Letters to Frank Meyer Reveal Rothbard’s Views on Lincoln, Slavery, and Popular Sovereignty

When Frank Meyer described Abraham Lincoln in National Review shortly after the centenary of his death as the purveyor of “an authoritarianism that was, in terms of civil liberties, the most ruthless in American history,” he left colleagues and readers stunned. Editor-in-chief William F. Buckley, Jr., for one, wrote that the “Books in Brief” review by his senior editor “comes close to blasphemy.”

The review’s 101 words set off both a tete-a-tete and a published brouhaha between Meyer and Harry Jaffa. It elsewhere set off bewilderment regarding where a National Review editor came upon such ideas. Not just the centenary of the 16th president’s assassination, but the concurrent context of the civil rights movement in full force by 1965 made Meyer’s words impolitic at best. 

Meyer, after he left the Communist Party in the 1940s but before he emerged as the personification of fusionism during the 1960s, came under the influence of Rose Wilder Lane, Frank Chodorov, and even, to some degree, a man who entered the world after Meyer had graduated from high school: Murray Rothbard.  

New evidence of the Rothbard-Meyer friendship comes to us as part of the research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. The correspondence between Rothbard and Meyer discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse starts in 1954 and ends with a note from the younger man to Meyer’s widow, Elsie, shortly after the older man’s 1972 death. The letters offer a glimpse into Rothbard’s thoughts on myriad subjects. Those examined in this article focus on his complex views of the Civil War and unique approach to U.S. history, for which he admitted that he enjoyed anointing heroes and villains. 

“Although an economist,” he told Meyer, “when I move over to history my first love is not economic history but political history—the clash and struggle of ideas, legislation, and parties.”

A year before the launch of National Review, Rothbard met Meyer. Like so many before caught in Meyer’s tractor-beam personality, Rothbard did not seek to escape the pull. He instigated an epistolic continuation of their late 1954 conversations. This, in turn, brought telephonic responses from Woodstock and eventual in-person reunions.   

“The slavery question is one I have always found very difficult to cope with,” a twentysomething Rothbard confessed to Meyer in November 1954. “I stand for the right of secession and nullification (the Southern Dem. position). On the other hand, on the issue of the territories, I believe I favor the Douglas (Northern Dem.) doctrine of popular sovereignty within each territorial legislature.”

Rothbard cited union attacks on freedom via bayonets, conscription, greenbacks, the introduction of the income tax, and much else to illustrate what he saw as Lincoln’s aggression upon not just the South but liberty as well. 

“If I were a citizen of a slave state,” he told Meyer, “I would have been in favor of state abolition of slavery, but not Federal. If I were a citizen of a territory, I would have favored that territory go in without slavery in its boundaries. If I were a Northern state, I would have favored civil disobedience against fugitive slave laws, but no coercive abolition by Federal action. I would have probably been a William Lloyd Garrison abolitionist, i.e. secession by the free states from the slave states. As you see, I think there were merits in all the positions, except that of the Republican Party.”

He regarded the Copperheads and Clement Vallandingham—whose claim that Lincoln used the war to establish tyranny found a rebuttal both forceful and weak in federal troops breaking down his door, arresting him, and exiling him to the Confederacy—as the real statesmen of the conflict.

Meyer, like Rothbard, came into the world the scion of Jews in America’s northeast. Meyer gravitated from left to right. Rothbard never endured the obligatory Marxist phase of so many others on the postwar Right. They both entertained thoughts heretical to others occupying space right of the middle. 

Less controversial opinions from Rothbard included praise for the Loco-Focos, Martin Van Buren as one of America’s great presidents for refusing calls to intervene in the economy despite hard times, and James K. Polk as another on that level, if not for his Mexican War. He encouraged Meyer to read the 1840 platform of the Democratic Party. He pointed to the New York Post’s William Leggett and William Cullen Bryant as 19th-century journalists whom he admired. He cited the antebellum period as a golden age in American political history. 

And that golden age, for Rothbard, ended at Fort Sumter. 

“The Civil War was really the watershed,” he wrote Meyer. “Lincoln was America’s first dictator, and almost all the Republican Acts were monstrous.”

Daniel J. Flynn, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and American Spectator senior editor, is the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (Encounter/ISI Books, 2025).