Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) was an editor of National Review, though he later broke with the magazine’s founder and editor, William F. Buckley, Jr. Murray Rothbard devoted critical attention to him, and I have sometimes written critically about him myself. This is not the most promising background for a favorable review, one must acknowledge; but he was a Southerner from Oklahoma, and—in a review of the Straussian Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided—he offers forceful criticism of Jaffa’s portrayal of Lincoln as an egalitarian and a defense of the Southern position in the War Between the States.
The review first appeared in National Review and is reprinted in Kendall’s book The Conservative Affirmation (1963) from which I quote. Kendall identifies the heart of Jaffa’s interpretation of Lincoln, the meaning of the equality clause in the Declaration of Independence, i.e., the clause that says that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln thought that this clause was the key to understanding the Declaration, the Constitution, and the course of American history until his own time. As Kendall puts it:
The central problem of Crisis of the House Divided is the status in the American political tradition of the “all men are created equal” clause of the Declaration of Independence. For Jaffa this is the same problem as the status of Abraham Lincoln vis-à-vis the Signers of the Declaration and the Framers of the Constitution; which, again, is the same problem as that of the very possibility of self-government, that is of democracy, as a realistic political alternative. These three problems, Jaffa brilliantly demonstrates, were Abraham Lincoln’s own deepest preoccupations from the earliest moments of his career—preoccupations, moreover, with which he wrestled not as the smart political strategist of recent Lincoln historiography (though Jaffa is willing for us to think of Lincoln as that too), but as a political philosopher of the first order of importance.
According to Jaffa, the Declaration had a meaning that its authors perceived only dimly. Lincoln was able to grasp this meaning and use it to offer a program for the American nation:
As for the “all men are created equal” clause, Jaffa’s Lincoln (and Jaffa) sees it as the indispensable presupposition of the entire American political experience; either you accept it as the standard which that experience necessarily takes as its point of departure, or you deny the meaning of the entire American experience. As for the status of Abraham Lincoln vis-à-vis the Signers and Framers, Jaffa’s Lincoln sees the great task of the nineteenth century as that of affirming the cherished accomplishment of the Fathers by transcending it. Concretely, this means to construe the equality clause as having an allegedly unavoidable meaning with which it was always pregnant, but which the Fathers apprehended only dimly.
We now come to a complication in this already-intricate interpretation.
The American system of government has a potential to lead to “Caesarism,” despite the provisions of the Constitution that limit government. This potential stems from the possibility of a demagogue of genius, who can inflame the passions of the people so that they will no longer regard themselves as bound to obey the law. As Kendall puts it:
As for the possibility of self-government, Jaffa’s Lincoln sees it as turning on the following questions: What can be done about the Caesarist potential in the system elaborated by the Framers? What can be done to prevent the passions of a self-governing people from, in the long run, taking over from their reason, so that it ignores the duties correlative to the rights self-government is intended to secure?
Jaffa’s Lincoln had an odd answer to these questions. Instead of calling for greater limits to the government, especially by the rights of the states to check the federal government, the answer was to be found in an “anti-Caesar,” who would use the powers of a dictator to teach people to worship the equality clause of the Declaration as a “political religion.”
Jaffa’s Lincoln (and Jaffa) has a crystal-clear answer to these questions: Caesarism can be avoided, and the take-over by passions at the expense of reason circumvented, only through the ministrations and ultimate self-immolation of an anti-Caesar, himself as indifferent to power and glory as Caesar is avid for it—an anti-Caesar capable of transforming the fundamental affirmations of the Signers and Framers into a political religion that men can live by.
Because the South rejected this political religion, the War Between the States had to be fought to bring it into line:
And for Jaffa these three problems reduce themselves to the question—tacit, but present on every page of the book—of whether the Civil War was, from the standpoint of natural right and the cause of self-government, the “unnecessary war” of the historians of the past fifty or sixty years, or a war that had to be fought in the interest of freedom for all mankind. Jaffa’s answer to the question is that the war did indeed have to be fought. . .once the South denied the validity of the equality-clause standard as the basic axiom of our political system. He insists that it had to be fought lest the possibility of self-government perish from the earth. That the war did establish the equality clause as the fundamental truth of the American political tradition, which by the very fact of the war’s being fought transcended itself as Lincoln transcended the Framers. And that the present meaning of the tradition lies precisely in its commitment to equality as a goal ultimately to be realized.
Kendall warns us against the dangers of this view of equality. It will lead to an endless stream of new anti-Caesars, who are of course really Caesars, to promote new revolutions in the name of “equality.”
His readers will, therefore, be well-advised to keep a sharp lookout. . .lest Jaffa launch them, and with them the nation, upon a political future the very thought of which is hair-raising: a future made up of an endless series of Abraham Lincolns, each persuaded that he is superior in wisdom and virtue to the Fathers, each prepared to insist that those who oppose this or that new application of the equality standard are denying the possibility of self-government, each ultimately willing to plunge America into Civil War rather than concede his point—and off at the end, of course, the cooperative commonwealth of men who will be so equal that no one will be able to tell them apart.
Kendall concludes that the South was right. Slavery could have been ended peacefully, the South was opposed to Caesarism, and it had the right to secede rather than accept Lincoln’s political religion:
The limits [of Jaffa’s view] I speak of are set by the alternatives that Jaffa steadfastly. . .refuses to consider: namely, that a negotiated solution might have been worked out in terms of compensating the Southerners for their slaves. . .and that the Southerners were entitled to secede if the issue was to be drawn in Lincoln’s terms. The idea of natural right is not so easily reducible to the equality clause, and there are better ways of demonstrating the possibility of self-government than imposing one’s own views concerning natural right upon others. In this light it would seem that it was the Southerners who were the anti-Caesars of pre-Civil War days, and that Lincoln was the Caesar Lincoln claimed to be trying to prevent; and that the Caesarism we all need to fear is the contemporary Liberal movement, dedicated like Lincoln to egalitarian reforms sanctioned by mandates emanating from national majorities—a movement which is Lincoln’s legitimate offspring. In a word, it would seem that we had best learn to live up to the Framers before we seek to transcend them.
The dangers that Kendall warned us against have become increasingly more threatening since his death in 1967.
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