In a recent conversation with one who sees herself as a compassionate Canadian liberal, I was informed that the Americans actually fought the Civil War not to eradicate Slavery, but simply to keep their fledgling country together. Its the sort of logic, of course, that gave rise to “critical race theory.” It’s the sort of Anti-Americanism that pervades the Left here in Canada. Not wanting to incite an argument, I decided not to pursue the subject.
But if the foremost priority of Lincoln’s Government was the preservation of national unity, would not the most obvious and indeed least hazardous of its options have been the continued tolerance of Slavery? That “institution,” after all, was still considered perfectly acceptable throughout most of the non-Western world.
Britain began to actively chafe against slavery late in the 18th Century, banning it outright from the Commonwealth in 1833. Ships of the American Navy joined the Brits in 1819 in their decades long patrol of the African coast designed to end the practice of what were predominantly African natives selling their own people into servitude. My blog of Nov. 3, 2020, entitled “The Arrogance of Hindsight,” outlines the complexities confronting the designers of the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, many of whom found slavery abhorrent even as they sought to include in their new Union a number of States whose very economies seemed to depend upon it. Yes, Jefferson inherited slaves from his parents. Yes he wrote a tract condemning slavery for the Declaration of Independence which was ultimately deleted. But that he was the hypocrite implied by the “1619 Project” is a gross simplification of the facts. A lifelong crusader against the Atlantic slave trade, he sought to have it banished from Virginia in 1778, banished from the Northwest Territories in 1784, and, as President, did in fact have it banished from the shores of the entire Nation in 1807.
I cite the paradoxes of Jefferson’s life simply to illustrate the absurdity of “intellectuals” 200 years later condemning the founding fathers of the USA with no consideration whatsoever for either the revolutionary nature of the social changes they were prescribing or the daunting geopolitical considerations before them. It’s the same level of arrogance that leads Post Moderns to denounce Plato for not sharing their 21st Century Relativism; the same level of arrogance that leads the proponents of Critical Race Theory to denounce the very White people, British and American, who actually began to free the world of the scourge of Slavery.
Canadian “liberals” love to look down on Americans, excoriating their pride in “rugged individualism” as but a veiled endorsement of Capitalist greed; stereotyping vast portions of their population as ignorant hicks barely worthy of the vote. But of course Canadian “liberals,” as indeed all on the Left, have no real respect for the underlying Principles of a Democracy, no real respect for the Freedom of the Individual. It was with some glee, then, that my “liberal” friend pointed out the hypocrisy of America’s so-called Idealism, the hypocrisy of the notion that the States fought the Civil War in defense of Freedom.
But as I am a Rationalist [ i.e., “conservative”] as opposed to one given to Marxist cynicism, I cannot help but be in awe of the commitment of the Enlightened leaders of a Nation 160 years ago to fight a devastating War which would ultimately cost it over 800,000 lives, in defense of a moral principle. The Post Modern notion that Lincoln was primarily motivated by the desire to keep the country together is rendered absolutely absurd by the fact that he could have achieved that very end by simply doing nothing at all!
What better illustrates the moral nihilism at the heart of the political Left than the inability of its adherents to admit that Man could ever act on behalf of a Principle rather than, as their prophet Marx asserted, out of sheer self-interest? Isn’t it odd that those given to such cynicism actually see themselves as Idealists?