Some libertarians and advocates of limited government and federalism, such as economists Thomas DiLorenzo and Walter Williams have argued that the Confederate State of America was the last gasp of limited government on the American continent in the face of Lincoln-esqe consolidation. However, is that really the case ?
The existence, enforcement and enshrinement of slavery would, it would seem, be enough to condemn the Confederacy to the ash heap of history for anyone who believes in individual liberty, but, even if slavery is taken out of the equation entirely the government of the CSA was far from the limited government utopia that some revisionists would like to think it was:
[I]s the record of the Confederacy one of limited government and respect for individual rights? The record includes:
* Conscription (before the United States)
* Tax-In-Kind
* Tariff (higher than the 10 to 15 percent rate proposed by Hamilton in his Report on Manufacturers (1791)
* Confederate National Investment in Railroads (amounting to 2.5 million in loans, $150,000 advanced, and 1.12 million appropriated)
* Confederate Quartermasters leveled price controls on private mills and were later authorized to impress whatever supplies they needed.
* Government ownership of key industries
* Government regulation of commerce
* Suspension of habeus corpus (According to historian, Mark Neely, 4,108 civilians were held by military authorities)
The Union wasn’t perfect, but neither was the Confederacy, and, unlike it’s southern neighbor, at least the Union didn’t exist for the primary purpose of enslaving an entire race of people.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I don’t think it’s a fair comparison, since the Confederacy was on a war-footing during its entire existence.
September 19th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Have you ever read the Confederate Constitution? Actually, you have, even if you think you haven’t — because they simply copied almost the entire original Constitution verbatim (the Articles, that is, not the Bill of Rights*).
Two glaring differences are that the Confederate Constitution conferred no interstate commerce power to its Congress, but did include overt theocracy verbiage in its Preamble.
It acknowledged habeas corpus, Article IV privileges and immunities, and Article I, Section X limits on state powers. It also had a federal Supremacy Clause and a provision banning the importing of new slaves. Ironically, it had no overt secession provision.
*With two massive exceptions:
Article VI, Section V
The enumeration, in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people of the several States.
Article VI, Section VI
The powers not delegated to the Confederate States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people thereof.
September 20th, 2009 at 12:21 am
Let’s not pretend that Lincoln’s purpose was to end slavery. He made an offer to the southern states DURING the war to let them keep slaves in perpetuity if they’d just disarm and pay the tariff.
Go and read his first inaugural address: he threatens to invade over the nullification of the tariff, not to free the slaves.
Slaves who escaped across the union lines during the war weren’t freed: they were captured and held as “contraband of war” (that is, confiscated property).
Regarding the Confederate constitution, Kip doesn’t mention that it prohibited the central government of the confederacy from taxing one state to build infrastructure improvements in another.
-jcr
September 20th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Other things to keep in mind: Arthur Schlesinger’s ‘cyclical theory.’ Kress’s 60 year super cycle and the Tytler Cycle. Throw in a look at the Elliott Wave Principle by Miller, Joubert and Butler, and things get interesting.
Also compare: Ray Kurzweil’s “The Law of Accelerating Returns.”
Without a look at the big picture and macro views of historical cycles, you’ll end up chasing your tails and not achieving anything other than argument for the sake of argument….
September 20th, 2009 at 1:02 am
William Davis, a historian at the University of Virginia, has written an excellent book on the political and economic reality of the Confederacy titled Look Away. His basic thesis is that the CSA was the first command economy in modern human history. It was not a conservative or libertarian type of system.
September 20th, 2009 at 1:11 am
The Union wasn’t perfect, but neither was the Confederacy, and, unlike it’s southern neighbor, at least the Union didn’t exist for the primary purpose of enslaving an entire race of people.
No, just people of all races.
Come now. Let’s not talk about the Union or the Confederacy as if there was much that was (or is) good about either.
September 20th, 2009 at 1:34 am
The War-Between-The-States is now The Civil War. All of the economic reasons and Constitutional reasons (9th &10th Amendment) are now the province of wackos and nutjobs in the minds of most Americans.
Still, The Civil War remains the ONLY war between elected democracies in history. Leave it alone… and Take forward the lessons of Reconstruction. Look to the laws enacted by The U.S. Congress of 1872 and see the source of many of our present economic ills…
The War may/may not have been about economics and political freedom. It may/may not have been about slavery. The affects of that struggle are still felt to this day. The 9th and 10th Amendments have never been taken seriously from then to now.
We forget how fragile our democracy is and how powerful a wrathful Congress can be. We are being reminded, but “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Total power is an awesome and fearful thing to see. All the old lessons about kings/vassals. dictators and peasants holds true… we just think we are so educated and that “It can’t happen here”… Oh yes it can. It has and it probably will again. Only the fear of the people and destruction of the Laws will hold them back… When there arises a leader who knows no fear of either the People or Shredding the Constitution…
Honduras has protections in their Constitution that we lack. When their elected leader turned against the people, they turned him out. Our Leaders turned against the Constitution of Honduras… What is the lesson to be learned-?
September 20th, 2009 at 1:51 am
I’m glad to hear that we’re not in danger of secession again, but I do think we’ve drifted too far from federalism and the idea of distributed government. I wish there were some way back to the era before the federal government became the Colossus and the rest of us Rhodes.
September 20th, 2009 at 2:13 am
“Let’s not talk about the Union or the Confederacy as if there was much that was (or is) good about either.” Well, the North birthed and nurtured the Abolitionist movement, which argued blacks were people and therefore inbued with the same natural rights as whites. Case closed – the Union was better.
One could argue the Confederate citizen’s “right to enslave others” represented a kind of hegemonic freedom — a law of the jungle that superficially made, say, the Plains Indian “freer” than his U.S. Calvaryman opposite. But this is just codified anarchy. Perhaps such a governing philosophy would have been considered positive in the Classical World, but by the middle of the 19th Century the ideas of primacy of the individual and natural rights were already well established. The South’s belief in hegemonic freedom was (among many bad things) regressive, reactionary, and anti-Enlightenment.
September 20th, 2009 at 2:28 am
Dear Mark Jasper: No, the Confederacy couldn’t really be said to be on a war footing. Conscription was introduced because the state governments, particularly Georgia, weren’t coming through with the men. The “in-kind” tax was levied because again, the Confederate Congress wouldn’t take the political heat for getting taxes in hard currency. I like what Charles Evans Hughes had to say on this topic: “The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” The Confederates never really faced that issue squarely, and it’s a big part of the reason they lost.
Dear Justin Bowen: I adapt this saying of Winston Churchill’s: “The Union is the worst government that ever existed, except for all the rest.” I would like to see the response of your ideal government to the 9/11 attacks. Granted, such a government would be far less likely to be involved abroad, and less likely to suffer such an attack, such an attack is possible. What’s the response? Finally, don’t ever be a bank robber. You’d be busy grabbing rolls of pennies, which are money, no question about it, while others helped themselves to the $100 bills. Such a precision instrument as your discrimination is always going to suffer rough handling in this Utopia we live in.
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
September 20th, 2009 at 2:32 am
This is always, for me, a fun argument. Supposedly, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery; it was about tariffs and limited government. Those who argue this usually have a rather stilted, obtuse way of dealing with the slavery issue, and try to argue that the Confederates weren’t trying to keep slaves enslaved, and that Lincoln wasn’t trying to free the slaves, either.
This is partially true, but the argument distorts the issue in the wrong direction, and so it tricks you into thinking that limited government was the issue. During the period, Southerners always insisted that the issue was “States Rights”, but the particular right they wished to preserve for the states was the right to keep slavery legal. It’s basically a euphemism. Interestingly, all the way back in the 1780s, when the debates over the Constitution were going on, one of the principal anti-Federalists (opposed to the adoption of the Constitution) was Patrick Henry, the Virginian who said “Give me liberty or Give me death.” Henry opposed a strong central government for a simple reason: “They’ll take your n*ggers away!” So the issue of state power vs. Federal power being the reason for the war, as opposed to slavery itself, is a false one. Slavery was the state power they were fighting to preserve. During the war, the Irish-born Confederate General Patrick Cleburne proposed freeing the slaves and enlisting them in the Confederate army. After all, if the war wasn’t about slavery, shouldn’t they be using every resource of manpower available to fight off the hated Yankees, who outnumbered them? Cleburne’s proposal was rejected summarily; supposedly, when Jefferson Davis heard of the proposal, he chuckled and asked “Doesn’t he know what we’re fighting for?” All of this, and more, will never convince some idealists, who can’t be convinced by facts or logic, because they want to believe their ancestors actually were the paragons of virtue, walking straight out of a Sir Walter Scott novel the way they saw themselves.
September 20th, 2009 at 2:55 am
It’s worth taking note of what we lost when Lincoln conquered the states. In California and thirteen other states, we’ve gone to the polls and voted to allow medical use of marijuana.
The federal government doesn’t care about the will of the people expressed at the polls, though. They insist on maintaining their usurpation of power and carrying on a “war on drugs” for which there is no constitutional authority whatsoever.
-jcr
September 20th, 2009 at 5:37 am
Thanks Doug for pointing out a superannuated theory of governance that no one on the Right is seriously talking about. On the other hand, speaking of a system that existed for the primary enslavement of its citizenry, check out Thomas Friedman’s lates column! http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1253438668-V3bz0osYukI2VhKHT6jZcA
Why is it that talk of slavery and the Confederacy, whose proponenets are few and marginalized, is still a topic of discussion, while the corpse of Marx still parades the streets of Caracas and Boston?–a little less lively, perhaps, but not for lack of propping up by his advocates.
September 20th, 2009 at 6:41 am
This is a big subject. However, we should remember a few things.
It’s true that President Lincoln first called for volunteers to enforce the laws of the United States (which the rebel attack on Fort Sumter, a federal installation, violated). In effect, he was calling for a posse large enough to arrest all those rebels responsible for rebel takeovers of Federal property. Since the rebels subject to arrest were numbering in the tens of thousands, this attempt to enforce the laws immediately became a de facto war.
Once the war started, Lincoln was very erratic in his liberation of slaves. For example, he endorsed General Benjamin Butler’s decision to classify slaves taken as “contraband’, but refused to endorse General John Fremont’s order simply to free all the slaves in Missouri. Nonetheless, each step that Lincoln and his Republican congress took on the slavery issue tended to move toward the liberation of slaves. Those taken as “contraband”, for example, were originally considered simply as property seized by the government, and so belonging to the government; however, both Lincoln and the Republican Congress formally relinquished the government’s “ownership right” to such slaves, who thus became free men (since they had no legal “owners”). Later, after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in rebel-held areas were considered legally free men who were being illegally held in captivity. Such persons (the overwhelming majority of slaves in the south) no longer had to escape to Canada to be legally free; all they had to do was escape to the nearest Union army camp, where the soldiers treated them as free men. (It’s true that most escapees were then employed by the Union army as laborers, but they were paid for their work, and they had the legal right to move if they wanted to; most of them didn’t, simply because they now had paying jobs, and didn’t know anyone in the North they could turn to for a job or a home. Above all, they could no longer be bullwhipped if they showed up late for the job.)
Lincoln’s preferred solution to the slavery issue was to offer a money payment to any slaveowner who voluntarily freed his slaves, after which the ex-slave was legally free. In any event (with the exception of a few thousand in Kentucky and Missouri who belonged to ‘loyalists’) once a slave escaped to a Union-controlled territory, he or she was legally free, with no threat of re-enslavement.
It has long been fashionable to treat the Union army and the Confederate army as somehow identical in their attitudes and practices regarding slavery. At the beginning of the war this was largely true. As the war progressed, however, many Union soldiers became abolitionists (there was even a term for it: “going black”), some for purely military reasons, but many for humanitarian as well as military reasons. Soldiers who enlisted in 1861 did so to preserve the union; many of these re-enlisted in 1863 or 1864 to purify the union.
Many Union soldiers (especially those from copperhead counties in the midwest) were callous to the slaves who came under their custody); many others (especially those from Yankee Republican counties) were sympathetic to the ex-slaves, offering them food or clothing or helping them get in touch with abolitionist groups in the north.
In the south, however, there were no such feelings, and the supposedly laissez-faire confederacy of southern mythology was geared above all things to preserving slavery. It’s been noted that all southern men were subject to immediate induction into the army; those who didn’t go into the army were conscripted or recruited into the home guards or militia, whose purpose was as much to prevent slaves from escaping as to fight the Union army (nor was this simply a war measure; after the Nat Turner rebellion, southern states slowly progressed toward a kind of police state, with its adult males subject to service preventing or suppressing slave revolts). There was a good deal of freedom among Southern newspapers, preachers, lawyers and other opinion makers to criticize rebel politicians and war leaders, but their right to criticize slavery itself was practically nonexistent.
When the so-called confederacy was destroyed by the war, white southerners of all classes had many options available to them. In the end they chose to set up the world of Jim Crow. I think we can all agree that this was not based on libertarian principles.
.
September 20th, 2009 at 6:49 am
I’ve always thought that the supreme political accomplishment of the plantatocracy was its success in convincing poor whites that slavery was good for them.
September 20th, 2009 at 9:43 am
With socialists in the highest levels of the US government, the real pressing issue is . . . Neo-Confederates?
(I seriously doubt Walter Williams pines away for chattel slavery.)
Plus, all those things you listed in the post kinda seem moot being as the CSA spent its entire existence locked in existential war.
September 20th, 2009 at 11:30 am
By the last two years of the war, the parts of the Confederacy that hadn’t been retaken by Union troops were in fact very much a police state. It’s not widely known, even among ACW buffs (and ignored by the libertarian cranks who have joined the neo-Confederate ranks), but the CSA employed a great deal of internal repression.
Much was of a vigilante character, such as the massacre of Union-loyal German immigrants in Texas in 1861.
Some of it was downright totalitarian: by the end of the War, white male railroad passenger in civilian clothes had to carry passes from the CSA government, to be shown to provosts and marshals on demand (“Yo papahs, suh.”). Even those in uniform had to show authenticated furlough or leave orders to the authorities on demand.
September 20th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Giving Lincoln credit for ending slavery is an insult to the real heroes of the abolition movement. John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, William Llyod Garrison, and all the Quakers and other people who opposed slavery on moral grounds at great personal risk.
The Republican party started out as an anti-slavery party, but it was quickly corrupted by the Whigs, who turned it into a party of plunder and privilege.
-jcr
September 21st, 2009 at 2:49 am
JCR: What slaves did they free? Aside from the handful of escapees on the Underground Railroad, none. The majority of Americans regarded the abolitionists as noisy cranks or (in the case of Brown) as dangerous violent radicals.
Lincoln, being an effective political leader, won election by a strong plurality of Americans for the restriction of slavery, and marshaled the support of a majority for suppression of the pro-slavery rebellion, including the actual liberation of the slaves.
Whatever the abolitionists wanted to do, they accomplished very little. Lincoln did it.
September 21st, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Lincoln, being an effective political leader, won election by a strong plurality of Americans for the restriction of slavery, and marshaled the support of a majority for suppression of the pro-slavery rebellion, including the actual liberation of the slaves.
________________________________________
Wow, a “strong plurality”. That sure is the basis for plunging the country into a bloody war. As for the support of a majority, I’d argue that support for the war, as opposed to simply going along with it, never rose to the height you think it did. You also have to remember that other then the border states, and brief incursions into Pennsylvania and Maryland, the war was fought entirely on Southern soil. Lee didn’t burn the homes of the abolitionists and radical Unionists, as Sherman would raze Georgia.
The farmers of the Midwest are selling rations to the army, the industrial areas are in war production, and the shipping industry is doing a booming business. All they need to do is round up the layabouts and Irish and put them in blue uniforms. What’s not to like about the war? Meanwhile the folks being drafted are rioting, and the folks with a rudimentary knowledge of history are asking themselves why exactly a country formed by rebellion is now suppressing one.
The immediate cause of the war was the election of 1860. Lincoln was not on the ballot in nine of the states that made up the CSA. Of the over nine hundred counties that made up the CSA, only two voted for Lincoln in the election. The CSA felt that the government in Washington no longer represented them, and so they decided to leave. Can you honestly blame them? If the new President of the US had not even been on your ballot, would you be angry?
If Lincoln had let the South go peacefully he would have had large majorities in Congress. The now staunchly, overwhelmingly Republican Union would have drawn slaves from the South like iron fillings to a magnet. They’d leave en masse, and the institution would end without a shot being fired. Assuming the institution didn’t collapse under its own weight, which was already starting to happen. Slaves cost a lot of money, you could hire workers much cheaper and you didn’t have to take care of them. Slavery was an economic dead end, a dying relic of the past before Fort Sumter or even John Brown’s raid.
September 21st, 2009 at 8:17 pm
“The Union wasn’t perfect, but neither was the Confederacy, and, unlike it’s southern neighbor, at least the Union didn’t exist for the primary purpose of enslaving an entire race of people.”
Unfortunately the Union now does exist only to enslave an entire category of citizens … the productive, tax-paying, ones. The top 1% in income pays more in income taxes than the bottom 95% of tax filers. I say, “tax filers”, because entitlements mean that many tax filers either pay nothing, or get a, “refund” (EIC), on the taxes they didn’t pay.
The top 1% in income pay 40.4% of all individual income taxes, based on 2007, the most recent year for which there is data.
September 27th, 2009 at 7:04 am
This is an argument about who is the lesser of the two evils. What we can say is that the Union (capital U!) has used slavery to whitewash its own crimes. It’s not much different than using Saddam Hussein’s crimes as a pretext for foreign invasion.
If we can point to any evil as a justification for our own, there is simply no limit to what we can do in the name of government. This explains the motivation behind everything from Waco to tobacco regulation to what have you.
October 18th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Конечно, на самом-то деле так оно и есть.