I believe an understanding of the Civil War has great relevance to the future of liberty in America.
It may be the most misunderstood of all American wars. And so much of what we lament today -- government intrusions on civil liberties, unlimited taxation, corporate welfare, disregarding of the Constitution, funny money -- date back to programs started during the Civil War.
Although slavery was an ever-present political issue in the early 1800s, it wasn't the immediate cause of the war. In fact, Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address vowed that he wouldn't interfere with slavery. You can read his speech at http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm
He also said the North wouldn't invade the South unless necessary to collect taxes.
Before the war, the main concern about slavery was whether new states and territories would come into the Union as free states or slave states. This affected the balance of power in Congress, and both Northerners and Southerners worried that the other region might dominate Congress.
Taxes
Why then was the Civil War fought?
As with most wars, there's no single answer. But the predominant cause was taxation.
Before his election, Lincoln had promoted very high tariffs (federal taxes on foreign imports), using the receipts to build railroads, canals, roads, and other federal pork-barrel projects.
The tariffs protected Northern manufacturers from foreign competition, and were paid mostly by the non-manufacturing South, while most of the proposed boondoggles were to be built in the North. Thus the South was being forced to subsidize Northern corporate welfare.
Secession
When Lincoln was elected, South Carolina saw a grim future ahead and seceded. Other Southern states quickly followed suit. No declaration of secession gave slavery as the reason.
Lincoln asserted that no state had a right to secede from the Union -- even though several geographical regions had considered secession before. Few people thought the Union couldn't survive if some states decided to leave.
Upon seceding, the Confederates took over all federal forts and other facilities in the South, with no opposition from Lincoln. The last remaining federal facilities were Fort Pickens in Florida and Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln at first promised to let the South have Fort Sumter, but then tried to reinforce it. The South moved to confiscate it -- shelling the Fort for many hours. (No one was killed or even seriously injured.)
Why was Fort Sumter important? Because it was a major tariff-collecting facility in the harbor at Charleston. So long as the Union controlled it, the South would still have to pay Lincoln's oppressive tariffs.
Although there had been only scattered Northern opposition to the secessions, the shelling of Fort Sumter (like the bombing of Pearl Harbor almost a century later) incited many Northerners to call for war against the South. The South's seizure of Fort Sumter caused many Northerners to notice that the South would no longer be subsidizing Northern manufacturing.
As the war began, the sole issue was restoration of the Union -- not
ending slavery. Only in 1863 did the Emancipation Proclamation go into
effect, and it didn't actually free a single slave -- just like so many
laws today that don't actually perform the purpose for which they were
promoted. The Proclamation is at
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/emancipate.htm
The Damage
The Lincoln Presidency imposed a police state upon America -- North and South. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with him, suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned civilians without trials, and went to war -- all without Congressional authority.
Using war as an excuse, he increased government dramatically -- just as future Presidents would do. He rewarded his political friends with pork-barrel projects, flooded the country with paper money, established a national banking system to finance a large federal debt, and imposed the first income tax. He also destroyed the balance between the executive and Congressional branches, and between the federal government and the states.
He set in motion many precedents we suffer from today. That's why it's important to understand the Civil War for what it was, not what the mythmakers want it to be.
Alternatives
Was slavery an evil? Of course.
Is it a blessing that it ended? Of course.
Was it necessary for 140,414 people to die in order to end slavery? Definitely not. The U.S. was the only western country that ended slavery through violence -- outside of Haiti (where it ended through a slave revolt). During the 19th century dozens of nations ended slavery peaceably.
What Was Lincoln?
Was Lincoln opposed to slavery? Yes, he became an abolitionist in the mid-1850s, although he said he didn't know how slavery could be ended.
Lincoln's fans have portrayed him as the Great Emancipator, Honest Abe, who with great courage and single-minded determination fought a Civil War to free the slaves. Many of his detractors have tried to show that he was actually a racist.
I think it's important to understand that, more than anything else, he was a politician. Throughout his career he shaded the truth for political advantage, he played both sides against the middle, he lied about his opponents, and he used government force to get what he wanted. Like so many politicians, he continually uttered platitudes about liberty while doing everything in his power to curtail it.
His idolaters applaud him for being a dictatorial politician, saying this was precisely what America needed in 1861. No historian believes he acted within the Constitution.
Importance of Studying the Civil War
I believe the study of the origins and conduct of the Civil War is an important part of a libertarian education.
Although the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Great Society each caused government growth to accelerate, only the Civil War caused a complete break with the past. It transformed a federation of states into a national government. It introduced the elements of big government that later movements would build on. And it set in motion the disregard for the Constitution that's taken for granted today.
You'll also find parallels between the Civil War and today's War on Terrorism.
Lincoln and the Civil War are fascinating subjects. I've read numerous books about them, and I can highly recommend two recent books that provide an excellent introduction.
Jeffrey Hummel's book "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" (published
in 1996) and Thomas
DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln" (2002) are both well-documented and
very well-written. You'll find reading either of them (or both) to be an
adventure, rather than a task.
Hummel's book is longer, more complete, and perhaps more balanced. DiLorenzo's is faster reading. Both are well worth their inexpensive prices.
We're fortunate that Laissez Faire Books carries an enormous assortment
of pro-liberty titles, and makes it easy to order books online. You can
view the site at
www.lfb.org/index.cfm?aid=10432.
Hummel's book is only $14.95, and you can get more information about
it at
www.lfb.org/product.cfm?op=view&pid=HS7743&aid=10432.
DiLorenzo's book is only $17.50, and is at
www.lfb.org/product.cfm?op=view&pid=HS8594&aid=10432.
(NOTE: These links are long and you may need to cut and paste them into your browser.)
Happy reading!
Harry Browne is Director of Public Policy at American Liberty Foundation. His usual Liberty & Peace Commentary appears on LibertyWire each Friday.
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The Mythical Lincoln
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
February 12, 2002
Every February 12 Americans think they are celebrating Lincoln’s birthday. But what they are really celebrating is the birth of the Leviathan state that Lincoln, more than anyone else, is responsible for bringing about. No wonder federal politicos have made his birth date a national holiday, engraved his face is on Mount Rushmore, built a Venus-like statue of him in Washington, D.C., and put his mugshot on the five dollar bill.
More than 130 years of government propaganda has hidden this fact from the American people by creating a Mythical Lincoln that never existed. Take, for instance, the fact that everyone supposedly knows – that Lincoln was an abolitionist. This would be a surprise to the preeminent Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, who in his 1961 book, Lincoln Reconsidered, wrote that "Lincoln was not an abolitionist." And he wasn’t. He was glad to accept on behalf of the Republican Party any votes from abolitionists, but real abolitionists despised him. William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent of all abolitionists, concluded that Lincoln "had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins."
Garrison knew Lincoln well. He knew that Lincoln stated over and over again for his entire adult life that he did not believe in social or political equality of the races, he opposed inter-racial marriage, supported the Illinois constitution’s prohibition of immigration of blacks into the state, once defended in court a slaveowner seeking to retrieve his runaway slaves but never defended a runaway, and that he was a lifelong advocate of colonization – of sending every last black person in the U.S. to Africa, Haiti, or central America – anywhere but in the U.S.
Garrison and other abolitionists were also keenly aware that the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed no one since it specifically exempted all the areas that at the time were occupied by federal armies. That is, all areas where slaves could actually have been freed.
Historians have portrayed the Mythical Lincoln as a man who brooded for decades over how he could someday free the slaves. Nothing could be more absurd. According to Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln’s Collected Works, Lincoln never even mentioned slavery in a speech until 1854, and even then, says Basler, he was not sincere.
When Lincoln first entered state politics in 1832 he announced that he was doing so for three reasons: To help enact the Whig Party agenda of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare subsidies for railroad and canal-building corporations ("internal improvements"), and a government monopolization of the nation’s money supply. "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance," he declared: "I am in favor of a national bank ... the internal improvements system, and a high protective tariff." He was a devoted mercantilist, and remained so for his entire political life. He was single-mindedly devoted to Henry Clay and his political agenda (mentioned above), which Clay called "The American System."
Lincoln once announced that his career ambition was not to free the slaves but to become "the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois." DeWitt Clinton was the governor of New York in the early nineteenth century who is credited with having introduced the spoils system to America and supervising the building of the Erie Canal (which became defunct in a mere ten years because of the invention of the railroad).
Lincoln is also portrayed as a champion of the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, especially the statement that "all men are created equal." Political scientist Harry Jaffa has written an entire book along this theme. But this is hard to square with his statement during the Lincoln-Douglas debates that "I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true. But I must admit I never saw the Siamese Twins, and therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever saw a proof of this sage aphorism." So, with the possible exception of Siamese twins, Lincoln did not believe that any two men were ever created equal.
Moreover, Lincoln destroyed the most important principle of the Declaration – the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Southerners no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. in 1860, and Lincoln put an end to that idea by having his armies slaughter 300,000 of them, including one out of every four white males between 20 and 40. Standardizing for today’s population, that would be the equivalent of around 3 million American deaths, or roughly 60 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.
As H.L. Mencken said of the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln absurdly claimed that Northern soldiers were fighting for the cause of self determination ("that government of the people ... should not perish ...") "It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into the battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision of the rest of the country."
Another Lincoln myth was that he "saved the Constitution." But this claim is an outrage considering that Lincoln acted like a dictator for the duration of his administration and showed nothing but bitter contempt for the Constitution. Even Lincoln’s idolaters, like historian Clinton Rossiter, author of the book, Constitutional Dictatorship, referred to him as a "great dictator" who had an "amazing disregard for the Constitution ... that was considered by nobody as legal."
The Dictator Lincoln invaded the South without the consent of Congress, as called for in the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern anti-war protesters, including hundreds of newspaper editors and owners; censored all newspaper and telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created three new states without the consent of the citizens of those states in order to artificially inflate the Republican Party’s electoral vote; ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections to assure Republican Party victories; deported Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham for opposing his domestic policies (especially protectionist tariffs and income taxation) on the floor of the House of Representatives; confiscated private property, including firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as well.
As Dean Sprague correctly pointed out in Freedom Under Lincoln, all of these dictatorial acts were bad enough, but their real, long-term effect was to "lay the groundwork" for such unprecedented acts of coercion as military conscription and income taxation.
Hundreds of books have been written about Lincoln the humanitarian, a soft and gentle man. But from the very beginning of his administration he intentionally waged a cruel and unbelievably bloody war on civilians as well as soldiers. As early as 1861, Federal soldiers looted, pillaged, raped and plundered their way through Virginia and other Southern states, completely burning to the ground the towns of Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, Randolph, Tennessee, and others. Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel estimates that some 50,000 Southern civilians were killed during the war, and this number, even if it is exaggerated by a multiple of two, most likely includes thousands of slaves. In his March to the Sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman boasted of having destroyed $100 million in private property and that his "soldiers" carried home another $20 million worth.
In his memoirs Sherman wrote that when he met with Lincoln after his March to the Sea was completed, Lincoln was eager to hear the stories of how thousands of Southern civilians, mostly women, children, and old men, were plundered, sometimes murdered, and rendered homeless. Lincoln, according to Sherman, laughed almost uncontrollably at the stories. Even Sherman biographer Lee Kennett, who writes very favorably of the general, concluded that had the Confederates won the war, they would have been "justified in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants."
Henry Clay’s American System had been vetoed as unconstitutional by virtually every president beginning with James Madison. But as soon as Lincoln took office, with the Southern Democrats absent from Congress, it was finally put into place, literally at gunpoint. In 1857 the average tariff rate was 15 percent, according to Frank Taussig’s classic, A Tariff History of the United States. The Morrill Tariff more than tripled that rate to 47 percent and it remained at that level for decades.
The National Currency Acts nationalized the banking system, finally, and lavish subsidies to railroad-building corporations generated the corruption and scandals of the Grant administrations, just as Southern statesmen had predicted for decades. Income taxation was introduced for the first time, along with an internal revenue bureaucracy that has never diminished in size. All of these policies put a great centralizing force into motion and were the genesis of the centralized, despotic state that Americans labor under today.
The biggest cost of the Lincoln’s war was the death of federalism and
states’ rights, the value of which was expressed by John C. Calhoun several
decades earlier when he said: "The great conservative principle of our
system is in the people of the States, as parties to the Constitutional
compact, and our opponents that it is in the supreme court ... Without
a full practical recognition of the rights and sovereignty of the States,
our union and liberty must perish." And they did.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. His latest book is The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House, March 2002).
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Thursday, May 11, 2000
Genesis of the Civil
War
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
The historical event that looms largest in American public consciousness is the Civil War. One-hundred thirty-nine years after the first shot was fired, its genesis is still fiercely debated and its symbols heralded and protested. And no wonder: the event transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order. The cataclysmic event massacred a generation of young men, burned and looted the Southern states, set a precedent for executive dictatorship, and transformed the American military from a citizen-based defense corps into a global military power that can't resist intervention.
And yet, if you listen to the media on the subject, you might think that the entire issue of the Civil War comes down to race and slavery. If you favor Confederate symbols, it means you are a white person unsympathetic to the plight of blacks in America. If you favor abolishing Confederate History Month and taking down the flag, you are an enlightened thinker willing to bury the past so we can look forward to a bright future under progressive leadership. The debate rarely goes beyond these simplistic slogans.
And yet this take on the event is wildly ahistorical. It takes Northern war propaganda at face value without considering that the South had solid legal, moral, and economic reasons for secession which had nothing to do with slavery. Even the name "Civil War" is misleading, since the war wasn't about two sides fighting to run the central government as in the English or Roman civil wars. The South attempted a peaceful secession from federal control, an ambition no different from the original American plea for independence from Britain.
But why would the South want to secede? If the original American ideal of federalism and constitutionalism had survived to 1860, the South would not have needed to. But one issue loomed larger than any other in that year as in the previous three decades: the Northern tariff. It was imposed to benefit Northern industrial interests by subsidizing their production through high prices and public works. But it had the effect of forcing the South to pay more for manufactured goods and disproportionately taxing it to support the central government. It also injured the South's trading relations with other parts of the world.
In effect, the South was being looted to pay for the North's early version of industrial policy. The battle over the tariff began in 1828, with the "tariff of abomination." Thirty years later, with the South paying 87 percent of federal tariff revenue while having their livelihoods threatened by protectionist legislation, it became impossible for the two regions to be governed under the same regime. The South as a region was being reduced to a slave status, with the federal government as its master.
But why 1860? Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he did pledge to "collect the duties and imposts": he was the leading advocate of the tariff and public works policy, which is why his election prompted the South to secede. In pro-Lincoln newspapers, the phrase "free trade" was invoked as the equivalent of industrial suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It was a customs house, and when the North attempted to strengthen it, the South knew that its purpose was to collect taxes, as newspapers and politicians said at the time.
To gain an understanding of the Southern mission, look no further than the Confederate Constitution. It is a duplicate of the original Constitution, with several improvements. It guarantees free trade, restricts legislative power in crucial ways, abolishes public works, and attempts to rein in the executive. No, it didn't abolish slavery but neither did the original Constitution (in fact, the original protected property rights in slaves).
Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to enforce the fugitive slave laws, and to support an amendment that would forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or Boston -- since dropping off blacks in those states would have been restricted -- but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former slaves.
Now, you won't read this version of events in any conventional history text, particularly not those approved for use in public high schools. You are not likely to hear about it in the college classroom either, where the single issue of slavery overwhelms any critical thinking. Again and again we are told what Polybius called "an idle, unprofitable tale" instead of the truth, and we are expected to swallow it uncritically. So where can you go to discover that the conventional story is sheer nonsense?
The last ten years have brought us a flurry of great books that look beneath the surface. There is John Denson's "The Costs of War" (1998), Jeffrey Rodgers Hummel's "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" (1996), David Gordon's "Secession, State, and Liberty" (1998), Marshall de Rosa's "The Confederate Constitution" (1991), or, from a more popular standpoint, James and Walter Kennedy's "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" (1998).
But if we were to recommend one work -- based on originality, brevity, depth, and sheer rhetorical power -- it would be Charles Adams' time bomb of a book, "When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In a mere 242 pages, he shows that almost everything we thought we knew about the war between the states is wrong.
Adams believes that both Northern and Southern leaders were lying when they invoked slavery as a reason for secession and for the war. Northerners were seeking a moral pretext for an aggressive war, while Southern leaders were seeking a threat more concrete than the Northern tariff to justify a drive to political independence. This was rhetoric designed for mass consumption . Adams amasses an amazing amount of evidence -- including remarkable editorial cartoons and political speeches -- to support his thesis that the war was really about government revenue.
Consider this little tidbit from the pro-Lincoln New York Evening Post, March 2, 1861 edition:
"That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.
"What, then, is left for our government? Shall we let the seceding states repeal the revenue laws for the whole Union in this manner? Or will the government choose to consider all foreign commerce destined for those ports where we have no custom-houses and no collectors as contraband, and stop it, when offering to enter the collection districts from which our authorities have been expelled?"
This is not an isolated case. British newspapers, whether favoring the North or South, said the same thing: the feds invaded the South to collect revenue. Indeed, when Karl Marx said the following, he was merely stating what everyone who followed events closely knew: "The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty."
Marx was only wrong on one point: the war was about principle at one level. It was about the principle of self-determination and the right not to be taxed to support an alien regime. Another way of putting this is that the war was about freedom, and the South was on the same side as the original American revolutionaries.
Interesting, isn't it, that today, those who favor banning Confederate symbols and continue to demonize an entire people's history also tend to be partisans of the federal government in all its present political struggles? Not much has changed in 139 years. Adams's book goes a long way toward telling the truth about this event, for anyone who cares to look at the facts.
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