The Open Question

Mr. Clyde Wilson takes issue with my comparison of the South Carolinians who fired upon Fort Sumter with the Weathermen and Black Panthers of today [“Letters,” Nov. 3]. They were, he insists, “as different as night and day.” These Southerners were “conservatives seeking to shelter their society against the Weathermen of their time, typified by John Brown and his cutthroats, who had been rendered respectable by the capture of the Presidency by the respectable political wing of their movement (i.e., the Republican Party).” “How can Dr. Jaffa,” Mr. Wilson asks, “equate secession, the probably constitutional and certainly orderly and legalistic expression of the majority will of a semisovereign political community (antebellum state) acting on conservative motives and instincts, with the acts of revolutionaries and terrorists?”

Of course, I do not agree that secession was lawful, although I might agree that it was “legalistic,” meaning thereby an attempt to invest illegality with the appearance of legality. Nor is it strictly speaking correct to describe an antebellum state as “semisovereign.” I cite therein the authority of John C. Calhoun, who once declared that sovereignty was like chastity: It cannot be surrendered in part. Either the states were sovereign, or the nation; there was no logically intermediate position, assuming the understanding of sovereignty then current on all sides.

HV

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Harry V. Jaffa

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Mr. Clyde Wilson takes issue with my comparison of the South Carolinians who fired upon Fort Sumter with the Weathermen and Black Panthers of today [“Letters,” Nov. 3]. They were, he insists, “as different as night and day.” These Southerners were “conservatives seeking to shelter their society against the Weathermen of their time, typified by John Brown and his cutthroats, who had been rendered respectable by the capture of the Presidency by the respectable political wing of their movement (i.e., the Republican Party).” “How can Dr. Jaffa,” Mr. Wilson asks, “equate secession, the probably constitutional and certainly orderly and legalistic expression of the majority will of a semisovereign political community (antebellum state) acting on conservative motives and instincts, with the acts of revolutionaries and terrorists?”

Of course, I do not agree that secession was lawful, although I might agree that it was “legalistic,” meaning thereby an attempt to invest illegality with the appearance of legality. Nor is it strictly speaking correct to describe an antebellum state as “semisovereign.” I cite therein the authority of John C. Calhoun, who once declared that sovereignty was like chastity: It cannot be surrendered in part. Either the states were sovereign, or the nation; there was no logically intermediate position, assuming the understanding of sovereignty then current on all sides.