The Political Inquirer

Victors always write history. We believe, without question, that the United States was correct in its war against Britain, against Mexico, against Spain, and against Germany in World Wars I and II. While most people do not feel very passionate about the major wars I just listed (WWII aside), there is one in American history that the propaganda machine has went to work on full-speed-ahead over the last century. It is the War Between The States, or more aptly named by the propagandists, the Civil War.

NAMING THE WAR

First, let us get the correct definition of the war out of the way. No matter if you agree with the Union or the Confederacy, the war was by no means a “Civil War”. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a “civil war” as:

A war between factions or regions of the same country.

It should be noted that post-secession, the Confederate States of America was not part of the same country as the United States of America. There was not a “Civil War”–two factions were not fighting for control of the same territory. Had the South been intent on controlling the North, and vice versa, it could then be called a civil war. So, whatever you think of the Civil War, it must be called by another (obviously biased) name–The War for Southern Independence (Southern), The Prevention of Southern Secession (Northern), the War Between the States (More neutral). Whatever your name for it, it must not be called a civil war–it is an incorrect term.

Let it be known that the reason it was called the “Civil War” was because it suits the story of the winner. The North’s historians and reporters saw the South as “rebels” and “traitors”, not as men forming their own, independent country. This use of words puts the Confederacy in a bad light–if it is framed almost any other way, the South almost looks justified.

THE RIGHT OF SECESSION

The second item on the agenda is to establish the rights of secession for not only the Southern states, but the Northern ones as well. It is well documented that the Northern states once contemplated secession because they disagreed so strongly with the War of 1812. Most of the Northern states refused to send militia units to help in this war. The State of Connecticut declared in a resolution that,

But it must not be forgotten, that the State of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT State; that the United States are a confederacy of States; that we are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic. The Governor of this State is under a high and solemn obligation, “to maintain the lawful rights and privileges thereof, as a sovereign, free and independent State,” as he is “to support the Constitution of the United States,” and the obligation to support the latter imposes an additional obligation to support the former. The building cannot stand, if the pillars upon which it rests, are impaired or destroyed.

The Northern states were well aware of their ability to secede and to refuse to respond to the federal government. It was, after all, a federation, not a national government. The Union was a voluntary association of free and independent states. Thomas Jefferson said in his first inaugural address (1801),

“If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Thomas Jefferson was the standardbearer of Western liberalism, the United States, and within our own country, the right of the sovereign states. As Thomas J. DiLorenzo said,

Jefferson and James Madison were the authors of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 which held that “where powers were assumed by the national government which had not been granted by the states, nullification is the rightful remedy,” and that every state has a right to “nullify of its own authority all assumptions of power by others. . .” Nullification of unconstitutional federal actions was a means of effectively seceding.

Abraham Lincoln himself didn’t seem to have much of a problem with secession itself. If we recall, he was perfectly content with the secession of West Virginia from the State of Virginia. I also support any state’s right to secede. The powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed, not from any other source. If a group of people believes that their government is unjust, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security”, to quote Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

The story of secession being legal, right, and a legitimate means to an end has its roots all throughout American history. DiLorenzo notes that,

What Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and others were taught about secession at West Point was that to deny a state the right of secession “would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed.”

Secession is an American idea. We were born out of secession. The Confederacy was simply following the ideas of the Founders by seceding from the United States.

You might be wondering where the discussion on slavery is at this point since I have not mentioned it at all. It will be mentioned further down.

ECONOMICS, TARIFFS, AND FREE TRADE

We come to the real reason Lincoln wanted to invade the Union: to stop the South from becoming a free trade country.

Looking into Lincoln’s past, it is well documented that he was a firm believer in the “American System” that Henry Clay devised and found its roots in Alexander Hamilton’s political and economic beliefs. Lincoln only won the Republican nomination, and the presidency, because of the support he gained by former Whigs who wanted to make a high-tariff-supporting man the president.

The U.S. House of Representatives had passed the Morrill tariff in the 1859-1860 session, and the Senate passed it on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. President James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian who owed much of his own political success to Pennsylvania protectionists, signed it into law. The bill immediately raised the average tariff rate from about 15 percent (according to Frank Taussig in Tariff History of the United States) to 37.5 percent, but with a greatly expanded list of covered items. The tax burden would about triple. Soon thereafter, a second tariff increase would increase the average rate to 47.06 percent…

The tariff was a huge part of the “American System“. The South wanted no part of this high tariff plan because they received the lion’s share of the tax burden. Murray Rothbard wrote that,

One of the central grievances of the South . . . was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners whose major income came from exporting cotton abroad. The tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for such goods, and threatened to cut down Southern exports (in “Two Just Wars: 1776 and 1861″ in John Denson, ed., The Costs of War).

There are books and articles by the dozen out on the Internet on why Lincoln believed that tariffs were good economic policy, especially when the North received tax funds and grants while the South payed for them. Nearly 80 percent of the taxes that came in through tariffs were payed by Southerners, not by the North, due to the way the economic system was set up. When the South decided to secede, it was determined to have the lowest tariffs in the entire world. A free trade zone, so to speak. It was in the interests of Northern businessmen (who helped Lincoln gain power) to push for war. With a free trade competitor in the South, the Northern markets would have had to be competitive, no longer having their de facto government monopolies and cartels.

To sum up this point, Lincoln went to war with the South not to free slaves, but to serve the interests of mercantilism–big businesses that were against free trade because it would have forced them into competition. With free trade in the South, there would have been an industrial revolution. After Reconstruction, it took almost a hundred years before the South’s economy was restored to the point that it was in 1860, and only then was industrialization possible.

The economic factors at work in the war were great–the biggest reason, obviously–but there is enough information to last for an entire book on the subject. I recommend this article for a start.

SLAVERY

The most politically correct topic in American history to this day is slavery. Abraham Lincoln is the one that made such a long lasting topic of the issue, though, when he decided to involve slavery in the war effort. History has shown through letters, speeches, and actions that President Lincoln was a racist who did not want to free the slaves, mainly because he did not want Western and Northern lands to have black people in them. Slavery was to be contained to the South so that blacks would only live there and nowhere else. Lincoln said on two different occasions,

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”

The War Between The States was never about slavery until Lincoln decided to make it a factor two years into the war. A little discussed point: had the South stayed in the Union or had it rejoined within the first two years, slavery would not have been abolished. As a matter of fact, the Republican Congress and President Lincoln pushed a new amendment through (that was never ratified by the Northern states) that would have prevented the Federal government from ever involving itself in the issue of slavery. It read:

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

The war, for the first two years, was never about slavery. As the people of the North began to slack off in supporting what seemed like a pointless, endless war, Lincoln had to find some way to invigorate them into fighting. That way was slavery. The “great emancipator” was a known racist and white supremacist who only used freeing the slaves as a political tool to keep his war going for Northern white businessmen. Lincoln went so far to even blame black people for the war (though it was entirely about tariffs and economic motivations), declaring that “But for your race among us there could not be a war, although many men on either side do not care for you one way or another.“

I could go on and on about how Lincoln was a racist, but I do not believe that will change many people’s opinions about the man. After all, didn’t Lincoln do a huge service for the black people of America by freeing them? Maybe the war was not right, maybe Lincoln was a bit of a tyrant who suspended habeus corpus and the First Amendment more than any other president, as well as countless other crimes, but in the end we have to admit that it was justified because blacks were able to gain their freedom. Many people defend this idea, but I do not, and I will explain why.

WOULD SLAVERY HAVE CONTINUED TO EXIST?

There are several points to be made for why the war cannot be justified regardless of black people getting their freedom. Sure, it is a good thing that they are now free and treated like people instead of non-equals, but classic liberalism was on its way to eliminating slavery. Industrialized nations cannot have a slavery system because free labor is not only cheaper, but more efficient in the long run. There were many arguments in the abolitionist movement about slaves, some saying that the slaves needed to be free because they have a right to be, but those in the South (and in the North) would argue that giving the slaves their freedom would cause problems because they “were not ready for it”. Ludwig von Mises showed there was only one way to combat this, saying that

For against this objection in favor of slavery there is only one argument that can and did refute all others-namely, that free labor is incomparably more productive than slave labor. The slave has no interest in exerting himself fully. He works only as much and as zealously as is necessary to escape the punishment attaching to failure to perform the minimum. The free worker, on the other hand, knows that the more his labor accomplishes, the more he will be paid. He exerts himself to the full in order to raise his income.

An excuse given by the Cult of Lincoln is that slavery would have existed for another ten, twenty, probably fifty years. Some even say if the Confederacy had stayed in existence there would still be slavery. I disagree, As a free trade zone, the South would quickly have become the most industrialized nation in the world. Slavery could not exist in such a system–it was already starting to be an expensive enterprise even in 1860 with the Irish immigrants making hired labor cheaper.

Every society in the Western world has eliminated slavery through compensation and law–not through a war that caused over 600,000 dead American men, the raping of countless thousands of women, and the destruction of a once prosperous economy that kept whites and blacks alike in a dirt poor condition for almost a century. I argue that slavery could have been ended peacefully whether it was in the Union or in the Confederacy and that modern capitalism would have replaced it within probably ten years at the maximum. No 600,000 men dead, no death, no economic plundering, and no horrible race relations that we still see the effects of to this day.

BUT THE WAR FREED THE SLAVES. THE ENDS JUSTIFIED THE MEANS, CORRECT?

Again I disagree that the ends justified the means in this situation. What must be understood is that the North, in fighting the South’s right of secession, was in fact an act of enslavement to the whites and blacks of the South. Let us take a few examples that Walter Block has pointed out:

1. One argument is that if the South was unjustified in seceding from the North (since the South was a slave-holding society), then the same holds for the 13 colonies that broke away from England in 1776, since slavery was legal in virtually every state at that time. If the Confederate states are not allowed to secede because they would have “kidnapped victims” (slaves), then the same can be said for the United States leaving the authority of the British empire. Few people will try to say the American Revolution was unjust, but if they make the argument that the South had to be invaded because they had slaves, then the American Revolution was also unjust. It is only consistent to hold this position. If the North were morally justified to keep the South in the Union because of slavery, then the same applies to the United Kingdom vs. the United States. One must admit the American Revolution was also unjust.

2. Another point is that if the South was unjustified in leaving the North, then it would have been wrong for the North to leave the South, too. If the Confederate states had slaves in 1861, then so did the Union. New Englanders had long wanted to secede from the Union on abolitionist reasons—they wanted no part of sharing a country with slave holders. However, many Northerners also owned slaves—the South couldn’t possibly let the North leave against its will, if you hold to the theory that Lincoln’s war was, in the end and for all its wrongs, justified.

3. The third point is that the North (which held slaves in 1863 and 1864) comes along, attempting to stop slavery in the South with “unclean hands”. That is, the North was not on a higher moral position to free slaves when they themselves had not freed theirs. However, since Lincoln coerced one section of the country that wanted to be free from the yoke of the other against its will violates the law of free association. Those in the South wished to go their own way, but Lincoln prevented them from doing so. In essence, the entire Civil War showed a Northern hypocrisy: the enslavement of one group of people to free another group. However, the objection made here will not be whether the North acted logically and consistently, but rather that they were just in the end by freeing the slaves.

Now it’s time to bring this to a conclusion. Walter Block describes the “Lincoln was justified” position (one taken by Tibor Machan in his essay). Block writes,

But this brings us to a more basic question: would a hypothetical North, completely innocent of any slave holding itself, be justified on libertarian grounds, in opposing by force the attempted secession of the South, on the grounds that the latter is a slave owning society? (We are now also asking the question, assume, arguendo, that the U.K. did not own slaves in 1776; would they have been warranted in taking on the role they actually did in the Revolutionary War?) Machan argues in the affirmative, I in the negative.

At first blush, my opponent in this debate has a strong case. Suppose the following: a thief breaks into a grocery store, robs it, and then, when he is surrounded by the police, grabs a hostage. Whereupon he makes the following statement: “I hereby secede from your society; since you are all libertarians, you must allow this. Therefore, I am walking out of this store, with my hostage in tow, and none of you have the right to stop me, or to save my victim, based upon your own principles.” If this indeed is the position of the South, then the North was completely justified in not only fighting its attempted secession, but in actually winning the war. For, surely, the police need do no such thing as obey the robber-kidnapper in his curious demand.

This is the logical position that “ends justify the means” proponents must take. There is, however, a rebuttal to this. Block continues,

But a moment’s reflection will show a disanalogy between our hypothetical robber, and the South. For the libertarian police could reply, “Sure, we’ll allow you to secede; you are now a sovereign country. However, we hereby declare war on you, first, to fulfill our contractual obligation with your hostage, to free him from your unjustified kidnapping, and, second, to punish you for your past robbery as well as this bout of unjustified imprisonment of this victim.”

To refuse to allow secession is a violation of the law of free association. As Block put it, some people are “Machan is so concerned with ante bellum slavery, he allows this to blind him to the fact that this “curious institution” is merely an aspect of the denigration of the law of free association.” The South was guilty of enslaving black people. This is immoral and wrong. But Northerners added another sin to the list of wrongs by refusing to let the Southerners secede, in essence, putting the South into slavery.

To repeat: slavery is but the most egregious form of denigration of the rights of free association. But there are other, lesser versions, such as refusal to recognize the natural right of secession.

I hate to quote Water Block’s essay so much, but for the discussion he makes the point so eloquently that I see no other way to put it:

The analogy between the South and the kidnapper-robber would hold true if and only if every single white resident of this territory was guilty of slave holding, and every single non-white resident was a slave. Then and only then would the North be justified, not in refusing the South secession, but in invading them, to get them to free their slaves. But the North would still not be warranted to “save the Union,” against the express wishes of the Southerners (after they were duly punished).

Another difficulty with the Machan position is that slavery is not the only crime. If the North is entitled to violate the secession rights of the South because the latter committed the crime of slavery, then, too, they are justified in taking this coercive position against them for many other things as well. For example, suppose a Southerner stole (or was accused of stealing) a Northerner’s cow. Then, based on this perspective, the North would again be warranted to stop by force the departure of the South. Such a theory might well be entitled, “Secession in theory, captivity in practice.”

To this day we see the effects of the Lincoln’s War. Race relations have been damaged for over a hundred years (the media still talks about it with candidates like Barack Obama and issues like Don Imus). The Federal government no longer was a federated Republic, but became a national government that is supreme over the States. The law of voluntary association was killed, and Jeffersonian principles were demolished, all in the name of “saving the Union”. Lincoln did not care about the slaves–if the Union could have been “saved” and the slaves still in bondage, this was 100 percent a-okay with Lincoln. If the Union and the North had truly cared about slaves, the proper response would have been to tell the South “free your slaves and you may depart in peace”. But there was no such statement made.

The War Between The States was the destruction of the principles of the American Revolution and the right to self-government. Lincoln’s war may have “freed the slaves” in the end, but at the expense of essentially enslaving the South (white and black) for decades. To some extent, many black people in inner cities are still “slaves” to the Federal government.

Lord Acton, the great historian of liberty, is often remembered for his quote that “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. He also wrote a letter to General Robert E. Lee after the Civil War, saying that,

I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.

Lincoln and his war destroyed the America that Adams, Jefferson, and Washington created. It became the America of Lincoln, FDR, and George W. Bush, where government power may run unchecked and mankind is subject to the will of the overlords who rule us. Without the Civil War, slavery would have been ended peacefully. The United States would never have gotten involved in World War I, there would not have been a World War II, and the entire world would be better for it.

Lysander Spooner, one of the greatest abolitionists of the pre-war period, was a Northern man who wanted to try to free the slaves by every method possible. He wrote articles on the unconstitutionality of the war, the evils of slavery, and encouraged slaves to gain weapons and win their freedom by force. He also believed that the war ended in the essential murder of 600,000 Americans, both North and South, for no reason. Tom DiLorenzo writes,

Spooner believed Abraham Lincoln was speaking the truth when he said that whatever he did with regard to slavery was not because of any sympathy for the slaves, but to secure his goal of crushing the secessionists. And, Spooner would add, to then use the apparatus of the U.S. state to politically dominate and financially plunder the South. They did not abolish slavery “as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only as ‘a war measure,’ and because they wanted his assistance . . . in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery . . .”(p. 119).

If the Northern regime really wanted only to abolish slavery, Spooner argued, then they could have followed the road to emancipation taken by all other nations on earth in the nineteenth century and ended it peacefully through compensated emancipation and by declaring slavery to be unconstitutional. The war was unnecessary to end slavery, said Spooner.

In the end, the United States Federal Government became a national one. States essentially ceased to exist as anything more than agents of the Federal Government. Almost half a million men were killed ruthlessly, their property destroyed, women and children raped and murdered by the Union army all at the will of a few businessmen and Lincoln’s own agenda.

The slaves were freed, sure, but at what price? Many black people who were harmed by the KKK and other racists might never have been had slavery been ended peacefully. Lynchings might not have become a term we still think of today when remembering the post-war Southern society. There might never have been State-enforced segregation (thanks to the Union Supreme Court), no Selma march, and no Civil Rights Act of 1964, because black people would have been treated as equals and as real people. Instead, Southerners who were racist often took out their bitterness against the North on the black people of the South. The motivation for their crimes are traced back to the Northern War of Aggression.

The Lincolnian Civil War cannot be justified in any possible way. Slavery was being eliminated by free competition of labor. The Federal Government enforced slavery for almost a hundred years before it suddenly decided to “free the slaves”, and had the South stayed in the Union, slavery might have went on for another 40 or 50 before anything was done about it. The South committed the crime of slavery, but the North committed a bigger sin by enslaving an entire nation, black and white, and destroying the Lockean tradition of secession.

Secession is indeed part and parcel of American heritage and our historical experience. Secession does not have to result in war. The ultimate decision as to whether war will result from an act of secession rest with those that wish to retain union and force others to remain in their club. This very notion of forcing others to do things against their will seems the most undemocratic idea of all.

-The Secessionist, No. 3