Of Civil War and National Unity

Photo by Veronica Livesey on Unsplash

At a sesquicentennial distance the Civil War can become too easy to romanticize.  We can be tempted to envision some charm in it.  From a prolonged study of the Civil War, via many sources and a variety of formats, I find little romance in it.  The brutality and misery of that war have not been overstated.  Fortunately, there was work that was noble and heroic, such as the ending of slavery.   

A more peaceful solution, in hindsight, was available and likely, as the operation of the Constitution was steadily bringing about.  Perhaps it took a civil war challenge to that Constitution to make people recognize—the slaveholders especially—that a peaceful end to bondage would have been preferable.  Abraham Lincoln, a casualty of the war, perceived in a few words at the Gettysburg commemoration, that the Civil War was “testing whether [our] nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

To what conception and dedication did Lincoln refer?  “A new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

It must be understood that Lincoln observed that this nation had not fully achieved those principles.  He called it “unfinished work.”  Building on how well that work had begun, Lincoln praised how far it had been “so nobly advanced.”  Our nation, conceived in liberty, embraced a dedication to which our Founders bound themselves and their posterity, to achieve the proposition that each of us was created equal.  As the price in blood and suffering mounted, he was asking whether such a dedicated nation, still in its adolescence, could continue.

Through the 21 months following Gettysburg, the price would grow higher and more horrid while the people of that day persevered and demonstrated that the nation would endure, as it has to our day.  Further headway was made to fulfill our founding principles.

Today is a time for our dedication to be tested, as such a nation will always be.  Loud, magnified voices—there were those in Lincoln’s day demanding to end the effort (he nearly lost his reelection to some who preferred a compromise with the slavocrats)—today parade the obvious that our nation has not yet achieved all of our Founders’ ideals, and so demand that we abandon those ideals.

They prescribe a return to the age old pattern whereby in exchange for our liberty the self-selected few are elevated to mold the rest, prescriptions that somehow end up profiting the new bosses.  As in the past, while dressed in varieties of costumes, the chieftains, kings, czars, fuehrers, commissars, and other ugly monsters reshape societies that eventually devolve into ruin.

Their “modern” strategy is similarly old:  divide and conquer.  Rhetorical crossbows aim darts first at the failings of the very human Founders, to whom they assign blame for anyone unhappy with himself.  Next they guide their unhappy victims against our founding ideal, “the proposition that all men are created equal.”  Their bizarre assertion is that any failure in the ideal’s complete achievement justifies its trashing, the more violently the better.  Upon the ruins of civil disorder, disunion, and violence, they would build in the name of “equity” where they have destroyed fundamental equality. 

That is the program of those positioned to claim to be more equal than others while they rake in a bigger share of the proposed “equity.”  It is all old naked ugliness when denuded of the costumes.  In time it has always failed, but not without putrid fruits of misery.

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln appealed to his hearers for increased devotion to ensure that our nation, governed of, by, and for the people, should not perish.  Succeeding generations have united to nurture the nation.  It is our task to answer the divisive calls with our dedication to advance the work so nobly begun. 

Of Slavery and the Constitution

 

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

Slavery in America was doomed under the Constitution, and the slavocrats knew it.  For more than four score years they had been fighting and steadily losing ground to preserve slavery.  When Abraham Lincoln was elected President, the slavocrats understood that things would not get better for them.  They saw getting out as the only way to continue slavery.

They pushed their states to leave after the election of 1860 not because they disputed the results.  They recognized that Lincoln had been duly elected.  What the slavocrats feared was that under his administration and his support in Congress their ability to preserve slavery would be irreparably eroded and eventually ended.  They sought to exit the Union before that happened.

By necessity, forming a “more perfect union” under the Constitution required compromise to accommodate diverse peoples and experiences.  The miracle of the Founders was to bring all the states in.  Compromise and accommodation are at the heart of a republic. 

There is an art to compromise.  I saw that during the days of the Reagan administration.  President Reagan was a highly principled man, yet he often compromised.  I marveled how, in his compromising, he resisted compromise of principle.  Again and again he advanced his principles while accommodating on details.   

The Founders establishing a Constitution sought to preserve essential principles by which a government of liberty would act.  A key example was the slave trade.  Some vociferously argued for its end.  Slave state representatives argued for the matter to be left to individual states.  The Constitution enshrined the national principle that the slave trade must end.  Placing regulation of trade in general with Congress, the compromise set 1808 for the complete end of the slave trade.

A similarly important example where compromise embraced the principle was the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives.  The number of a state’s representatives was based on population.  Representatives from slave states wanted to count slaves.  Others objected that if your state treats these people as property, then they should not be counted any more than other property.  The principle in the compromise was to recognize the humanity of people held in slavery, but to count a person only as three-fifths for congressional apportionment so long as he was held in slavery, reducing southern congressional representation.

With these two compromises, resting on anti-slavery principles, all the states came into the union, accepting a Constitution that would progressively lead to abolition.  As the reality of that became abundantly clear to the leadership of eleven of the states, they tried to renege on the deal and leave.  The slavocrats failed.  Rather than let the Constitution end slavery peacefully, they forced a horrid war that ended it all the sooner, but at the cost of more than 600,000 dead, greater than the total of Americans killed in both World Wars I and II. 

The power of the principles of the Constitution continued its work.  Amidst a Civil War that, in the words of Lincoln, tested “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” elections were held.  The voters chose liberty and the nation endured.

The American Founders were sober people, sobered by a long and difficult war of Independence followed by several years of economic and social confusion.  They understood that people were flawed and make mistakes.  They believed that people are also good, who can and do make good decisions.  The Constitution on which they established the United States recognizes and is designed to offset the bad and allow good to succeed, which it more often than not does.  

Tested by myriad difficulties and unparalleled prosperity, the Constitution has worked better than any other system of government on earth.  That is why enemies of freedom hate it and why so many people want to come here to live.

Of Self Determination and Carving Up the World

Woodrow Wilson unleashed some nasty asps of public policy on the world, the venom of which continues to work its misery on mankind.  Professor Wilson as President pushed into practice the idea that American governance should be shifted from the people who elect Senators and representatives and entrusted instead to a cadre of wise men in the executive branch.  Experts like himself, elite college professors and their best students, would know better how to manage the affairs of others than would the teaming masses of the nation left to make their own decisions. 

Today, thousands of regulations, uncounted yards of red tape, and millions of bureaucrats later, we all live within a shrinking sphere of personal liberty, with diminishing control of our lives, permitted to make few decisions without someone we do not know having a major say in so much of what we have and do.  Increasing numbers of our neighbors have effectively been rendered wards of the state, unable to manage their own lives without dependence upon a myriad of government programs that punish individual initiative and grind up families.  Today, the most reliable predictor of poverty in America is being a single mother.  Lured into the web of sweet-sounding sticky federal, state, and even local programs that promise help, these government victims are rarely delivered from poverty, and neither are their children or their grandchildren.  This is surely not what Woodrow Wilson intended, but it is surely what his model of governance by experts has delivered.  Obamacare is one of the most recent and obvious examples of this machinery of misery.

Yet it can be argued that nothing that Woodrow Wilson bequeathed has worked more harm than the destructive principle of “self determination,” imposed by Wilson and his international experimenters at the negotiations to rearrange the world after World War I.  Of course, he did not act alone, but Wilson did much to make the world safe for World War II.  Self determination worked its evil by institutionalizing perpetual turmoil in eastern Europe and the Balkans, as bickering and unstable micro-states created a power vacuum tempting for fuehrers and commissars to fill.

The concept of self determination can seem appealing as long as you do not pause long enough to consider how it might actually play out in practice and over time.  The basic idea—and it does not go very far past this basic idea—is that every group of people has the right to find its own place in the sun, either with its own government or subject to another, whichever the group might wish. 

It was this idea that Russian boss Vladimir Putin invoked to cloak his grab of Crimea.  The people of Crimea had a vote (carefully monitored by Russian troops) in which over 95% said that they wanted to break away from Ukraine.  And then they decided, almost the next day, that they wanted to become a part of Russia.  According to the Russian Government, this was all very legal and in keeping with international law.  It was self determination.  Who could object?  It was more than faintly reminiscent of the nearly unanimous votes in the nations of eastern Europe a generation ago—when occupied by the Red Army—in favor of communist regimes closely allied with the old Soviet Union.  More self determination.

I wonder whether Professor/President Woodrow Wilson thought of how his principle of self determination would have worked in American history?  What if Wilson instead of Lincoln had been President in 1861?  Did self determination apply to the people of the southern states who wished to leave the Union?

I also wonder how dedicated Vladimir Putin really is to the principle of self determination?  If it applies to Crimea, does it also apply to the people of Chechnya, who seem to be eager to be out of Russia?  Are there other minority populations in Russia yearning to breathe free? 

How about elsewhere in the world?  Is self determination a universal principle worthy of universal application?  Are Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran ready to let the Kurdish minorities carve up their countries and realize their dream of a new Kurdistan?  How about Muslim minorities in southern islands of the Philippines?  The Tamil populated northern Sri Lanka?  The Sunni-majority communities in Shiite majority Iraq?  The multitude of tribal groupings in virtually every country of sub-Saharan Africa?  Are all of the many minorities of China content with being governed by Beijing?

When would the bloodletting of self determination ever end?  It has not ended yet, whether used as a justification for aggression or as a means of sustaining discontent.  It is a ponderous legacy.

Of War and Virtue

One hundred fifty years ago the United States remained divided in a brutal war of rebellion.  Rather than unusual, such convulsions are typical in the establishment of representative republics.  It does not come easy for a population new to a republic to embrace in practice the idea that matters of life and wealth should be resolved by votes.  It seems that the age old recourse to arms and blood has to be tried again a time or two before people, who have only experienced more abusive government, come to accept that ballots and representation, enshrined in the rule of law, are a better way of deciding a society’s important issues.

One hundred fifty years ago, in 1864, the people of the young United States were still learning that painful lesson.  But the instruction was nearing its end.  Back in July of 1863, at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the outcome of the war became inevitable.  The rebels of the southern states were going to lose, constitutional government of the United States was going to succeed.  The only chance for the rebels would be if the loyal people of the nation lost their determination to persevere to reunite the nation and reaffirm the constitutional republic.  Often that seemed in the press to be an iffy question, but in reality the republican will remained strong.  The hundreds of thousands who sacrificed life and limb in the field of war, in an overwhelmingly volunteer army (the number of drafted soldiers remained relatively minor), testified to that determination.

In the winter of 1863-64 U.S. soldiers in the field reenlisted in large numbers.  Throughout 1864, and into the Spring of 1865, many thousands more would die, but the battles were becoming increasingly futile for the rebel cause, little more than adding to the destruction and suffering that rebel commanders were pulling down upon themselves and their fellows and families in this national lesson in self-government.

For the rebel soldier, experiencing defeat after defeat to his regiment, his corps, or his tattered army—with only occasional respites and temporary successes—it all may have felt pointless.  The high and growing rate of desertion from rebel armies in those days suggests so.  The historian comes to this point in the conflict and is tempted to describe the remaining rebel heroics and gallant but failing defenses as futile, the casualty lists a bloody tally of worthless and wasted sacrifice—particularly for so ignoble a cause as breaking up the best form of government on the earth at the time.

From the perspective of the rebel “cause” it was pointless, the continued bloodshed and destruction a burden for which the rebel leaders—in the rebel government and at the head of the rebel armies—will surely have to give an accounting before the Judge who weighs the doings of nations and those who lead them.  Does that mean, therefore, that the daily struggle of the individual rebel soldier was meaningless?  His effort could not change the outcome, only affect in some small way its overall cost.

And yet, throughout 1864 and to the end of the war, there were meaningful and often pitched battles fought on every field of action.  The battles to which I refer echo a passage from The Book of Mormon written almost two thousand years before, describing an ancient American people after a very long war:

But behold, because of the exceedingly great length of the war between the Nephites and the Lamanites many had become hardened, because of the exceedingly great length of the war; and many were softened because of their afflictions, insomuch that they did humble themselves before God, even in the depth of humility.  (Alma 62:41)

War, on a very personal level, appears to accelerate moral development.  Individuals become more virtuous or more evil more quickly than they might under more peaceful conditions.

I believe that for the individual rebel soldier, as for perhaps every soldier, the real battle was his own, and in the end it was the most important battle with the most long-lasting consequences.  Abraham Lincoln understated that the world would “little note, nor long remember” his speech at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, though he perhaps correctly predicted that the world would never forget the great battle fought there. 

In the full scheme of things, in terms of what really matters in the eternal worlds after this temporary one is rolled up and its purposes completed, the individual battles fought by each soldier on each side will be recognized as far more important than the whole Battle of Gettysburg.  The battle of armies is a temporary one.  The battle fought by each soldier, whether he exercises virtues or chooses vices, is the more permanent, the one that has never ending consequences.  The battles of freedom were fought in recognition and preservation of these more important personal struggles we all have.

In the battles of 1864 and 1865 of the American War of the Rebellion the rebel soldier could not change the outcome of the war.  But in each case his own personal triumph or defeat was there to be etched into his character more permanently than the scars of bullet and saber in his flesh.

As my son has often reminded me, everyone who fought in the Civil War died.  And all of them lived.  So must we all die, and yet we will all live again where there is no more death.  By the time each of us leaves mortality, each must face and fight his battles, the ones that really matter far above those recorded in the history books of the world.

Of War and Freedom

Independence Day 2013 had perhaps a more than usual significance for our national holiday.  On that day, 150 years before, the Army of the Potomac waited on the hills and ridges south of Gettysburg for a rebel assault that did not come.  Though General Meade and his officers and soldiers were unaware of it that morning, the rebel army was beaten, after three fruitless days of attacking the soldiers of the United States to clear a path to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or even Washington itself.  Instead, Robert E. Lee was engaged on July 4, 1863, in plans to extricate what was left of his army from Pennsylvania and get it across the Potomac and into Virginia before it could be destroyed.

On that same day a thousand miles to the southeast, the rebel army in Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to the U.S. Army and General U.S. Grant.  It was strategically an even more important victory.  The fall of that rebel stronghold would lead to the free navigation of the entire Mississippi River, from its source to the Gulf of Mexico, for all shipping loyal to the United States, and it divided the rebel Confederacy in two.

As Grant reflected later in his Memoirs,

The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.  Much hard fighting was to be done afterwards and many precious lives were to be sacrificed; but the morale was with the supporters of the Union ever after.  (Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, p.297)

Some who are not friends of the United States Constitution make the false claim that the War of the Rebellion was clear evidence that the Constitution was hopelessly flawed, that the war revealed the weakness of the American government rather than its strength.  Such critics little understand history or what a rare thing it is for nations—or rather the people of nations—to learn to be willing to settle issues of life, death, and livelihood by the casting of ballots.  It is an acquired discipline. 

Consider how very few democracies or republics have been established and accepted by the populace without the people being convinced by bloody war and rebellion that deciding issues by votes and law is superior to trying them by force.  England had many civil wars and rebellions on its way to rule by parliaments instead of kings.  France, too, went through several revolutions before its current Fifth Republic achieved political stability.  The Weimar Republic of Germany teetered for some fifteen years until it descended into the Third Reich, and only upon ruins was a stable federal republic built.  Japan at last settled for meaningful republican government after its military dictatorship completely prostrated the nation in World War II.  Republican government was only months old when the Bolsheviks replaced it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the verdict is not yet in as to whether the Russian nation has embraced free republican government even now.  Similar stories can be told all across the globe, about China, Korea, Turkey, Mexico, and many other lands that through trauma and struggle came today to be governed by leaders chosen by the people limited in their authority by viable constitutions.

But if the American War of the Rebellion demonstrated the challenges to constitutional government in the first one hundred years of the Republic, it also showed its strength.  That can be illustrated by what its critics consider its most damning flaw, for they denounce the document for enshrining human chattel slavery instead of abolishing it.  In this they are entirely wrong.  The Constitution took the thirteen new American states as they were in the late eighteenth century and brought them into a society of constitutional freedom incompatible with slavery, where the operations of that Constitution would sooner or later bring slavery to an end.

It is true that there are provisions in the Constitution as adopted in 1787 that recognized slavery.  That was the price for bringing the slave-holding states into the Union within the structure of the Constitution.  That very Constitution, however, made it impossible for slavery in the United States to endure.  Four score and seven years after the Declaration of Independence, war waged by the people under that very Constitution was abolishing legal slavery in America.  Perhaps there was a time when it might have ended peacefully, but peacefully or not, slavery in the United States had to end.

As Abraham Lincoln predicted at the 1858 Illinois Republican Convention, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing, or all the other.”  I believe that Lincoln knew which would triumph, but I do not know that he suspected that he would be the constitutional officer that would see that the Union was not dissolved and that all of the United States would become free.

By  the end of 1860, slaveholders knew that they could not retain slavery if they stayed under the Constitution.  Sooner or later, the votes would be cast to end the practice.  The slaveholders chose to rebel and get out from under the Constitution before its principles of human freedom inexorably overcame them.  But once under the Constitution, it was too late to leave.  Under the organization of the Constitution, the armies of the Republic were organized and put down the rebellion and slavery, holding congresses and conducting elections along the way.

The War of the Rebellion did not free the land from enemies of freedom and constitutional law. Those who would impose their will on their neighbors remain with us today.  Their freedom is protected by the Constitution.  But the Constitution has ever stood in the way of their plans to subjugate their fellows, and it will continue to do so as long as it is upheld.  Hence the relentless efforts to undermine it, to claim it a flawed document, or pronounce it a “living document,” changeable at the whim of politicians and judges who are allowed to raise their own will above its meaning.  Our devotion to that Constitution, if we are to remain free, cannot be any less than that of those who fought at Gettysburg and other battles of freedom.  As we remember them, it is our turn to show “increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion”.

Of the Constitution and the Ever-Fresh Idea of Freedom

It seems that the days of trial and testing of our Constitution are not over.  Perhaps they never will be until the Author of the Constitution returns to the earth.  The Obamacare statutes unfold as the time approaches when people will be required to buy government-designed health insurance whether they want it or not.  The Environmental Protection Agency continues to impose on industry rules that Congress refused to pass.  The new financial consumer czar, with no meaningful oversight or accountability, exercises his will to design financial services for all Americans, even though he was put in office by a recess appointment made when the Senate was not in recess (skipping the uncomfortable Senate confirmation process).  There is more, but these examples represent the challenge.

Under the inspiration of God, the Founders established the Constitution to protect, preserve, and indeed promote the rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That is the legitimate purpose of government, as the Founders inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, considering it self-evident,

That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed,

that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In this effort the Founders twice abolished and instituted new basic forms of government.  The first was to throw off their allegiance to the Crown of England and control by his Parliament.  The second was to exchange the loose and ineffective Articles of Confederation with the new Constitution.

The Constitution was and remains a revolutionary document.  With footings based solidly on the indestructible rights and worth of the individual members of the society, it was unlike anything anywhere on the earth at the time.  At the core of the Constitution, and affecting all of its members, are the overriding and animating principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, constantly at war with and destructive of all forms of tyranny. 

Among the first fruits of the Constitution was the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, all so wholly consistent with the Constitution that the only objection raised to them was that they were redundant to the basic text that they amended.  Maybe they were redundant, but time has proven the wisdom of spelling out these powerful and important rights of the individual.

They were soon challenged.  Once in government it is natural and expected that government leaders would become progressively intolerant of criticism and opposition.  Government “of the people” does not make government automatically friendly to the people and tolerant of their freedoms.  We see it today, every day.  In 1798 the Federalist Party leaders in government passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, inimical to the Constitution, in significant part to silence opposition voices from the new Democratic-Republican Party.  The Acts sought to declare criticism of public figures to be libelous, punishable by fines and imprisonment.  Under these unconstitutional statutes newspapermen were arrested and their newspapers stopped, among other outrages to liberty.    

Fortunately, the Constitution was not impotent to throw off this new effort to impose an old tyranny on the nation.  Thomas Jefferson led a popular revolt through the elections of 1800 to expel the Federalists from office, repeal these statutes, and launch a renewed spirit of governing focused on individual rights and liberties.

In succeeding years the inconsistency of human slavery with the principles of the Constitution grew increasingly acute, until in 1861 the leadership of most of the slave-holding states concluded that it would be impossible to maintain their “peculiar institution” if they remained governed by the Constitution.  They understood that they could maintain slavery or observe the Constitution, but not both.  Eventually, the spirit of freedom at the core of the Constitution would work to end slavery, by operation of the very constitutional system. 

Since the Union created by the Constitution would not allow the states to leave peacefully and take their slaves with them, the southern leadership invoked rebellion as the only way out.  Theirs, however, was a rebellion to invoke and support tyranny, and it failed.  The revolutionary American Constitution and the people on whom it rested won yet one more victory for freedom.  As Abraham Lincoln perceived, the war of the rebellion was a test of “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

That nation, conceived in constitutional liberty, did endure that test, but the tests never end.  There are ever those who believe that they have the privilege, the calling, the right, or even the duty, to impose their will and judgment on others in ways destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Not every assault on freedom and the Constitution fails. There have been too many that have succeeded.  So far the Constitution and the people who uphold it have withstood these assaults, even if at great cost.  The Supreme Court’s outrageous Dred Scott decision and the foolish Kansas-Nebraska Act were last gasp efforts to perpetuate the tyranny of slavery, but in the end they sparked the birth of the Republican Party and fed the Civil War that removed slavery and extended the reach of the principles of the Declaration and Constitution.

Today as a nation we face the sputtering final efforts of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy to enthrone government as the source of solution to people’s problems—and to buy popularity with government-laundered largesse confiscated from a dwindling pool of taxpayers.  That is a hoary practice of kings and Caesars that buys time but no lasting success.  The money always runs out before the promises do. 

The question that remains for us and for our Constitution is how well will we as a people, and our Constitution as a system of government, weather the demise of the New Deal system.  Acute test of freedom approaches again, if not already here, when we will determine whether our “nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”  I have confidence that it will, and—in the words of Lincoln—that the American people will decide “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” as it has in all of its greatest tests so far.

Of Aliens in Washington and the National Symbols

Driving into Washington, D.C., each day, it is easy to become blindly accustomed to the rich symbols that delight and inspire the more infrequent visitor.  Occasionally, such as when the choke of traffic allows reflective moments, or the morning light or evening illuminations stimulate more meditative inspiration, even the hardened local can again be moved by the monuments of the nation’s capital.

One such recent morning, as reflections led to marveling at our wonderful and unique nation, and musing followed musing, I was struck by how out of line the Obama Administration is with all of these symbols and what they mean.  The differences between the symbols and the resident reality are not minor.  It is as if some group of aliens had taken dominion of the Capital of Freedom.

Consider an example a mere few days old.  In Barack Obama’s most recent weekly radio address he made the following statement.  Read it carefully.

It’s time to build a nation that lives up to the ideals that so many Americans have fought for—a nation where they can realize the dream they sacrificed to protect.

The address was entitled, “Honoring Our Nation’s Service Members and Military Families”.  Its main thrust was to provide that honor through more federal spending on “roads and runways and ports.”  Apparently, President Obama’s view is that this is what our soldiers, sailors, and airmen have been fighting for, or as he said, “That’s how we can honor our troops.”

Back to the highlighted quote, however, the rhetorical apogee of the speech.  Aside from the President’s revelation that he had tarmac in mind when he envisioned the dreams of our veterans, there is the declaration that, “It’s time to build a nation”.  Why would the President of the United States of America declare that now is the time to build our nation?  What does he consider to have happened in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was boldly adopted?  Was it not then that the building of the nation began?  What does he believe that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and the many other Founders did?  What does he consider was the purpose of the Constitution if not “to form a more perfect Union”?  Does he believe that America has been waiting for Barack Obama to begin the building? 

It is hard to escape the impression that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are in meaningful ways alien to the current President, that he does not recognize what they wrought.  For President Obama, now is the time to build the nation.  Apparently, he does not like what he sees. What kind of alternative nation does Barack Obama want to build? 

I suspect that what my father fought for in two wars was akin to the ideals embodied in our national symbols, not more government construction projects.  I doubt that in France, Germany, or Korea he ever spent a single moment imagining that he was risking his life for new highways.

Which brings me back to my musings on the highways of the federal city.  I see the Lincoln Memorial, in which the words from President Lincoln’s last address to the nation are inscribed, proclaiming malice toward none while seeking to unite a nation and bind up the nation’s wounds.  I contrast that with the current President and his long list of those he labels enemies:  big oil, big banks, big insurance, big medicine, business in general, the world’s financial center in New York, people of strong religious conviction, among others.  Instead of unifying the nation, it is impossible to avoid his constant efforts to divide the nation into racial, ethnic, and interest groups, as if the citizens of the United States are black, or white, or rich, or poor, first and Americans second.

From almost anywhere in Washington you can see the Washington Monument, soaring over 500 feet high.  The monument is simple and unadorned, symbolizing the man declared by mourners at his death as, “First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” who set the pattern for freedom protected by limited government, where government office was a service to the nation and its people.  In little more than the last three years we have instead experienced an unprecedented accretion of power to the government in Washington.  Government workers make decisions reaching into nearly every aspect of people’s lives, even as the President declares that the achievements of individuals are as much or more the work of government than the fruits of their own efforts.  Rejecting the example of George Washington, who turned aside a crown and walked away from generalship and public office into quiet retirement, President Obama fosters an imperial cult of personality, where the light of every achievement, real or imaginary, is focused on himself.

Ringing the dome of the Jefferson Memorial are Jefferson’s words, “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”  Today we have a presidency filthy with politically correct speech, that pounces on any words of opponents that can be made to appear at odds with the official doctrines of the administration.  Instead of free speech and open debate, the President declares that for his priorities, such as global warming, health care, financial legislation, “the debate is over.”

In H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction story, The War of the Worlds, the invading aliens are at last destroyed by simple bacteria in the air and water that men breathe and drink, defeated, “after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”  Was our Declaration of Independence correct that God has placed similar protections in our society, the heavenly endowed unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”?  Will these simple, fundamental rights will out and preserve our nation from our present alien occupation?  They may, if we employ them as the Founders did.

Of Easter and the Constitution

One morning in Tennessee, 150 years ago, many thousand U.S. soldiers were quietly enjoying breakfast on a beautiful spring Sabbath, thinking of little more than passing a quiet Palm Sunday and sometime soon thereafter continuing the destruction of the rebel army in nearby Corinth, Mississippi.  That was, until the rebels came calling and rudely interrupted breakfast.

By the end of the battle the next day the rebels were in full retreat, but over 13,000 Union soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing, and nearly 11,000 rebels had met the same fate.  Shiloh turned out to be a major victory for the United States Army, opening up nearly the whole western part of the rebel confederacy to invasion.  The impact of the victory was missed by much of the population of the loyal states, however, whose senses reeled from a bill of losses of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers never seen before in the life of the Republic.  General U.S. Grant, whose coolness under pressure made the victory possible, was mercilessly criticized in the press.

The nation little understood that the casualties of Shiloh would be only the first of many tens of thousands more who would suffer from civil war in the land of Washington and Jefferson before 1862 would be over.  Then there would be 1863, 1864, and 1865 to follow, running the tally of destruction ever higher.  In 1865, near the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln summed up in his marvelous second inaugural address—for a term of office that would last the rest of his life, less than 6 weeks—“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. . . . Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.”

All Americans today benefit from that profound victory and the others that brought an end to the rebellion and that upheld the Constitution.  It was a strange and new thing for the world that the words on a piece of paper, written by men of an earlier generation, could create a system of government and affect so many lives.  It was the lives of those who fought to sustain the Constitution that gave it that life, men who insisted on living by those words and organizing a free society within the protections of its provisions.

The same is true today, as with each generation:  we are called upon to uphold that Constitution, those words on a piece of paper, and hand it on down, as strong as ever, to our children.  Those men who died at Shiloh cannot do our work for us today.  Neither can the men who fought and died in Europe and the South Pacific and on many other places of battle.  Just as important as those who died to preserve the Constitution are those who have lived to maintain the Constitution.  They, however, could do no more than pass that freedom under constitutional law to us.  We have it today.  What will we do with it?

As Ronald Reagan taught in his 1967 inaugural address as Governor of California,

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.

We must not let it become extinct.  It is under challenge from enemies without, who hate the freedom and worth of the individual enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and it is endangered by those within the nation—some in very high places of power and responsibility— who see the Constitution as a barrier in the way of their plans to replace individual rights, value, initiative, and worth with the ages old system where the government and the governors run the lives of the people and decide who wins, who loses, who gets what, and how much.

Our forebears fought a revolution and crafted a new system in the New World to get away from that rule by the few.  The lesson we need to learn anew, is that it is the job of the many individuals who make up each generation to win that freedom again, because there will always be those eager to impose their will on others and use and direct and take the resources that they themselves did not earn, who will want to have their way with other people’s money and other people’s lives.

No one’s sacrifice is the same as anyone else’s.  Read no unfairness in that, because to sacrifice is to absorb unfairness.  But we cannot avoid the call to sacrifice.  Not even Christ, the greatest of all, could.

As we celebrate Easter we should remember the sacrifices of the Savior, by which He absorbed all unfairness.  Those sacrifices made Easter possible, by which all that is wrong is overcome and ultimate freedom bought for each person born into this world.  We are privileged by Christ to be given the chance to join in that effort to preserve and extend the blessings of freedom to our families, our friends, and to people we do not know and may never meet.

At Gethsemane, then Golgotha, and from the Garden Tomb, Christ has created the framework that makes freedom possible.  He inspired the founders who built a nation of freedom as the beacon to all mankind that it has been for over 200 years.  As our Easter worship, let us take up the last call given by Abraham Lincoln to the nation as the Constitution was reaffirmed in struggle, who recognized the great value of America for the world:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Of Abraham Lincoln and Another Birth of Freedom

On the 203^rd anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln—to our national embarrassment a day no longer celebrated as a national holiday—I once again picked up a copy of the compelling lecture by Walter Berns, commemorating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.  Delivered on February 9, 2009, at the American Enterprise Institute, Berns’ lecture concluded with these words:

We say that a man can be known by the company he keeps.  So I say that a nation, a people, can be known and be judged by its heroes, by whom it honors above all others.

We pay ourselves the greatest compliment when we say that Abraham Lincoln is that man for us. 

(Walter Berns, “Lincoln at Two Hundred:  Why We Still Read the Sixteenth President,” AEI Bradley Lecture, February 9, 2009)

Berns offers a compelling statistic as a measure of the nation’s recognition of Lincoln and his greatness:

            More has been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other president or, for that matter, any other American.  The amount is prodigious:  no fewer than16,000 books and goodness knows how many journal articles.

Abraham Lincoln was president for slightly more than four years, assassinated one month after his second inauguration, when the Civil War was not quite over but its end was in clear sight, Robert E. Lee having surrendered the rebels’ largest and most successful army just a few days before.  Soon after his first inauguration the war began. 

What are the grounds for asserting and recognizing Lincoln’s heroism, having fought a war and not quite finished it?  Because he did fight the war and persevered and put in place what was needed for its inexorable conclusion in the victory of the United States.  I do not say victory of the North, but rather victory for the whole nation.  North, South, and all of the later states of the West and all of their people and their descendents were blessed by that victory.  So was the rest of the world, for that victory showed that a free people could triumph in self-government, having rejected the tyrannies of Europe and overcome the challenge of anarchy offered by the rebels of the old South.  The United States has done a lot of good for the world since then, all of which would have been impossible but for that victory.

Lincoln’s immediate predecessor, the Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan, opposed the rebellion of the South but refused to do anything about it.  He dithered and dallied as state after state fell into rebellion and even seized U.S. Army and Navy supplies and facilities while doing so.  Berns quotes how then Senator William H. Seward mimicked Buchanan’s near traitorous dereliction of duty with the impotent formula, “the states had no right to secede, unless they wanted to, and the president had the duty to enforce the law, unless someone opposed him.”

Lincoln came to office with a singular focus from which he refused to be distracted, to meet foursquare the national emergency, that is, to unite the nation and preserve that unity.  And he knew why.  He knew what the United States meant for freedom, for Americans, and for all people everywhere.  In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reminded his countrymen that the war was a test whether our free nation “or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure.”  The answer must not be allowed to be anything other than “Yes.”

As another mark of greatness, Lincoln knew that this was not about Lincoln.  As the war progressed, he fully expected to be defeated in the election of 1864 by the candidate of the Democrats, former Union General George B. McClellan, on a platform of ending the war by negotiating a truce with the South.  Lincoln pressed Generals Grant and Sherman to win the war before Lincoln’s likely successor could surrender. 

Moreover, Lincoln repeatedly pointed the nation away from himself and to who it was who fought the war.  At the new National Cemetery at Gettysburg, he reminded the nation that it was “the brave men, living and dead” whose national sacrifice had consecrated the war effort, far above the poor power of speeches by political leaders to add or detract from it.  Later, as the end of the war could be seen approaching and the end of his own life near if unseen—soon to be added to the many others who paid the price of preserving self-government—Abraham Lincoln again pointed the people to those who fronted the battle.  His second inaugural address could have been a moment of triumph and self congratulation against great odds.  Instead he asked the nation “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan”.

Lincoln was great because he rose to the challenge of the times without shirking or excuse and sacrificed all that he had to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which principles were given force through the Constitution.  The force of those constitutional principles was correctly interpreted by the southern slave holders as leading to the inevitable end of slavery, confronting them with the acceptance of the end of their “peculiar institution” or rebellion.  They chose rebellion and anarchy, and Abraham Lincoln rallied a nation to refuse to walk away from that challenge to liberty for all.  

Today again we face a rather divided nation facing freedom-threatening dangers, not the least of which is impending national bankruptcy.  Fortunately, our nation is less divided than the press would have us believe (opinion poll after opinion poll shows large majorities who support the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution).  This time, however, we have a president who not only avoids the national fiscal crisis but feeds it.  To distract attention from that irresponsible policy he seeks every opportunity to encourage division and create new divisions. President Obama seeks to divide the nation by income, by race, by class, by religious belief.  He indicts whole industries and groups of people one by one as in effect enemies of the nation, whether it is the energy industry, pharmaceuticals, banking, health insurance, or Catholic leadership.  The solutions that he promises all boil down to “vote for me” in a media-supported national cult of personality.

Every cult of personality throughout history has ended badly for its people and their fearless leader.  The current one does not look to be changing that historical trend.  And yet, we still have the power to elect our leaders, and the year of national election has begun.  It may not be too late. 

As I ponder the birth, life, and service of Abraham Lincoln, I choose his example, because he rejected the cult of personality but instead gave his life for individual freedom and self-government.  I have hopes that the policies of dependence on government and the surrender of freedom will be rejected so that the American experiment will witness yet another “birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” will continue to be a beacon and example around the world.

Of Liberty and Barackracy

When President Barack Obama leaves office, he will leave Americans with less liberty than they had when he took office. Absorbing many liberties that Americans had, making decisions for Americans that they used to make for themselves, will be a vast array of new government agencies, the new Barackracy.

I chose the term “Barackracy” with care. It ends with a suffix similar to that in “democracy.” Democracy means rule or government by the people. Barackracy is similar to the well-known term, “bureaucracy.” That is not accidental. Bureaucracy was a pejorative term, coined in early modern times to criticize the French government, which had become by and large run buy unelected officials in government agencies, the bureaus. At the time, elective governments—and indeed, constitutions—in France would come and go with amazing frequency, but the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats who ran the operations of government would always be there and would carry on largely undisturbed. For much of what mattered in day-to-day life, France was ruled by the bureaus.

The bureaucracy helped to make France what it is today. More and more decisions over a wide range of matters in the ordinary lives of ordinary people were made by the bureaus. The Soviet Union learned from the French model and could probably not have been created without drawing upon that example. The Soviets expanded upon the French model, but the Soviets did not invent it. Even with the Soviet Union dissolved, the Russians are having a very difficult time establishing the liberties of the people, because the Russian bureaucracy survives at the core of the current Russian government.

When the United States was created we had no bureaucracy. In the early years of the Constitution we had only three departments of government, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the War Department. These three departments focused on the three acknowledged purposes of the federal government, to conduct our international relations, provide for the common defense, and have a national system of revenues to pay for it all.

Instead of bureaucracy, we had liberty, protected for a time by a federal system of government that dispersed governmental power among the states and within a system of checks and balances. The founding fathers had already seen how government limited freedom and how government tended to grow if left unchecked.

Each order from a bureaucrat limits liberty. The decisions of bureaucrats, operating on behalf of the government, have the authority of law and occupy the field where individual decisions used to operate. And, unlike private decisions, the mandates of the bureaucracy are backed by force. Several decades ago Alan Greenspan described the power of bureaucratic decisions this way:

At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
(Alan Greenspan, “The Assault on Integrity,” in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p.119)

At the core of each proposal by Barack Obama to change America lie several new government offices and agencies that arrogate to themselves the power to make decisions that so far have been made by the people themselves. In the Obama “Cap and Trade” plan designed to save us from global warming (or now, “climate change” since it is no longer clear whether the earth is getting warmer or colder) are various agencies that will decide how people can use energy, what they can buy, how their products are made, and what they pay for them. The healthcare legislation will have an unnumbered collection of new government agencies to decide who gets to buy health insurance and from whom, at what price, with what features, covering which illnesses, under which treatments. The proposed new Barackracy will include new agencies to determine what financial services can be offered to you, who can offer them, and on what terms. It will also decide which banks and other financial firms can survive and which ones should be bailed out. There are other plans, too.

In each case, liberty is replaced by government decisions, made by people who are never up for election, accountable to no one. The Senate sponsor of the financial Barackracy bill, Senator Chris Dodd, said that with a new financial consumer regulator it will no longer be necessary to go back to Congress for new consumer legislation—the new Barackracy will have that legislative power. What if you do not like what the new agency does? Or, just what if you would like to decide for yourself? That liberty would be gone.

In the days ahead the power of the Constitution created to preserve the liberties of the people will be tested. The surrendering of our nation—described by Abraham Lincoln as possessing a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”— over to rule by the new Barackracy certainly seems to be inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. We will look next to the courts to uphold the Constitution and the liberty it was established to protect.

Of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave

Each verse of our national anthem ends with the stirring phrase, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” For nearly two centuries—this fall will mark the 195th anniversary of the writing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” by Francis Scott Key—these words have stirred Americans on the battlefield, on the frontier, in their homes, at their work, at their places of worship, even in the halls of government, stirred them to great and bold and noble action for the freedom and independence of our people and as an example to the rest of the world.

In recent times, in more or less accelerating fashion from the New Deal of the 1930s to an even quicker pace since the first of the year, too many of our governmental leaders have been trying their best to turn our nation into the land of the safe and the home of the careful. From the little child wearing a monstrous bicycle helmet as she rides her tricycle, through the proliferation of warning labels on virtually everything we buy or use, to the politically correct speech codes at work and on campus, to the honey sweet invitations for people to surrender to government control their health care and financial choices, Americans are in danger of losing the core of what makes us Americans: our freedom and our courage.

Freedom is the ability to choose, to make our own lives, to make of ourselves who we are and who we will present to God at the last day. Courage is the drive to draw upon the best within us and make the best and right choices, in spite of the odds, in spite of ridicule, to overcome danger. Courage is the father of all of our virtues, without which no virtue is possible.

When I was a child—not too many decades ago—my playmates and I often defended our decisions with the phrase, “It’s a free country.” I do not hear children say that anymore. Is it because it is not a free country, or that the freedom is not apparent, or that our children are not taught about freedom being at the core of what made the United States the beacon of hope for the world?

This November we will mark another anniversary, seven score and six years ago, when Abraham Lincoln called upon a nation of the free and the brave to a greater and continued exertion, so that “this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Is that call any less relevant and important and stirring to Americans today?