A marvelous article by Prof. Stoner! I'm putting it on my reading list for my course in modern political thought. Stoner is both accurate and concise, and students can benefit from his presentation.
Conservatives, however, may have some difficulty with his final comments on American slavery and the constitutional amendments that followed it. Many conservatives regard it as an enormous violation of the Constitution that these amendments were passed at all, believing them to be the result of force and not law. Slavery is indeed not to be found in the common law, but the Old South's traditions were permeated by it, and so its destruction by Lincoln, a liberal statist who imagined he was a conservative, can hardly be an occasion for celebration.
