James Poulos sings the old neo-Confederate song:
Postmodern Conservative.: Abraham Lincoln, Suffering Sovereign: These are some of the most praiseworthy things I have to say about Lincoln, and by saying them, faithful readers might already know, I in no way intend to obscure the fact of US history that Lincoln resolved to bring that smiting and suffering upon large portions of Americans who exercised, through their elected representatives, their sovereign right to remain in the American nation but depart the American nation-state...
From my perspective, this is very bad and very extraordinary. The extraordinary thing about this sentence by James Poulos is how it overlooks the fact that a free vote of the inhabitants of each of the American slave states--including South Carolina--would almost surely have produced majorities not to secede but to stay in the union.
Anybody setting forth the self-evident principle that:
governments... instituted... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
And asserting the people's sovereign right that:
any form of government... destructive of these ends... [triggers] the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government... on such principles and organizing its powers in such form... most likely to effect their safety and happiness...
had better have a solid majority on their side. Not a solid majority of an aristocracy. Not a solid majority of a political class. Not a solid majority of a race. But a solid majority of the people.
The confederate secessionists did not--few of the African-American slaves in the south, you see, preferred Jefferson Davis to Abraham Lincoln.
But it doesn't bother James Poulos very much that a majority of the people on whose behalf the "sovereign right to... depart the American nation-state" did not approve of the exercise of that right by those who claimed to be their representatives. African-Americans don't exist, after all--at least not as human beings with a moral claim to a form of government instituted to secure their unalienable rights.
We have seen this before in law professor Mark Graber's claim that the U.S. Constitution "ought" to have been revised in 1860 because it was a bargain between "Tribe A" northerners and "Tribe B" southern slaveholders, and it had unexpectedly worked out to the disadvantage of "Tribe B" (see http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/more_dred_scott.html). Once again, African-Americans simply did not exist--at least not as human beings with moral claims.