The Abbeville Institute 2005
Summer School

"Rethinking Lincoln: The Myth, The Symbol, The Legacy

At the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 a move to create a unitary American state that would effectively destroy state and local sovereignty was soundly defeated. The ambition, however, did not die, and was revived in various forms after the Constitution was ratified and a Bill of Rights added to protect State and local sovereignty. One of these was the Hamiltonian project--later carried on by Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln--of economic centralization through the creation of a national bank, public credit, protective tariffs for Northeastern manufacturing, and government subsidies for business. The other was judicial centralization through the Supreme Court's construction of the Constitution. And, of course, the one was often connected with the other.

The first philosophical, moral, and constitutional critique of this effort to create a unitary American state of the sort that was sweeping Europe after the French Revolution was put forth by Southerners. Taken as a whole, this critique begins with Jefferson's "Kentucky Resolutions" and ends with the decentralist constitutional reforms embedded in the Confederate Constitution. The goal of the 2004 Summer School was to provide students with a vision of this critique as a whole and to introduce them to the main players in the critique. Students read the primary sources and were given a bibliography of primary and secondary sources for future use.

The foundation for this critique was laid by a number of thoughtful Virginians: Jefferson, Madison, St. George Tucker, John Taylor of Caroline, John Randolph, Spencer Roane, and Abel Upshur. Lectures were given on the thought of these figures as well as that of John C. Calhoun and the Jeffersonian republicans--North and South--who dominated much of the politics of the ante-bellum era.

The lectures and seminars were based on selections from the following texts: Jefferson's "Kentucky Resolutions," Madison's "Virginia Report" of 1799, St. George Tucker's View of the Constitution of the United States (1803), the first systematic treatment of the Constitution; three works by John Taylor: Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820), a criticism of judicial centralization; Tyranny Unmasked (1822), a criticism of economic centralization; and New Views of the Constitution (1823), an insightful account of the origin of the conflict between centralist and decentralist views of the Constitution; Abel Upshur's A Brief Inquiry into the True Nature and Character of Our Federal Government 1840), a reply to Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, which elaborated the first systematic nationalist view of the Constitution; and John C. Calhoun's Discourse on the Constitution of the United States (1851). At the end of the week we pulled together our study by discussing the political economy and jurisprudence of the Confederate Constitution of 1861, asking the question, "to what extent did the Confederate Constitution embody the Southern critique of centralization and nationalism that runs from Jefferson to Calhoun?"

In exploring the Southern critique of centralization, we necessarily examined the contrary nationalist and centralist theories to which the tradition was opposed, especially the jurisprudence of John Marshall and Joseph Story, and the conflict as revealed in the Webster-Hayne and Webster-Calhoun debates.

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