The real U.S. Constitution, which was
scrapped long ago, does not permit judges to be its final interpreters,
executive orders, coercion of the people of a State by the federal government,
delegation of control of the currency to a private banking cartel, the subsidy
of private corporations, or calling the militia to active service except in
case of invasion or rebellion and at the request of the State.
The Constitution should have been
reverently buried long ago. Except that its rotting corpse provides lucrative
pickings for lawyers and pseudo-respectable cover for power seekers. The
central government has no check on its power that is not determined by the
politicians in control of its various branches. They seldom check each other
but frequently check the people and the States. The 14th Amendment,
illegitimately promulgated in the wake of Lincoln’s revolution, has provided
power seekers with everything they need to fulfill their limitless ambitions.
The Constitution died when Abraham
Lincoln decided to treat the solemn constitutional acts of the people of eleven
states as mere “combinations of lawbreakers” to be destroyed by the force at
the command of the party in control of the federal executive. One may celebrate
or abhor that fact, but fact it is. And Lincoln so acted even though in the
election that brought him to power, 60 per cent of the people had voted against
“a policy of coercion.”
The document that was designed to
provide specified operational powers to a federal government was changed into
an unappealable instrument of power. There is a great unnoticed peculiarity in
the name of this country. Before Lincoln, “United States” was a plural—in all
laws, treaties, proclamations, and in the Constitution itself. It was a
“Constitution FOR the United States of America.” And while Americans sometimes
referred to a common identity as a “nation,” their common government was
usually referred to as the “Union” or the “general government.”
We now assume that the Constitution is
something to be interpreted by “constitutional lawyers,” especially those on
the federal bench. “Constitutional lawyers” busy themselves with “emanations”
and a “living document,” or else they talk about stare decisis and “original
intent.” Usually they cite “original intent” from “The Federalist,” a series of
deceitful essays put forward by the defeated centralist party in the Philadelphia
Convention, which was never ratified by any people. The “original intent” of
the real Constitution can only be interpreted by the intentions of the people
of the States who ratified (gave their consent) and thus made the document
valid. Their intentions were made clear when they ratified and in the
clarifying Ten Amendments upon which they insisted. The real Constitution did
not belong to lawyers, who obfuscate for a living, but to the people of the
States. The proper meaning of the Constitution is not a legal question but a
historical one. Citizens did not need lawyers and judges to tell them what
THEIR Constitution meant. A truly living Constitution would be one in which the
people take continuing active part.
Contrary to “democratic capitalists” and
other Marxists, economics does not determine history. However, it is
regrettably true that money, the love of which is the root of much evil,
explains a lot of human motivation. The goal of centralising power in
Washington has ALWAYS been part of a wealth distribution agenda. The efforts of
Hamilton and his successors intended to use the government to transfer weath
from the agricultural class to the speculator class. They even made a plausible
defense of this as a patriotic program for national “development.”
It is equally true of Lincoln. The
PRIMARY accomplishment of his revolution was a permanent national debt and to
establish the federal government as the handmaiden of corporations, which has
continued to this day. You may deplore or applaud this fact, but it is a fact.
It is hardly a secret. Northern leaders at the time said plainly, frequently,
and emphatically that crushing the South was necessary to Northern prosperity.
Lincoln’s self-contradictory but pretty words about government of the people
was window-dressing. Truly, slavery was the most visible issue, though the
division over that was not as great as is usually supposed. Plenty of
Northerners moved to the South and owned slaves. Without any question Lincoln’s
goal of forbidding slavery in the territories was not a matter of benevolence
toward black people but of keeping the West as the domain of “free white men,”
i.e., government sponsored capitalists. (The new States created by the
Republicans west of the Missouri were not real States but pocket boroughs of
the Copper Trust, the Union Pacific Railroad, etc.) The essential cause of the
Republicans’ war against other Americans was that slave-owning Southerners had
too much power and would not get with the self-evidently righteous program of
Northern prosperity.
It is the lack of the real Constitution
destroyed by Lincoln’s violence that today guarantees that the government
primarily functions to transfer wealth from the productive classes to the rich
and their nonproductive clients.
Hindsight has presented the crushing of
the South not only as a great crusade of benevolence, but has obliterated
consciousness of how revolutionary it was and the degree to which it was
necessary to crush the North as well as the South. There is a sense in which
the North was crushed by Lincoln’s party as well as the South. For Lincoln’s
party the government was a. money-making proposition, not a focus of
patriotism. That they destroyed constitutional government was of little concern
to the rent-seekers.
Southerners, with their old-fashioned
notions of republican virtue and Constitutional limits, were an obstacle to
rent-seeking that had to be removed. Karl Marx, many of whose comrades held
positions in Lincoln’s party and army, completely agreed with Lincoln. The
Southerners, who had played a major role in the founding and progress of the
United States, were according to Marx an oppressive and aggressive ruling class
of “slave drivers” who must be destroyed because they stood in the way of the
“labor of the emigrant,” i.e., the European national socialist who was to
profit from the paradise created by American pioneers. The slave drivers were
engaged in a wicked rebellion against the “one great democratic republic whence
the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued.” Lincoln, in the
Gettysburg Address certified and immortalised Marx’s version of American
history. The meaning of the Constitution had now been re-ordered by ideology
and cut off from the people.
Yet the people still have the capacity
to exercise power through their indestructible States. State rights is merely
an institutional aspect of the primary right of self-government.
About
Clyde Wilson
Clyde Wilson is a distinguished
Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was
the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E.
Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or
editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews
and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com,
a source for unreconstructed Southern books. More from Clyde Wilson
