Real American Conservatism

For the past week, Dinesh D’Souza has engaged in an ongoing debate on social media concerning the meaning of American conservatism and the influence of the South in American history. D’Souza—like Victor Davis Hanson, Harry Jaffa, Larry Arnn, Allen Guelzo, and a host of other mainstream conservatives—argue that while Robert E. Lee has admirable traits, the South cannot be integrated into American conservative thought because it advanced principles hostile to the American founding. More importantly, Southern Democrats provided the intellectual firepower for the modern Democratic Party by establishing or defending slavery, racial segregation, and identity politics. Southerners also committed treason in 1861, and, as D’Souza consistently claims, fought only to “conserve the plantation system of the Old South”, and by this D’Souza means “slavery.” In other words, nineteenth century Democrats were the progressives of antebellum America. They defended slavery as a humane “cradle to grave” institution not unlike modern welfare, wanted poor people to remain locked into either de jure or de facto slavery, and viewed society as a collection of antagonistic class or race “interests” vying for political spoils and power.

This line of attack is nothing new. Mel Bradford and Harry Jaffa engaged in a lively debate on the topic in the 1970s, a debate that by all accounts Bradford won. In many respects, Bradford simply defended the positions of Willmoore Kendall and George Carrey from their book, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition. Jaffa, however, became the central intellectual figure for the “West-Coast Straussians”, a group of conservatives that were convinced by his argument that “equality” was a “conservative principle”, that Abraham Lincoln offered a continuation rather than a break with the founding tradition (making him a “conservative”), and that the American founding was, in fact, hostile to the Southern tradition. Jaffa literally called Southerners proto-fascists and lied that Bradford harbored sympathy for the Nazis. He made that up, but that is par for the course with this group.

D’Souza had to quickly edit his book The End of Racism when it became clear that he would be sued for falsely quoting other conservatives. Larry Arnn likes to believe that John C. Calhoun was influenced by Hegel. His evidence? A connection to Francis Lieber, the German political philosopher famous for the Lieber Code. Lieber wrote an essay on Hegel and advanced his views in the United States. But the “connection” was between the men consisted of correspondence to Calhoun from Lieber that had nothing to do with Hegel. In fact, there is no evidence Calhoun ever responded to Lieber or even read anything he wrote.

Yet, these conservatives are not only guilty of making up quotes and associations, they advance a fantasy of the American founding and American conservatism that ignores both history and the central role of the Southern tradition on the American right. They have crafted a false dichotomy of a righteous North and an evil South, and by contending that nineteenth-century Democrats were, in fact, progressives, they display a willful distortion of the historical record. There’s a reason R.L. Dabney wrote in 1871 that:

This [Northern conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.

Russell Kirk labeled the immediate post-bellum period as “Conservatism Frustrated” in his Conservative Mind, in part because the defeated South could offer no real challenge to the massive social changes taking place during the progressive era. Northern conservatives ignored John Randolph and John C. Calhoun to their own detriment. Charles Francis Adams, direct descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and a Union diplomat during the War, could eulogize Robert E. Lee in 1907 and condemn the Radical Republicans of Reconstruction because he understood that post-bellum Republicans were not conservative. The arch-radical Henry Winter Davis of Maryland labeled his Democratic opponents “conservatives” throughout the 1860s. But these are the same people modern “conservatives” like Hanson, Jaffa, Arnn, Guelzo, and D’Souza will trumpet. These “conservatives” seek to “conserve” nineteenth-century progressivism. They are no different from Heather Cox Richardson or Eric Foner in this respect, and they ultimately undermine their own positions.

Here are a few uncomfortable facts for these “conservatives”:

1. Calhoun classified himself as a “conservative” and because he was a “conservative” he was a “State’s rights man” as he said in an 1837 speech on the admission of Michigan as a State, a proposal he favored.

2. Calhoun was arguably the most original political philosopher in American history who based his “concurrent majority” not on European political science but American federalism and the history of the United States. We call this “originalism” today. But Calhoun could also see a time when simple numerical majorities would be used to plunder their opposition and destroy the Constitution. He also argued that the Constitution would become a useless piece of parchment and nothing more than a convenient argument for those out of power and ignored by those in power.

3. Jefferson Davis did not seek to simply “conserve the plantation system of the Old South” but to defend the American principle of self-determination. Secession was not treason. His statements before the War mirrored what he said both during and after the War. He did not invent the “Lost Cause” after the War or The Southern cause was that of the Constitution, not some mere abstraction like the modern “proposition nation myth.” Every issue, from banking to tariffs to internal improvements to slavery in the territories, was framed as a Constitutional question. As Calhoun said in the 1830s, if Congress could pass an unconstitutional bank, they could pass any piece of unconstitutional legislation, including the prohibition of slavery in the territories. The issue was power, not slavery. And Davis was willing to advance Confederate emancipation in return for European recognition later the War. He also supported arming slaves. Hard to reconcile the D’Souza position with the actual history of the conflict.

4. Republicans were not opposed to slavery in the Southern States. Lincoln himself supported an amendment to the Constitution that would have made slavery permanent in the South. At the same time, both Lincoln and the Republican Party Platform of 1860 affirmed that the general government had no power to interfere with slavery in any State where it already existed. This was the general consensus on the eve of the War in 1861. Lincoln also suggested in 1865 that if the South was willing to put down their arms and return to the fold, they could vote down the impending Thirteenth Amendment. He also said as much in 1862. Additionally, as Paul Escott has shown, Lincoln wanted to build a bridge to the old Southern Whigs and create a new political party when the War was over.

5. Southern Democrats did not invent segregation. C. Vann Woodward made this clear in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. In fact, “Jim Crow” segregation was born in Connecticut in the 1830s, while Lincoln’s own State of Illinois prohibited blacks from living there in the 1850s. The amendment to the Illinois Constitution that barred blacks from living in the State was written and advanced by eventual Republican John A. “Black Jack” Logan, a Union general during the War.

6. Lincoln defended segregation throughout his political career and favored colonization for freed slaves as late as 1865. He never believed that white and black Americans could co-exist peacefully. Republicans insisted that the GOP was the “white man’s party” in the 1850s and demanded the prohibition of slavery in the territories in order to defend white Americans from black labor competition.

7. Southern Democrats were not alone in their defense of slavery. The earliest pro-slavery tract in American history was written in Massachusetts in 1701, and Northern theologians defended the institution into the early nineteenth century. Many pro-slavery Southerners were educated in Northern institutions that promoted a Biblical defense of slavery. As the historian Larry Tise wrote, “The adoption of a pro-slavery ideology by the South in the 1830s marked, not a departure from the rest of the nation either ideologically or psychically, but rather a full adoption of what may have been at the time America’s strongest sociopolitical and cultural philosophy and tradition.”

8. Nineteenth-century Americans, North and South, considered the Democrats to be the “conservative” political party, particularly from the 1850s until around 1896. Abolitionists were run out of town in many Northern neighborhoods. They were never considered “conservative”, and to relabel them as “conservative” proves Dabney’s point. The Republicans that people like D’Souza promote were the radicals of the nineteenth-century. Heather Cox Richardson is correct when she claims Lincoln as the forefather of the modern Left. Jaffa’s Lincoln is a myth. Lincoln may have been to the right of someone like Winter Davis, but he was no conservative.

In short, the distortion of history by mainstream “conservatives” and the removal of antebellum Democrats, and notably the Southern tradition, from acceptable conservative discussions has done severe damage to a robust intellectual American conservatism. If your “conservative” heroes are nineteenth-century radicals, you have already lost.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute. 

Brion McClanahan

Brion McClanahan is the author or co-author of six books, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America (Regnery History, 2017), 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her (Regnery History, 2016), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, (Regnery, 2009), The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution (Regnery History, 2012), Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012), and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes, (Regnery, 2012). He received a B.A. in History from Salisbury University in 1997 and an M.A. in History from the University of South Carolina in 1999. He finished his Ph.D. in History at the University of South Carolina in 2006, and had the privilege of being Clyde Wilson’s last doctoral student. He lives in Alabama with his wife and three daughters.

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