Don't Get Madison

[posted by Callimachus]

While I'm sympathetic to sincere people of faith, I caution them against arguing that the Founders intended to make America a Christian nation. Especially if they are going to do it with a set of cherry-picked quotes and no deep reading of the sources. Especially if they're going to let someone else pick the cherries for them.

As Michael Medved seems to have done here. His argument is built from disconnected snippets; ten-word half-sentences from men who wrote millions of words of pubic discourse. And when the snippets turn out to be flimsy, the argument becomes a house of cards. For instance:

Jefferson’s friend and colleague, James Madison (acclaimed as “The Father of the Constitution”) declared that “religion is the basis and Foundation of Government” ....

I believe Medved wrote honestly and sincerely. But I suspect he had some less-than-honest book of history or quotations open in front of him. They are out there. The Christian bookstores are full of them. And they are mine-fields for an honest writer. They are full of mangled, out-of-context, or outright bogus quotations.

Here's the full paragraph of the Memorial and Remonstrance from which Medved's first Madison quote was plucked:

15. Because finally, "the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience" is held by the same tenure with all our other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to us; if we consult the "Declaration of those rights which pertain to the good people of Virginia, as the basis and foundation of Government," it is enumerated with equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis.

Emphasis added by me, to show how badly you have to torture Madison to make him say what Medved wants him to have said.

So what is Madison really talking about here? Well, read the introduction to the "Memorial and Remonstrance."

We the subscribers, citizens of the said Commonwealth, having taken into serious consideration, a Bill printed by order of the last Session of General Assembly, entitled "A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion," and conceiving that the same if finally armed with the sanctions of a law, will be a dangerous abuse of power, are bound as faithful members of a free State to remonstrate against it, and to declare the reasons by which we are determined.

It takes a willful disregard for truth to take that document and employ any part of it as an argument for the Founders wanting America to be a Christian nation.

When Madison took his place in the Virginia legislature after the Revolutionary War, a bill stood in the General Assessment, sponsored by Patrick Henry, that would funnel tax money to support religious education in all denominations.

Henry justified this as a way to curtail the sin and immorality of young people. But the General Assessment bill would have hatched the monster Madison feared most: a "tyranny of the majority." If the ministers from all the major Protestant denominations were paid from the state treasury, a coalition of Protestant groups would relegate minority views to a "tolerated" status or worse.

Madison scholar Robert Alley writes that, "toleration presumed a state prerogative that, for Madison, did not exist." Madison wrote that "the right to tolerate religion presumes the right to persecute it." Instead Madison argued for "liberty of conscience." The "natural rights of man," centering in the concept of "liberty of conscience," stand, without question for Madison, above and before any other authority.

The legislature was on the verge of passing the bill, but Madison convinced his colleagues to postpone a vote until the next session in 1785. Madison used the postponement to take his case to the public, writing a broadside critique, the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," which has become the classic statement for religious freedom in North America.

His sole concern was protecting the individual conscience from the intrusion of state power.

The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.

Madison insisted government keep its hands absolutely off religion.

Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.

Madison, in his Virginia pamphlet, addressed a God-fearing audience. Probably there's a degree of sophistry in his painting Patrick Henry's bill to provide public funds for religious education as an anti-Christian bill, because "it at once discourages those who are strangers to the light of revelation from coming into the Region of it; and countenances by example the nations who continue in darkness, in shutting out those who might convey it to them."

But in the course of his central argument Madison makes statements that, though he comes down on the secular side, show as high a respect for religion as you can find anywhere.

As I've written in many places before, the Founders had a complex and shifting set of attitudes toward religion overall, religion as they found it in America, and religion as they felt it personally. They by no means agreed on any of these things. But to act as though they had a single, simple, clear vision, and to attempt to prove it by quotes picked by dubious pickers, only makes you look foolish.

Kerry Quotes Jefferson

Not. JFK has been sent to the dunce's stool -- again -- this time for quoting Thomas Jefferson in praise of dissent -- with a quote nobody has ever found in Jefferson's actual writings.

Eh, I'm willing to give him a pass for this. A great many quotes attributed to the Founders or to Lincoln were never said by them. They're often pithy quotes that obscure people wrote, which over time, by deliberate effort of deception or not, have gravitated into the sphere of the brighter lights in our history.

There are a raft of bogus quotes by the Founders in praise of Christianity as a governing principle, for instance. ("We have staked the future of the American civilization not on the power of government, but on the capacity of Americans to abide by the Ten Commandments of God" -- Madison never said it.) They have been collected and promoted by the Christianists among us, notably David Barton of WallBuilders Inc., and now have been enshrined in the Congressional Record.

Progressive and atheists are not immune to the practice.

The quote Kerry used was consistent with what Jefferson might have thought, and written, circa 1798. The words weren't so wildly out of character for him that they should have been immediately flagged. I bet half the bloggers pouncing on Kerry this weekend couldn't have identified the "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" quote as a dud last weekend.

Absent any evidence that he knew beforehand it was a bogus quote, or that he sought any special benefit from using it in willful error, I see no reason to bother Kerry. You don't get much from a Jefferson quote, anyhow. It was the genius of the man's life that, sooner or later, he compromised every political principle he had. I see no reason to rub Kerry's face in an honest mistake. It does no harm to be charitable about his intentions.

But, but, but ... But what? Because he wouldn't do the same for you? Do you only take the high road as a matter of compromise, or is it your default position. Why pass up a chance to bash the opposition? Do you not reside in the full expectation that your opponent will make real and dishonest errors in time. Isn't it our duty to inform the voters how bad the opposition is? Nobody outside of school cares about this one. And you'll do far better with the voters if they see you as charitable when you can be, the moreso if the other guy is not.

Otherwise, you'll just end up like Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman or Molly Ivins. No matter how much they certainly know about their respective topics, it's hard to take their anti-Bush screeds seriously, because you know they'd be writing with exactly the same tone no matter what he had done for the past 5 years or so. Ultimately it has nothing to do with any reality except their visceral contempt for certain things he embodies, to them.

In a harbor near here a cargo ship sat for months with a broken siren that howled day and night. Sometimes there would be a fire somewhere in town, so during those times the siren was technically right. But it didn't do any good and nobody paid it any mind.

Though according to this pro-Kerry site, the former candidate may, in fact, have been quoting professional America-basher Howard Zinn instead. If Kerry thinks Zinn is Jefferson, then we have a problem.

It's more complicated than that, of course.

Lincoln Again

“I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the extreme of toleration than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardise in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.”

I've been seeing this Abe Lincoln quote a lot recently.

Andrew Sullivan used it recently to book-end a column in the London Times defending those who stand up for civil rights, and condemn torture, in the war on Islamist terrorism. I think he's right, of course, but I also have noticed that polemicists who enlist historical figures in their crusades often make ill-advised choices.

The quote Sullivan uses is a lovely and forceful statement. Its source is the artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter (1830-1900), who from February through July 1864 worked at the White House painting "First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation before Lincoln’s Cabinet." Carpenter was hardly an impartial observer, being a passionate abolitionist. He put the Lincoln quote into a book he wrote, "The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House."

At one of the "levees," in the winter of 1864, during a lull in the hand-shaking, Mr. Lincoln was addressed by two lady friends, one of whom is the wife of a gentleman subsequently called into the Cabinet. Turning to them with a weary air, he remarked that it was a relief to have now and then those to talk to who had no favors to ask. The lady referred to is a radical, — a New Yorker by birth, but for many years a resident of the West. She replied, playfully, "Mr. President, I have one request to make." "Ah!" said he, at once looking grace. "Well, what is it?" "That you suppress the infamous 'Chicago Times,'" was the rejoinder. After a brief pause, Mr. Lincoln asked her if she had ever tried to imagine how she would have felt, in some former administration to which she was opposed, if her favorite newspaper had been seized by the government, and suppressed. The lady replied that it was not a parallel case; that in circumstances like those then existing, when the nation was struggling for its very life, such utterances as were daily put forth in that journal should be suppressed by the strong hand of authority; that the cause of loyalty and good government demanded it. "I fear you do not fully comprehend," returned the President, "the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens." [p. 156-157]

I've never seen a historian cast doubt on the quote, but it is relevant to note it's anecdotal, not from Lincoln's writings. Oh, I believe he may have said something like that, in response to a fire-eating unionist, in the early months of 1864, with the mid-term elections safely over and the presidential campaign not yet begun, with the crisis of emancipation past and the draft riots quelled.

He could afford to speak that way, and it would be like him to pose as a leader carefully navigating a moderate path through the shoals of crisis. Always, Lincoln knew, there were men and women in the North who would have pursued a policy that would have been fatally radical and aggressive. Lincoln was savvy enough not only to keep their hands off the tiller, but to use them as a public foil, to put the shine on his image as a sober, sane leader. It seems he could manage this trick whether they were congressional leaders or ladies at a levee.

But in fact, his administration already had once shut down the offending newspaper -- and many others.

After editorials lashing the administration and expressing sympathy for Clement Vallandigham, the copperhead Ohio politician who had been arrested and banished for criticizing the administration and the war, Gen. Ambrose Burnside, on June 1, 1863, issued "General Order N. 84," which declared, in part:

On account of the repeated expression of disloyal and incendiary sentiments, the publication of the newspaper known as the Chicago Times is hereby suppressed.

Brig. Gen. Jacob Ammen, commanding the District of Illinois, was charged with the execution of this order, and under his authority the captain in command at Camp Douglas, Chicago, warned the newspaper's management they must not publish again, under penalty of military seizure.

Generals in uniform often lacked the patience and philosophy to distinguish between treason or support of the rebellion, on the one hand, and right to criticize civil and military acts of the government, on the other. As a result, military authorities in the North often carried out presidential directives more heavy-handedly than Lincoln and his cabinet intended. Or at least the Administration found it convenient to present matters as such.

After learning of the orders to suppress the "Times," Lincoln wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton:

I have received additional despatches, which, with former ones, induce me to believe we should revoke or suspend the order suspending the Chicago 'Times'; and if you concur in opinion, please have it done.

The paper resumed publication. But a year later, Lincoln revealed his ambivalence about the matter in a letter to his congressional ally Isaac N. Arnold:

In regard to the order of General Burnside suspending the Chicago "Times," now nearly a year ago, I can only say I was embarrassed with the question between what was due to the military service on the one hand, and the liberty of the press on the other, ... I am far from certain today that the revocation was not right.

Using embarrassed here in the older sense of "perplexed, thrown into doubt."

Under cover of a congressional act of Aug. 6, 1861, authorizing the President to direct the seizure of anyone who was “aiding, or abetting, or promoting ... insurrection,” the Lincoln government had begun shutting down the opposition press. Court martials were authorized in the cases of newspapers that printed information considered to have aided the enemy. Telegraph wires out of Washington, which the major daily newspapers relied on for their news of the war and the government, were subject to State Department censorship. On August 16 charges of disloyalty for alleged pro-Southernism had been brought in United States Circuit Court against the "New York Journal of Commerce," "Daily News," "Day Book," "Freeman’s Journal," and the "Brooklyn Eagle." On August 21 the federal government ordered that copies of the New York newspapers that had been suppressed should not be carried by the mails. Suppressions continued August 22 in New York, New York; Canton, Ohio; and Philadelphia. On September 18 the Louisville, Kentucky "Courier" was banned from the mails, and its offices were seized the next day by federal authorities.

Even a small-town paper like the "Jeffersonian," in the little borough of West Chester, Pennsylvania (pop. 4,000), could feel the government's wrath. The federal authorities in Philadelphia shut it down in September 1861 after reporting critical of the administration and the conduct of the First Bull Run battle. The Philadelphia "Bulletin" justified this suppression:

The principal circulation of the Jeffersonian was in the lower part of Chester County and along the Maryland line. Many of the people even upon this side of the line are touched with Secession sentiment. They take but one newspaper, frequently, and they are, of course, greatly influenced by its statements and opinions. The mischief that can be accomplished by a persistent enemy of the Government, under such circumstances, will be appreciated.

Not long after the conversation Carpenter reported, and the now-widely cited quote about "extreme of toleration," another newspaper got into hot water with the administration. This time, Lincoln went directly and personally to the military authorities to shut it down.

In May, the battles began again, this time with Grant in charge in the East, and the casualty list of dead and wounded skyrocketed. The North fought to bloody stalemates in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania, and saw terrible waste of lives in the botched Bermuda Hundred campaign.

The anti-war New York "World" on May 18 published a false presidential proclamation listing the recent battles and setting aside a day for public humiliation and prayer. It also printed a false call for conscription of 400,000 men. [A conscription was looming, in fact, but this wasn't it.]

The day it appeared, Lincoln sent Gen. John A. Dix an order:

Whereas, there has been wickedly and traitorously printed and published this morning, in the New York World and the New York Journal of Commerce, ... a false and spurious proclamation purported to be signed by the President ... which publication is of a treasonable nature, designed to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States and to the rebels now at war against the Government and their aiders and abettors, you are therefore hereby commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison ... the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers, and all such persons as, after public notice has been given of the falsehood of said publication, print and publish the same with intent to give aid and comfort to the enemy; and you will hold the persons so arrested in close custody until they can be brought to trial before a military commission for their offense. You will also take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce, and hold the same until further orders, and prohibit any further publication therefrom.

Dix took newspaper managers into custody. He seized the newspaper offices and held them under military guard for three days.

The "extreme of toleration" quote is an unusual one in Lincoln's corpus. Because during the war Lincoln more often turned his eloquence to justifying civil repressions than to condemning them.

For instance, he wrote in June 1863 to Erastus Corning and others in New York state who had petitioned against Lincoln's trampling of civil liberties in the name of war for the Union. Lincoln took the petition as an opportunity to reply with a public letter explaining his view of these things.

Place, if you can, these ideas in the head of the current incumbent of the White House, and consider the consequences if he were to govern with them in mind. Imagine the safety of a dissident, a Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky, or Cindy Sheehan, in Lincoln's America:

...[A]rrests are made, not so much for what has been done, as for what probably would be done. ... The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed, cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy; much more, if he talks ambiguously -- talks for his country with 'buts' and 'ifs' and 'ands.'

And elsewhere:

... [H]e who dissuades one man from volunteering, or induces one soldier to desert, weakens the Union cause as much as he who kills a Union soldier in battle. Yet this dissuasion or inducement may be so conducted as to be no defined crime of which any civil court would take cognizance.

Harsh measures for perilous times? Lincoln's got that argument covered in honey:

Nor am I able to appreciate the danger ... that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the rebellion, lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence, trial by jury, and Habeas corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future which I trust lies before them, any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.

The letter reveals an eloquent, lawyerly, and ruthless mind that is willing to bend the Constitution and ignore basic rights for the sake of winning the war. Habeas corpus only matters, Lincoln says, up to the point it becomes an impediment to the persistence of the government that guarantees its citizens habeas corpus. In 1861, he writes,

[Southern] sympathizers pervaded all departments of the Government and nearly all communities of the people. From this material, under cover of 'liberty of speech,' 'liberty of the press,' and 'habeas corpus,' they hoped to keep on foot among us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause in a thousand ways. They knew that in times such as they were inaugurating, by the Constitution itself, the 'habeas corpus' might be suspended; but they also knew they had friends who would make a question as to who was to suspend it; meanwhile, their spies and others might remain at large to help their cause. Or, if, as has happened, the Executive should suspend the writ, without ruinous waste of time, instances of arresting innocent persons might occur, as are always likely to occur in such cases; and then a clamour could be raised in regard to this, which might be, at least, of some service to the insurgent cause. It needed no very keen perception to discover this part of the enemy's programme, so soon as, by open hostilities, their machinery was fairly put in motion. Yet, thoroughly imbued with a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals, I was slow to adopt the strong measures which by degrees I had been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the Constitution, and as indispensible to the public safety."

Read it like Lincoln has to be read -- with an eye to the key phrase, which likely will be a subtle one: "... strong measures which by degrees I had been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the Constitution ..." If you want an image what Lincoln would have done had he, not Bush, been president at 9/11, here's a clue:

Of how little value the constitutional provisions I have quoted will be rendered, if arrests shall never be made until defined crimes shall have been committed, may be illustrated by a few notable examples. Gen. John C. Breckenridge, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, Gen. John B. Magruder, Gen. William B. Preston, Gen. Simon B. Buckner, and Commodore Franklin Buchanan, now occupying the very highest places in the Rebel war service, were all within the power of the Government since the Rebellion began, and were nearly as well known to be traitors then as now. Unquestionably if we had seized and held them, the insurgent cause would be much weaker. But no one of them had then committed any crime defined in the law. Every one of them, if arrested, would have been discharged on habeas corpus were the writ allowed to operate. In view of these and similar cases, I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.

And here's another:

Mr. Vallandigham avows his hostility to the war on the part of the Union; and his arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it. He was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the administration, or the personal interests of the commanding general; but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence, and vigor of which, the life of the nation depends. He was warring upon the military; and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands upon him ....

Long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death. The case requires, and the law and the constitution, sanction this punishment. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feeling, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy.

And the Great Emancipator shows his political skill, in a way Bush and Cheney can only envy and never hope to match, in pulling the rug out from under the Democratic opposition without stepping down from his own high ground:

In giving the resolutions that earnest consideration which you request of me, I can not overlook the fact that the meeting speak as "Democrats." Nor can I, with full respect for their known intelligence, and the fairly presumed deliberation with which they prepared their resolutions, be permitted to suppose that this occurred by accident, or in any way other than that they preferred to designate themselves "democrats" rather than "American citizens." In this time of national peril I would have preferred to meet you upon a level one step higher than any party platform; because I am sure that from such more elevated position, we could do better battle for the country we all love, than we possibly can from those lower ones, where from the force of habit, the prejudices of the past, and selfish hopes of the future, we are sure to expend much of our ingenuity and strength, in finding fault with, and aiming blows at each other. But since you have denied me this, I will yet be thankful, for the country’s sake, that not all democrats have done so.

Truly, it's one of the great pieces of political writing in American history -- and one of the most nefarious.

If you're looking for a quote upholding civil liberties and freedom in a time of desperate war, a better choice than Lincoln would be Supreme Court Justice Robert C. Grier, who presided over the circuit that heard the case of the West Chester "Jeffersonian's" publisher. He charged the jury that there was no justification for the seizure, and that the district attorney had no power to issue a writ ordering the seizure. The power to issue writs, he told them, belongs to the courts alone.

No one can pretend that our law was changed by the mere fact of the rebellion. The very purpose of law is to set a rule that may remain fixed and immovable among the disturbances of society, and that shall be the standard of judging them. ... If it yielded to excitements it would be judged by them, instead of being their judge.

While admitting neither Churchill nor Lincoln was perfect in his adherence to these principles, Sullivan nonetheless finds them superior to our current crop of leaders.

If Lincoln could say this in the middle of the bloodiest conflict in American history, why cannot Bush and Blair say it today?

He's right; the modern leaders lack the eloquence of their forebears. But Lincoln said a great many things during that conflict.