Lincoln and Modern Conservatism

While reading through my email during lunch today, an email from the Patriot Post caught my eye.  The Patriot Post is a conservative news letter that is normally very good on most issues, but in regards to the Civil War in general, and Abraham Lincoln in particular, they repeat many of the same arguments found in Southern editorials from 1860-1865. 

The following is what Mark Alexander, the editor of the Patriot Post, wrote today about Lincoln:

"...the War Between the States which cost 600,000 American lives and annulled the authority of our Constitution's mandate for Federalism. Unfortunately, today's "Republicans" tie their lineage to Abraham Lincoln, the man who engineered that frontal assault on states' rights."

But the "states' rights" arguments from the South only saw the light of day after the Civil War.  Before the war, John C. Calhoun argued that slavery was a "positive good," and Alexander Stephens, who served as Vice President of the Confederacy, argued that both science and revelation agreed on the great truth of the natural inequality of the races.

On the other hand, Lincoln was so careful to abide by the Constitution that he always argued that without amendment, he did not have the power to extinguish slavery in the states in which it had already taken hold.  The Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a war time measure and was limited to the states in rebellion.  I would argue Lincoln preserved the Constitution in a crisis greater than that which George Washington faced.

I will have much more to say about this issue in the future, but I will leave with this:  these kinds of arguments are inherently at war with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It is a shame that many conservative news source and books put forth these kinds of arguments to an unknowing general public only interested in recovering founding principles.  In a country now trying to once again orient itself by founding principles, this is a debate worth having.