In Abraham's bosom - tribute to political historian Mel Bradford

National Review, April 12, 1993 by Harry V. Jaffa

No one-outside the immediate circle of his family and close friends--will miss Mel Bradford more than I. His opinions on Lincoln, the Civil War, the Declaration of Independence, equality, and slavery were so diametrically opposite to mine that they were virtually mirror images of each other. We were, more than any of our contemporaries, I think, so convinced that the conflict that centered on the figure of Abraham Lincoln was the central conflict in American, perhaps even in world, history that we came to constitute a fellowship of our own.

In his loyalty to the Old South--to the South of which he knew from what he regarded as the only ultimately reliable authority, namely "our fathers," Mel was perfectly intransigent. He believed in tradition in the absolute sense in which the fundamental ordering of society, and above all its convictions on the ultimately important things--such as God and the universe--were transmitted by the family. Of course, this meant not any families, but the old families, such as constituted the senatorial class in ancient republican Rome, the ones who ruled by divine right because their family gods were the gods of the city. Once in a long private conversation, I pointed out to him that the only regime that was purely patriarchal-- more so even than that of the Roman republic--was that of ancient Israel. This regime alone, in the form of Orthodox Judaism, had survived into the modern world. "You ought to be a Jew, Mel,"I said.

"Maybe you're right, Harry, maybe you're right," he replied, in his long squeaky Texas drawl.

Of course, Mel couldn't become a Jew, because it was not his inherited religion. That, however, illustrated the difficulty with "pure" traditionalism in a Judaeo-Christian framework. When Jesus asked: "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" (Matthew 12:48) he transformed the family of pure tradition into one constituted, not by blood, but by faith. Curiously, this is exactly what Abraham Lincoln did within the American experience.

We have besides these men--descended by blood from our ancestors .... perhaps half our people who are not descended [from them] ... German, Irish, French,. and Scandinavian ... If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none . . . but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are.

Just as Jesus bridged the gap between the God of Israel and Mel Bradford's ancestors, who were not descended from the Fathers who stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai, so Lincoln bridged the gap between the Revolutionary Fathers and my ancestors. When Lincoln began the Gettysburg Address by invoking "our fathers who brought forth this nation" he confirmed our community as a sacramental union of "one nation, under God."

Our Separate Fathers

Mel Bradford could never accept this view of Lincoln, or of the Declaration as the source of our authentic tradition. Yet in a curious way we shared a faith in "our fathers"--both Biblical and American--as the source of authority and tradition. Because of that shared faith, we agreed very much in our post-bellum convictions. We shared a hatred of Communism abroad and socialism at home. We both loathed "race-based remedies." We felt much the same way about the liberal statism that would replace the family and its extension in neighborhood communities, neighborhood schools, neighborhood churches and synagogues, and voluntary charitable organizations. In fact, we shared a conviction concerning states' rights, even though Mel, following John C. Calhoun, could not see the connection that I (and Abraham Lincoln) saw between states' and natural rights.

Above all, we shared a hatred for that acid of modernity, moral relativism, which lay at the heart of the welfare state, and which was dissolving the very basis of our civilization. In 1977 I presented a paper on Measure for Measure at a Shakespeare conference at the University of Dallas. It was entitled "Chastity as a Political Principle," and in it I set out what I believed to be Shakespeare's finding of moral laxity in private life as the basis for the disintegration of public morality. Shakespeare's play is a drama of the restoration of the family of republican Rome--as is symbolized in part by the silent presence of old Romans at the end. Mel was most enthusiastic at this presentation; both from a literary and a philosophic perspective, he felt it represented complete agreement as to what we understood conservatism to be.

Joining Lincoln's Party

It was accordingly not surprising that Mel called on me when he decided in 1981 to become a candidate for the chairmanship for the National Endowment of the Humanities.