Profoundly nonchalant
And There Was Light
In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I take a look at Jon Meacham’s new biography of Abraham Lincoln, entitled And There Was Light. Excerpt:
[Lincoln’s] intransigence proved crucial in the immediate aftermath of his election to the presidency, and Meacham’s description of this episode is the best part of his book. In the months between November 1860 and the inauguration in March 1861—the so-called Secession Winter, during which South Carolina and six other states left the union—slave owners and their northern collaborators proposed myriad compromises to avoid bloodshed. The most popular was offered by Kentucky Senator John Crittenden; it would have drawn a line across North America to the Pacific Coast, guaranteeing the legality of slavery below that line by amending the Constitution. Lincoln opposed the idea, not only because of his antislavery convictions but because the slave states had repeatedly bullied the federal government since at least the 1830s, with the latter almost always conceding to southern demands under the threat of violence. To appease them yet again would only have rewarded their intimidation, effectively guaranteeing another round of extortion.
Lincoln could not actually do anything before his inauguration to block the Crittenden Compromise, except to rally members of Congress to oppose it. That he did, under pressures to which many men in his place would have bent—and Meacham rightly highlights the importance of his inflexibility at this crucial moment: “Lincoln courageously resisted compromising on slavery in an hour when such compromise was within the realm of acceptable opinion,” he writes. “In these cold and complex months, Abraham Lincoln was both statesman and moral being, choosing the difficult over the easy, the catastrophic over the convenient, the right over the wrong.”
In underscoring this, Meacham outclasses David Herbert Donald, whose 1995 book Lincoln until now had been the best one-volume biography of the sixteenth president. Donald was a superb historian but far more interested in the pragmatic, day-to-day machinations of party politics than in leaders who elevated principle above mere scheming. In his version of the story, “the chances for compromise in 1860–1861 were never great,” and Lincoln’s refusal to endorse it, while admirable, was motivated more by awareness that to do so “would disrupt the party that elected him” than by the courage of his convictions.
Yet as Meacham shows, the Crittenden proposal was a real threat—and Lincoln’s moral courage was not just right but also, and for that reason, the only truly practical plan. That’s because by 1860, slavery’s opponents were so accustomed to cowardice on the part of their leaders that Lincoln’s refusal to surrender gave them the morale boost they needed. A cynical Henry Adams, watching Crittenden’s allies negotiating the compromise proposal with Republican lobbyists, predicted that Lincoln’s party would eventually embrace “some damned nonsense or other”—but Lincoln, knowing such concessions would make his party, in his words, “a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it,” said no.
Talking about “The Furies”
The other day, I joined Robert Tracinski on his podcast Symposium to talk about my new book and the fascinating lives of the three women who helped rescue liberty in an age of totalitarianism and world war. You can listen here.
I also got a chance to talk about the Furies at an event at the Goldwater Institute, and we recorded the presentation. You can listen to it here. (Incidentally, I started with a little clip from the movie Titanic, which didn’t work in my Powerpoint presentation—but you can see it here.)
Going on offense against Super Bowl Censorship
My colleagues and I had a fun victory in a free speech case involving the City of Phoenix, which unconstitutionally prohibited people from putting up signs without first getting the permission of the NFL—a private company. You can learn more at the Goldwater Institute’s blog.
The illusory “justice” of administrative agencies
The Orange County Register’s Steven Greenhut also focused on one of Goldwater’s cases in a recent column. It’s a case called Legacy Fund v. Clean Elections Commission, and it may not sound like the sexiest issue, but it’s very important to a lot of people who don’t even realize it, because so much of our lives is governed today by the actions of regulatory bureaucracies. In Arizona, as in many other states, these bureaucracies have the power to simply nullify legal decisions that go against them. As Steve puts it:
Let’s say the a state or federal labor agency accuses your business of shortchanging workers, or an environmental agency accuses you of despoiling a wetland as part of a construction project. Agency officials make mistakes or misinterpret the law, so you attempt to have your day in “court” to protest a fine or regulatory enforcement action.
Your case will come before an administrative law judge, but these aren’t the same as court judges. They sometimes are employees of the agency. Other times, administrative judges are dispatched from a clearinghouse agency that claims to provide neutral decisions. They operate through a looser set of rules than the judiciary and might be expected to share certain bureaucratic pre-dispositions.
It’s no surprise how often administrative opinions reflect the outlook of the agency, although on occasion these arbiters defy the odds. Even when they do, the agency itself can often overrule the finding of the administrative law judge. How’s that for a stacked deck?
In the Legacy Fund case, the Arizona Supreme Court took the unusual step of asking for additional briefing on the due process implications of this process. You can read our brief here.
Tord Gustavsen
Christina and I had the pleasure this month of seeing my favorite living jazz musician, Tord Gustavsen, playing live in San Diego with his trio (drummer Jarle Vespestad and new bassist Steiner Raknes). Tord’s style has a quiet, introspective minimalism to it (see, for example, “The Ground,”) but he can definitely swing, and he did so at this concert. You can get a sense of his work though this recent video of one of his live concerts.
When music speaks to you as exactly as this music speaks to me, it’s a strange, almost telepathic experience. With this music, every note counts, and Tord, et al., seem to somehow generate a quality of rightness or aptness with their choices that is (of course) inexpressible in anything but musical terms. This music is spare, sometimes with the quality of a nocturne; dark, yet without the bitterness or even nihilism one senses in, say, some of Miles Davis’s “Prince of Darkness” phase. Perhaps this is due to the influence of religious music on their compositions. (Many of their songs are reworkings of Bach.) There’s an air of mystery and even chaos in much of some of these tunes, especially in his new album Opening, yet it resolves itself with a sense of order and wonder; it’s as if he carries the listener on a journey from one star to another, ultimately unafraid of the immense distances between.
I’m fond of a saying I once encountered, that jazz is the music of nonchalance. Much of Tord’s music is not always nonchalant (although it often is), and maybe that means it’s not even jazz, sometimes; it’s a music of significance and profundity—and yet he and his bandmates either deliver it with a reclined attitude that’s in the best tradition of, say, Miles or Dexter Gordon’s nighttime ballads, or they do something even more unusual: they’re profound about nonchalance. Listen, for example, to “Edges of Happiness,” or “Stream,” and there’s an intimacy about it that brings to mind the paintings of Steven Hanks or Casey Baugh. It’s a music that takes simplicity and mutual silence seriously in a devout, yet not overly sentimental way. For an artist to achieve that requires an extremely deft touch, and it’s one the Tord Gustavsen Trio have.