No, We’re Not More Divided Than We Were During the Civil War

I have been an admirer of the Claremont Institute. The California-based think tank, founded in 1979, has in prior years done impressive work in recovering the legacy of the American founding, exploring the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln, and dissecting the modern rise of theories about government that are fundamentally at odds with Founding principles. Conservatism owes a great debt of gratitude, in particular, to Harry Jaffa, the late Lincoln scholar and political theorist institutionally affiliated with the Claremont Institute (which was founded by some of his students).

In the early years of the modern conservative movement, Jaffa persuaded many important figures, including William F. Buckley Jr. himself, that the legacy of Lincoln was one worth claiming for the Right — at a time when this was very much in dispute. As Jaffa student and Claremont Institute fellow Glenn Ellmers puts it in his new book on Jaffa, The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America, “in part through his friendship with (and constant badgering of) William F. Buckley, Jaffa was largely responsible for pulling the modern conservative movement toward a more authentically American and pro-Lincoln stance, away from the nostalgia for European throne-and-altar traditionalism or (worse) the slaveholding South.”

In a recent interview in The Atlantic, however, Ryan Williams, the Claremont Institute’s current president, gave me slight pause. Conversing with Atlantic staff writer Emma Green, Williams stated that he believed America was in a “real regime crisis right now.” He said he was concerned about the possibility of a second civil war. “The Civil War was terrible,” Williams said. “It should be the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs.” And yet, in his view, in some respects we are even worse off now than we were then:

If Claremont thinks real Americanism is a belief in the principles of the American founding, we have to acknowledge that a good portion of our fellow citizens don’t agree with our principles and conclusions about what politics is for. If we differ on those fundamental things, we’re really two Americas.

Even during the Civil War — I think we’re more divided now than we were then. As Lincoln said, we all prayed to the same God. We all believed in the same Constitution. We just differed over the question of slavery.

When it was asserted by Ken Burns, famously the director of a documentary series on the Civil War, I took issue with the belief that America today is even more divided. And I take issue with it here. While acknowledging the real challenges we face, I will pass by the obvious realities of bloodshed and carnage displayed during those awful Civil War years and blessedly absent today, as Williams is certainly aware of this disparity. Instead, I would like to focus on a more worrying misconception for someone affiliated with the Claremont Institute to have made: about the nature of the division over slavery in antebellum America.

Williams’s description of the place of slavery in the day’s debates suggests that it was an isolated ill, as opposed to an all-consuming source of societal, economic, and political tension. To an extent, and in all likelihood inadvertently, this also understates the profound challenge that Lincoln was up against. Indeed, the question of slavery featured constantly in political debates in the period between the Founding and the Civil War. Many, if not most, of the Founders were uncomfortable with the institution, hoping to have set it on the road to extinction. As Jaffa so ably demonstrated in his work, the principles of the Founding were incompatible with slavery’s continuation. Yet it remained stubbornly resistant, in fact further entrenching itself in American society, especially in the final years before the Civil War.

Great national agony ensued over slavery as it pertained to territorial expansion, slavery as it pertained to the admission of new states into the Union, slavery as it pertained to the powers of the federal government (such as in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act), slavery as interpreted by the Supreme Court (infamously in the Dred Scott decision), etc. It loomed large in debates at the national level and at the level of the states. And it ultimately precipitated the Civil War. Writing for National Review in 1965, Jaffa said that he could “think of no good objection to either Nazism or Communism, that would not apply to the chattel slavery that once existed in this country.” He added that the possibility that “the horrors inherent in the system might be tempered by the humanity of individuals is, I take it, no more excuse for slavery than for Communism.”

But slavery was not only a political question. Slavery also advanced a metaphysical claim. In the Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa framed the 1858 Senate-campaign debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as a Socratic dialogue effectively turning on the same question as one asked in Plato’s Republic: whether justice truly were the will of the stronger. And as a metaphysical question, it naturally took on religious implications. Jaffa called the antebellum national division over slavery a “spiritual crisis.”

Here’s how Lincoln put it: “The sum of pro-slavery theology seems to be this: ‘Slavery is not universally right, nor yet universally wrong; it is better for some people to be slaves; and, in such cases, it is the Will of God that they be such.’”

His response to this summary, naturally, was biting:

Certainly there is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases. For instance we will suppose the Rev. Dr. Ross has a slave named Sambo, and the question is “Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?” The Almighty gives no audable answer to the question, and his revelation — the Bible — gives none — or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to it’s meaning. No one thinks of asking Sambo’s opinion on it. So, at last, it comes to this, that Dr. Ross is to decide the question. And while he consider[s] it, he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun. If he decides that God Wills Sambo to continue a slave, he thereby retains his own comfortable position; but if he decides that God will’s Sambo to be free, he thereby has to walk out of the shade, throw off his gloves, and delve for his own bread. Will Dr. Ross be actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions?

But, slavery is good for some people!!! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly perculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.

Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!! [sic throughout]

Note well Lincoln’s framing of the question in religious terms.

But I do not quote Lincoln here merely to affirm slavery’s low moral character; that is beyond dispute, and Williams is not disputing it. Yet he does seem to be downplaying its salience as a divisive issue, particularly by implying that mid-19th-century Americans otherwise believed in the same constitution and believed in the same God, as Williams paraphrases Lincoln’s Second Inaugural to insinuate. Concerning common belief in the same constitution: Even before the war, slavery caused fundamental political divisions, with Southerners such as John Calhoun declaring that the Declaration of Independence was in error to state that “all men are created equal,” whereas Lincoln, debating Douglas, enshrined the document as the bedrock of the American regime. And while national debates over slavery took place through the framework of the Constitution, they engendered serious divisions nonetheless: The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in Congress and demanding the return of runaway slaves, was seriously resisted in the North; and the Dred Scott decision was seriously contested (by, among others, Lincoln himself). And during the Civil War, it was self-evidently untrue that the Union and Confederacy shared a constitution: They had different governing documents, with slavery established in the latter’s as what Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, taking up Calhoun’s mantle in denying the equality of man under the Declaration, called its “cornerstone.”

As for worshiping the same God: There is reason to doubt that as well, at least in the way Williams means it. Such was slavery’s weight during the period that it warped contemporary religiosity. Christian denominations split over the question. Before the war, both Northern and Southern Christians drew from scripture to justify their views one way or the other. To radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the Constitution’s complicity in slavery’s perpetuation had made it a “pact with the devil.” Meanwhile, to Baptist pastor Richard Furman of South Carolina, it could not be supposed that, “had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, . . . the inspired Apostles, who feared not the faces of men, and were ready to lay down their lives in the case of their God, would have tolerated it, for a moment, in the Christian Church.” And during the war, as Miles Smith IV noted in Law & Liberty, “Southerners and Northerners both viewed the Civil War as a holy cause.” As Smith wrote elsewhere, “pro-slavery southern intellectuals, sometimes dubbed the Fire-Eaters, abrogated Christian orthodoxy on race and slavery to make Christianity more palatable to the societal moment. By doing this they knowingly revolted against at least 1500 (probably closer to 1700) years of Christian doctrine and practice.”

Slavery, then, was a question of profound political and religious significance in the United States from America’s founding through the Civil War. It thoroughly suffused the politics and culture of that entire period, and eventually sent the country into a conflict in which brother took up arms against brother.

And it was something of a miracle that the U.S. had, in Abraham Lincoln, a statesman of sufficient prudence and principle to have guided it through that period and to have engineered its ultimate reunification. The Claremont Institute has long honored the legacy of Lincoln, even naming one of its trademark fellowships after him. And its scholars have labored mightily, and rightly, to burnish his reputation. The Jaffa essay quoted above was written in response to National Review’s Frank Meyer, who had evinced skepticism of Lincoln. In it, Jaffa calls our 16th president the “great prophet of our tradition,” “the greatest of our true liberals, and the greatest of our conservatives,” a man who, “more than anyone, . . . said clearly that just government must be controlled by moral purpose, and that no counting of heads can turn wrong into right.” Jaffa also praises Lincoln’s “genius,” which

consisted above all in the clarity with which he perceived and demonstrated the inner connection between free, popular, constitutional government, and the mighty proposition, “that all men are created equal.” Questions concerning the construction of the Constitution were absolutely subordinate to the principle which gave life and meaning to the whole regime. The sovereignty of the people, Lincoln argued, was itself an inference from the primordial tenet of human equality. Men originally equal in authority consent to form a people, and consent thereby to the authority of government. But how can consent be given to slavery, which denies the requirement of consent? How can one man enslave another, without conceding that the other might, if he can, enslave him?

It was not Lincoln’s view on tariffs that earned him these plaudits. Nor was it the deftness by which he handled excise taxes during his presidency that makes his statesmanship still worthy of study and admiration. It was his handling of what was and remains the greatest crisis facing this nation, an occasion of traumatic belligerence rooted in a profound political and moral division over the question of slavery. It was Lincoln’s great achievement, as Jaffa made clear, to engineer a “new birth of freedom” in this country by bringing the nation into greater alignment with its own Founding principles while also making it whole once more. It cheapens the unparalleled darkness of this chapter of America’s history, as well as the unparalleled legacy of Lincoln’s statesmanship, to think of them as anything less. I can think of almost no reason why someone would attempt to do so.