April 25, 2011
If the European franchises were still not universal in 1860, neither were they in many American states where suffrage was limited to white male property holders. I’m not saying this in a spirit of leftist condemnation. Extending the franchise has rarely increased the degree of self-government. It has usually produced the opposite result. Bloated voting rolls, especially those full of government workers, relief recipients, and those not rooted in established communities, have helped transfer power toward centralized bureaucratic administrations which are imagined to look out for the “people.”
Lincoln had claimed a right of secession in 1848 during the Mexican-American War, which he opposed as a freshman Whig congressman from Illinois. I’ve been told by neocon and other leftist acquaintances that Lincoln’s stand was OK because he opposed the war as the undertaking of Southern slaveholders, including then-President James Polk of Tennessee. Supposedly Lincoln took a strong stand against the war for immaculately progressive, abolitionist reasons. But there’s scant evidence for this. Lincoln attacked the conflict, not as an opponent of slavery but because it was misrepresented by its government backers. It seemed to Lincoln and other war-dissenters that the federal government had bamboozled the public into the conflict with Mexico, from which it hoped to extract Western lands. Lincoln insisted that those states that opposed the war had the rights of nullification and secession. Presumably, he changed his mind in 1861 when he ordered Union soldiers into Virginia, which had just seceded.
