[The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and The Fight for America by Glenn Ellmers, Encounter Books, 2021; 514pp.]
Glenn Ellmers—following his teacher Harry Jaffa—asks a good question, but his answer to it is wrong-headed. It is widely acknowledged that Americans are polarized in their political opinions between “Reds” and “Blues,” with the former being more populist and traditional, while the latter is more elitist, favoring rule by so-called “experts” and more “liberal” in the modern sense, that is to say, more leftwing. Given this polarity, how may Americans come together as a united people?
One could challenge the premise that Americans should come together as a united people: perhaps, for example, “woke” and “anti-woke” Americans don’t want to come together. But we can put this issue aside by conditionalizing the question, that is, we can ask, “If Americans want to come together as a united people, what should they do?”
Ellmers’s answer to this question is most implausible. He suggests that Americans should come together around the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as this clause was interpreted by Abraham Lincoln. (There is a disagreement about whether “equality clause” refers to the full paragraph we have quoted or just to “all men are created equal,” but this is a mere matter of semantics.)
In particular, Lincoln’s efforts to end slavery and his policies during the War between the States, also known as the Civil War, should be endorsed by all of us, though there is perhaps room for disagreement on details. In saying this, Ellmers is following Jaffa, who in the first of his two most important books, The Crisis of the House Divided, argued that Lincoln drew out the meaning of the equality clause in a way that the authors of the Declaration did not fully grasp, and, in the second, A New Birth of Freedom, argued that the authors of the Declaration did grasp the full meaning of the clause and that Lincoln carried out their intentions in a way they were unable to do when the Declaration was written.
Ellmers is more favorable to the latter view, but it was in connection with the former view that Jaffa suggested that Americans should adopt a “civil religion,” with Lincoln as a quasi-divine figure, hence the ironic title of our review. As Ellmers notes, a controversy has arisen among those students of the political philosopher Leo Strauss who—like Jaffa—accept Lincoln’s understanding of the equality clause, whether Lincoln needs to be “demoted” in his standing if one adopts the later reading. We will not discuss that controversy here.
Ellmers’s proposal on how Americans should come together is, to reiterate, most implausible. Americans cannot even agree about the correct name of the war between the North and the South, much less agree about Lincoln’s policies during that conflict. And this is an understatement.
Many Southerners, to say the least, execrate Lincoln, regarding him (in our opinion rightly) as guilty of unleashing a destructive and unnecessary war on the South. Jaffa countered this by arguing that the South bore the responsibility for the horrors of the war, because they wanted the Democratic Party to endorse enacting a law guaranteeing their right to bring slaves into all the states and territories of the United States, regardless of the votes of the citizens of those states and territories. When the demand that he explicitly endorse this proved unacceptable to Stephen A. Douglas, the nominee of the Northern Democrats for President in 1860, the Southern Democrats refused to support him. Had they done so, Jaffa surmised, Douglas would likely have won the election and war would have been avoided.
But it does not follow, even for the sake of argument granting the truth of Jaffa’s conjecture, that war was inevitable. It was Lincoln who brought on the war by refusing to recognize the right of a state to secede from the Union, at least without the unanimous consent of the other states. Had Lincoln allowed the states to secede peacefully, war would have been avoided. If Jaffa countered by saying that South Carolina fired the first shot by bombarding Fort Sumter, our response is that this ignores Lincoln’s efforts to maneuver South Carolina into attacking the fort, in order to have a justification for invading the state, in a way remarkably parallel to Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to maneuver the Japanese into an attack on Pearl Harbor, as documented by George Morgenstern, John T. Flynn, Charles Beard, Charles Callan Tansill, and other revisionist historians, as well as Robert B. Stinnett in more recent years in his outstanding book Day of Deceit (Free Press, 1999).
It is quite clear also that Lincoln’s purpose in waging war was not to end slavery. He expressly denied that it was in a letter to Horace Greeley, and he supported passage of the Corwin and Crittenden Amendments, which would have guaranteed in perpetuity the right to hold slaves in the states where slavery existed. Lincoln, in fact, drafted the Corwin Amendment. Lincoln’s purpose in invading the South was to continue to collect “duties and Imposts,” particularly the tariff—the principal source of revenue for the federal government at that time; and also to build up a strong centralized nation, in the style of his near-contemporary Otto von Bismarck, as the legal scholar George P. Fletcher has argued in his notable book Our Secret Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2001).
We may be allowed one more digression. Thomas Jefferson—the main author of the Declaration of Independence—supported the right of secession and predicted that several confederacies would be likely to result a few generations after the Constitution came into effect.
Further, although Lincoln often referred to the equality clause of the Declaration, there is good reason to believe that he did not interpret it in the way that Jaffa and Ellmers suggest he did. Lincoln made a number of statements questioning whether blacks are equal to whites. (Thomas DiLorenzo has offered a good conspectus of these.) Further, he supported restrictive measures on blacks in Illinois that were comparable to the “Black Codes” enacted in the aftermath of the War between the States, and without the rationale for these restrictions—that they were needed to resist a black takeover—since the number of blacks living in Illinois was insufficient to pose such a threat.
Ellmers and Jaffa have an explanation for Lincoln’s remarks, but again it is not plausible. They suggest that, given the opinions held by nearly all whites, including many white abolitionists, about black inferiority to whites, someone who favored complete black equality would have to indicate that he accepted this view also, if he were to have any chance of influencing public opinion toward the position of full black equality that he in fact supported. But this suggestion blatantly begs the question by taking as given their own interpretation of what Lincoln took the authors of the Declaration to mean by “created equal.”
To return at last to Jaffa and Ellmers’s proposal about how Americans should come together, it is, to speak bluntly, senseless. It is the equivalent of suggesting, for example, that the French people become unified around interpreting the Reign of Terror as a triumph for liberty, when precisely the Reign of Terror and the French Revolution itself are central points of disagreement among the French people. You can always reach “agreement” if one side in a dispute abandons its own position and accepts that of the other.
We conclude that Jaffa’s defense of Lincoln’s is a complete failure.
