Beyond The Lost Cause

On this 145th anniversary of Robert E Lee's surrender, talk of nullification is in the air.

In his first Inaugural Address, after several secessions, Lincoln endorsed a constitutional amendment that would have made slavery permanent in the 15 states where it already existed, and offered to help the Southern states to capture runaway slaves. In 1862, he expressed his desire to restore the Union without freeing a single slave. So what, you may say? His job was to preserve and, where necessary, restore the Union. There was nothing then in the Constitution about stamping out slavery. Quite. So let's not forget it. Lincoln himself certainly didn't.

Lincoln's famous Emancipation Proclamation of 1st January 1863 freed only the slaves in the Confederacy, whom, whatever the legal niceties, he had at that point absolutely no practical power to free. In the Union slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, nothing changed. Lincoln objected to secession, and good for him. But he did not object to slavery. The Union Army's treatment of Indians and of slave women was routinely horrific.

And there really is no answer to the question of why, if slave-owners such as Washington and Jefferson had the right to cast off a government to which they no longer felt loyal, then other slave-owners, indeed their very successors, did not have the same right?

Nullification, which inevitably leads to secession, really is the Lost Cause. Moreover, leaving aside Western and other states where it is being whispered and more than whispered over healthcare, why would the South, where mainstream politicians have only quite recently (if at all) stopped invoking "the Old Cause" and a continuous scholarly tradition continues to uphold it, want anything to do with nullification?

In the 145 years since Lee's surrender, Southern whites have been one of the two principal beneficiaries of the use of government, including federal government, power to economically populist ends. I think that we all know the other one. Healthcare is the latest in that long line, and, contrary to what is often asserted, resembles the earlier ones in being staunchly supported by people whose moral and social conservatism is firmly rooted in the uncompromising Christianity of the blacks, of the blue-collar Catholics, and of the Southern, Western and rural whites.

America as a whole profoundly needs the voice and example of states, Southern and otherwise, that will insist on that tradition, which is as resistant to the use of government power to subvert traditional family values, or the character of America as English-speaking and as built on strictly legal immigration, or the republic as one of laws and not of men, as it is welcoming of the use of that power to deliver social justice straight out of Catholic Social Teaching and the radical Evangelicalism that, among so much else, really did oppose slavery in such stark contrast to Lincoln.

Those same traditions bear powerful witness against the needless wars that harvest black Americans, blue-collar Catholic Americans, and white Americans from the Evangelical heartlands, as surely as the first and third categories, at least, were harvested in the 1860s, whether for the progenitors of the Ku Klux Klan, or for the man who was prepared under sufferance to declare "free" the slaves beyond his control, but who kept in bondage those whom he really did have it in his power to liberate.

Nullification? Secession? Forget it. You are indispensable.