natural law reasoning, supplemented with a dose of English practicality. Despite the mistake later Southern writers made in taking over the word "sovereignty," few of them lost sight of the purely instrumental nature of the union. The union was means and not end. Mr. Lincoln reversed that relationship at great cost. X. Final Observations In June 1821, Justice Story wrote his colleague John Marshall regarding the dangerous doctrines of the Virginians. If those views prevailed, he said, "We should dread to see the government reduced as Virginia wished it, to a confederacy; & we [Federalists] are disposed to construe the Constitution of the U.S. as a frame of government & not as a petty charter granted to a paltry corporation for the purpose of regulating a fishery or collecting." Imagine, if you can, the Constitution treated as a practical business contract and the federal regime degraded to doing useful, menial jobs. Imagine the parties to the contract remaining superior to their Great Agent. The horror! No great empire was built by delivering the mail. Far-seeing men like James Madison have always known this. There is no public monument to the Unknown Subcontractor, but the Great Agent has given himself many monuments. Mr. Lincoln and his war made it possible for later presidents to eschew unheroic bourgeois escapism in favor of constant wars and moral uplift, at home and abroad. Now you can see why we must love him; and why DiLorenzo, for shaking our faith in Lincoln, has become a public enemy. The central state made war and war made the central state, to paraphrase Charles Tilly. "The truth is out there." ~ Fox Moulder I close with a word to interested readers who might ask how we might recover the authentic British North American political tradition? Given the sheer wealth of written material from our revolutionary era, I suggest that we read that, as opposed to brooding over a small number of more prestigious "texts," while hoping for some kind of cabalistic-alchemical-hermetic illumination or revelation. But I could be wrong. Read the original documents. Don’t take the nationalists’ word for it; and don’t take mine, either. Think for yourselves; you are not in public school any more. Get a sense of how 18th-century Americans used their language. War is too important to leave to the generals, and the historical origins of American political life are too important to leave to Neo-Unionists.
May 13, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com |
Joseph
R. Stromberg [