No Vindication For Lincoln

Some will say or do anything to maintain Lincoln's iconic image as the greatest president and emancipator (perhaps even saviour). David Gordon, a senior fellow at the Mises Institute has written a great critique to another secesh detractor. Thomas Krannawitter's book, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President deserves critique. Gordon points out some of Krannawitters inconsistencies and errors.

Can Krannawitter be ignorant of the fact that Darwin did not discuss human evolution until The Descent of Man in 1871? Perhaps the passage was a trivial slip, that only a reviewer intent on blood would highlight. But several pages later, Krannawitter rides again: "In the antebellum South, religious thought incorporated the ideas of Hegel and Darwin to provide a potent defense of slavery that was well received by many Southern whites."

Gordon goes on to discuss at length Krannawitter's Royalist views. Krannawitter, despite what the real patriots did in the first war for American Independence, believes that a people do not maintain the right of secession. Gordon notes,

However critical of Krannawitter one may be, one must be grateful to him for one admission: "In many ways, Lincoln's legacy hinges on the question of whether states did in fact possess a constitutional right of secession. If they did, then virtually everything Lincoln did as president was illegal at best, immoral at worst. If Lincoln had no legal power and no constitutional duty to maintain the Union against secessionist movements, then Lincoln might well deserve the title "war criminal" … and should be viewed with contempt."

He got that one right, but as has been noted, Krannawitter believes that the Union was perpetual and no right to secede exists. One major problem that some of these folks have is that they cannot explain the anti-Federalists' demand of exact limitations of federal government evidenced particularly in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions penned by Jefferson.

Krannawitter has ignored an important fact that undermines his contention. Precisely in order to rebut the anti-Federalist complaints that the new government unduly subordinated the states, the Federalist defenders of the document in the Virginia Ratification Convention of 1788 were anxious to assure opponents that if the federal government infringed on the prerogatives of the state, the state would not be bound by these actions.

It would be absurd to assert (especially considering the immense amount of evidence to the contrary) that the men who won their battle for independence from an oppressive government would create a new government void of these same philosophy of the "right to alter or abolish."