Founding Virtue

To the list of those labeled as “social justice conservatives” by Brion McClanahan (“Reinventing Reconstruction,” February 2020) you can add the names of the Founding Fathers. Referring to them, Alexander Stephens (Vice-President of the Confederacy and author of the infamous “Cornerstone Speech”) wrote, “The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with.”

Lincoln and the Republicans stood with the Founders. Stephens went on to describe what the Confederacy stood for. “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” 

No appeal to Burke’s “ancient constitutions” can mask the inherent evil of this particular “traditional order” and this peculiar “well-constructed institution.”

Was Reconstruction perfect? Of course not, but by adopting the Reconstruction Amendments the “radical” Republicans reformed both the Constitution and the nation—and thank God for it! Who today would object to the abolishment of slavery, would deny citizenship and equal protection of the law to the freedmen, or deny them the right to vote on account of their race or color? The unalienable human right of liberty and the basic civil rights of equal justice under the law and the franchise, regardless of one’s color, are principles that any true conservative can support.

—Keith Burtner

Dallas, Texas

 

Prof. McClanahan replies:

My piece on “Reinventing Reconstruction” seemed to touch a nerve with the “social justice conservative” population. Good. Mr. Burtner’s letter exemplifies the growing intellectual disconnect between modern American conservatism and its ancient roots and the symbiotic relationship between these modern “conservatives” and their radical leftist cohorts.

I should emphasize that Mr. Burtner should be pitied rather than ridiculed. He has been duped by a cadre of pseudo-intellectual talking heads on Fox News, bombarded with worthless drivel from neoconservative writers infatuated with proving that the Republican Party has always stood on the right side of the social justice crusade, and conned by conservative “historians” who attempt to show that the founding generation would have all been good Lincoln-loving Republicans had they lived until 1861.

Mr. Burtner seems to believe that the Founding Fathers would have supported the same level of political machinations and revolutionary policies the 1860s Republican Party used during Reconstruction. These are the Founding Fathers who left slavery intact in every state in the Union when drafting and ratifying both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, who chafed at federal involvement in election laws and suffrage requirements, who to a man considered blacks to be an inferior population, and who despised abolitionist agitation (even John Adams thought immediate abolition would “produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice” of slavery). The idea that they would have approved of the Radical Republican agenda during Reconstruction would be laughable, were it not so sad. 

Did some members of the founding generation oppose slavery? Certainly, but none would have suggested that the central government was anything other than the “white man’s government” or that blacks should be granted universal citizenship. There was no difference between the Confederate Constitution of 1861 and the United States Constitution of 1787 on this issue. 

We can consider these positions abhorrent today, but let us not engage in the same righteous cause the myth-making Lincoln codified in the Gettysburg Address.

And what about those Reconstruction Amendments Mr. Burtner champions? I never mentioned them in my Chronicles piece so this is a bit of a straw man argument. No one would argue the 13th Amendment wasn’t beneficial for the U.S. Even most Southerners conceded this point after the War. Mr. Burtner also praises the 14th Amendment, the same amendment the communist historian Eric Foner has suggested fundamentally transformed America. What is “conservative” about that amendment? Nothing. It has been used as the legal gateway for every centralized social engineering project in the U.S., from same-sex marriage to transgender bathroom “equality.” 

The feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton gushed over the Reconstruction Amendments because they led to a “reconsideration of the principles of our government and the natural rights of man.” 

In other words, they recreated America. 

By using the words and deeds of the Radical Republicans of the 1860s to defend what passes for American conservatism today, would-be conservatives concede the field to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both would agree with the Radical Republican Henry Wilson that government should seek “equality in the broadest and most comprehensive democratic sense.”

That might be Republican, but it sure isn’t conservative.