Posted on 12/07/2010 11:31:03 AM PST by presidio9
On a recent pilgrimage to Gettysburg I ventured into the Evergreen cemetery, the scene of chaotic and bloody fighting throughout the engagement. Like Abraham Lincoln on a cold November day in 1863, I pondered the meaning of it all. With the post-Tea Party wave of libertarianism sweeping the nation, Lincoln’s reputation has received a serious pillorying. He has even been labeled a tyrant, who used the issue of slavery as a mendacious faux excuse to pummel the South into submitting to the will of the growing federal power in Washington D.C. In fact, some insist, the labeling of slavery as the casus belli of the Civil War is simply a great lie perpetrated by our educational system.
First of all, was Lincoln in fact a tyrant? For me the root of such a characterization centers on the man’s motivations. A man of international vision that belied his homespun image, Lincoln saw the growing power of an industrialized Europe and realized that a divided America would be a vulnerable one. “The central idea of secession,” he argued, “is anarchy.” Hence, maintaining the Union was his prime motivation, not the amassing of self-serving power.
It is true that Lincoln unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus. From a Constitutional standpoint, the power of the federal government to suspend habeas corpus “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety” is clearly spelled out in Article 1, Section IX. And an insurrection of eleven states would certainly qualify as such. Whether or not Lincoln had the authority (Article I pertains to Congress) most significant to me is that the Constitution does allow for the suspension of habeas corpus in times of severe crisis. So, doesn’t the question distill down to a more wonkish matter of legal procedure, rather than the sublime notion of denying the rights of man?
Constitutional minutia aside, the question remains whether or not Lincoln’s actions made him a tyrant. Consider the country in 1861-1862, the years in which the writ was suspended, re-instituted and then suspended again until war’s end. The war was not going well for the North, and Southern sympathies were strong in the border states and the lower Midwestern counties. The federal city was surrounded by an openly hostile Virginia on one side and a strongly secessionist Maryland on the other. “Copperhead” politicians actively sought office and could only sow further seeds of discord if elected. Considering these factors, one wonders what other course of action Lincoln could have taken to stabilize the situation in order to successfully prosecute the war. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,” he asked, “while I may not touch a hair on the head of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?”
It seems that one’s appreciation for Lincoln’s place in history is largely an off-shoot of one’s position on the rebellion itself.
If the South was within its rights to secede, then Lincoln was a cruel oppressor. If not, then he had no choice but to put down a major insurrection.
What most glib pro-Southern observers of the war’s issues forget is that there were three million Americans enslaved in that same South, who would have been dragged into a newly formed Confederate States of America. “How is it,” asked Samuel Johnson as early as 1775, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Can any true libertarian argue that using the power of the federal government to end a state’s perpetuation of human bondage is an act of tyranny, regardless of the reason? And whether or not either side was willing to admit it, slavery was indeed the core issue of the war.
For those who believe otherwise then I ask you: In 1861, if the entire country was either all free or all slave states, would war have still come? If secession was about securing the South’s dearest rights, I must ask a follow-up: the right to do what exactly? We know the answer of course.
Was the North without sin? Certainly not, as anyone who understands the economic symbiosis of the two regions can attest. But in the end it was a Northern president using Northern troops who freed the slaves, and erased from the American experience what Lincoln himself referred to as “the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
A common blasé position among the Lew Rockwell’s of the world (a man who never felt the lash himself of course) is that slavery would have eventually died out as modernization overtook the antebellum Southern way of life. Yes it can be argued that it was economically inefficient – but it’s Marx not Mises who argues that systems of production necessarily dictate political forms. Consider that the de facto servitude of Blacks in the post-reconstruction South lasted well into the 1960s, and South Africa’s apartheid into the 1980s…both of which were ended by external pressures rather than internal catharsis .
Given the cost in dead and treasure, would it have been best to let the South go and hope for the best in slavery’s natural demise? As Patrick Henry, a southerner, once asked: “Is life so sweet or peace so dear as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Certainly Lincoln’s steadfast prosecution of the war revealed his feelings on this fundamental question.
So when I look at Lincoln I see a man who, for myriad reasons ranging from realpolitik to moral imperative, released three million people from the shackles of slavery. I see a man who may have over-reached his legal authority by making the suspension of habeas corpus an executive rather than legislative initiative, but did not act outside the spirit of the Constitution regarding its position on whether such a right was untouchable.
I can only conclude that to think Lincoln a tyrant is to support the Confederacy’s right to secede in the first place…and take its enslaved Americans with them. Given what a weakened state a split country would have placed us in as we moved into the industrial age, given the force for good that a united and powerful America has been in the world since Appomattox, and considering even his most brazen suspensions of Constitutional rights were temporary, and resulted in no one swinging from the gallows for their opposition to the war, I must support the actions of this great President who was ultimately motivated by love of country, not lust for power. As Shakespeare might have said: “Despotism should be made of sterner stuff.”
But it was the Deep South states that cited that most often. Just thinking logically, how many slaves could possibly make it hundreds of miles to get across the Mason Dixon line or the Ohio river to a free state from say South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi?
I doubt one in ten thousand, if even that, could have passed through all of that slave territory to make it to freedom before being caught. But fugitive slaves was an the issues they cited in their declarations. It was total bull.
The only slave states that really had a run away slave issue (and they were minor on the scale of things) were Virginia and the other border states such as Maryland, Delaware, and especially Kentucky. Yet the border states other than Virginia stayed loyal to the Union, and Virginia ended up losing their only border with the Mason Dixon line because the people who actually lived in that area remained loyal to the Union.
The entire Fugitive Slave issues was total political theater. The only thing that mattered to the Slave Power was expansion of slavery to the territories and with Lincoln able to prevent that expansion, they chose war instead of the status quo.
You're from Pennsylvania, so I'll cut your some slack, but usually when I see a comment like that it's coming from flyover country (and BTW I spent a few years in my 20s living in and working for hedge funds in the deep South and South West). What most people from places like that don't get about the North East is the population density. There are more conservatives and patriots living in NY or California than just about any state except Texas or Florida. Sure, we can't do much about that the perverts and criminals in Albany, but we send more than our share to the Republican candidates in National Elections. And we are the home of the Wall Street Journal, the NY Post, Fox News, the birthplace of the EIB Network, Teddy Roosevelt.
I wasn’t at all trying to say that America wasn’t all that bad compared to others, I was merely trying to put a perspective on the issue.
However, there are a couple of points to be made:
- Most conversation about slavery seems to center on America’s slaves in our early years. Where is all the outrage regarding slavery going on throughout the world today?
- Many early Americans did have slaves, but many were opposed to slavery. A major problem, as I see it, is that their opposition to slavery was not very vocal or public. However, the plight of slaves in America eventually became untenable and we did abolish it.
Interesting point, and no doubt correct.
But at least Fugitive Slave Laws were mentioned by the secessionists themselves, in their Causes of Secession documents -- unlike all those other phantasms our Lost Causers invent to smokescreen the real reasons.
Further, for all those (excuse my language) idiots who claim the South seceded because of overreaching, over-powerful, usurping and abusive Federal Government (in other words: projecting today back 150 years ago), the South's complaint about Fugitive Slave Laws was that the Feds were not vigorous enough in enforcing those laws.
Finally, of course, Fugitive Slave Laws were all about slavery, which reinforces my main point: that slavery was the only real cause of secession.
Anyway, you've done some great posts, I'll keep an eye out for them in the future. ;-)
It is interesting is that the Fugitive Slave Act was the first time to my knowledge that the Federal government acted directly upon the citizens of the nation as individuals as opposed to acting upon the states or business enterprises. Under that law, Federal Marshals could, and in fact did, force citizens under threat of punishment to become deputies to track down run aways even if it were against their will or to punish individuals under Federal law for harboring or assisting run aways.
It did in some respects reflect the Constitution in it affirmed the requirement for states to return run aways in their custody, but it took a very big leap in forcing those laws upon individual citizens.
It went even beyond a states rights issue. It was about how close the Federal government could act directly on citizens.
A majority of Americans then didn't own slaves and decades before the Civil War, eight of the original thirteen States ended slavery or put it on the road to extinction through gradual emancipation -- several of them even before the Revolutionary War was over.
Even before the Constitution was ratified, Congress banned slavery in the Northwest territory. Every State had emancipation societies and abolitionists preaching from the pulpits in those early years, even South Carolina. Thousands of slave owners, moved by their conscience freed their slaves.
There was plenty of sentiment against slavery in those early years and it was vocal.
The problem came from a humble fellow named Ely Whitney who invented a contraption called the Cotton Gin thinking it would make a slave's life easier. He had no idea.
Money changes things.
Don’t need any slack
Those states vote in the majority for liberals
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| Secession Timeline various sources |
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| [Although very late in the war Lee wanted freedom offered to any of the slaves who would agree to fight for the Confederacy, practically no one was stupid enough to fall for that. In any case, Lee was definitely not fighting to end slavery, instead writing that black folks are better off in bondage than they were free in Africa, and regardless, slavery will be around until Providence decides, and who are we to second guess that? And the only reason the masters beat their slaves is because of the abolitionists.] Robert E. Lee letter -- "...There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day. Although the abolitionist must know this, must know that he has neither the right not the power of operating, except by moral means; that to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master..." |
December 27, 1856 |
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| Platform of the Alabama Democracy -- the first Dixiecrats wanted to be able to expand slavery into the territories. It was precisely the issue of slavery that drove secession -- and talk about "sovereignty" pertained to restrictions on slavery's expansion into the territories. | January 1860 |
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| Abraham Lincoln nominated by Republican Party | May 18, 1860 |
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| Abraham Lincoln elected | November 6, 1860 |
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| Robert Toombs, Speech to the Georgia Legislature -- "...In 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions. The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons. What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish. We are constrained by an inexorable necessity to accept expansion or extermination. Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. All just reasoning, all past history, condemn the fallacy. The North understand it better - they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits - surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death." | November 13, 1860 |
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| Alexander H. Stephens -- "...The first question that presents itself is, shall the people of Georgia secede from the Union in consequence of the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States? My countrymen, I tell you frankly, candidly, and earnestly, that I do not think that they ought. In my judgment, the election of no man, constitutionally chosen to that high office, is sufficient cause to justify any State to separate from the Union. It ought to stand by and aid still in maintaining the Constitution of the country. To make a point of resistance to the Government, to withdraw from it because any man has been elected, would put us in the wrong. We are pledged to maintain the Constitution." | November 14, 1860 |
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| South Carolina | December 20, 1860 |
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| Mississippi | January 9, 1861 |
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| Florida | January 10, 1861 |
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| Alabama | January 11, 1861 |
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| Georgia | January 19, 1861 |
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| Louisiana | January 26, 1861 |
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| Texas | February 23, 1861 |
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| Abraham Lincoln sworn in as President of the United States |
March 4, 1861 |
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| Arizona territory | March 16, 1861 |
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| CSA Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, Cornerstone speech -- "...last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact." | March 21, 1861 |
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| Virginia | adopted April 17,1861 ratified by voters May 23, 1861 |
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| Arkansas | May 6, 1861 |
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| North Carolina | May 20, 1861 |
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| Tennessee | adopted May 6, 1861 ratified June 8, 1861 |
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| West Virginia declares for the Union | June 19, 1861 |
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| Missouri | October 31, 1861 |
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| "Convention of the People of Kentucky" | November 20, 1861 |
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What a profoundly stupid justification. I suppose the USA is worthless these days too because a majority voted for Barak Obama? Think before you post.
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison rejected a proposal that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. He said, “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
A textbook used at West Point before the Civil War, A View of the Constitution, written by Judge William Rawle (who was one of the leading constitutional scholars in early America and a personal friend of George Washington), states, “The secession of a State depends on the will of the people of such a State.”....Lee, Davis, indeed many of the most influential leaders in the South were West Point grads...and if its not legal, why is the government teaching it at West Point?
“I am determined to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than to give up the rights of self government in which alone we see liberty, safety and happyness.” Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
To coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself, a government that can only exist by the sword?” Alexander Hamilton
“The future inhabitants of [both] the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove otherwise; and if they see their interest in separating why should we take sides? God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.” – Thomas Jefferson
“If any State in the Union will declare that it prefers separation” over “union,” “I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us separate.’” Thomas Jefferson
“Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848
If secession clearly was not constitutional, then why pray tell was a constitutional amendment proposed on March 2, 1861 that would have outlawed secession (See H. Newcomb Morse, “The Foundations and Meaning of Secession,” Stetson Law Review, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 419—36)
“If [the Declaration of Independence] justifies the secession from the British empire of 3,000,000 of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.” – New York Tribune, December 17, 1860
Bangor Daily Union wrote on November 13, 1860, the Union “depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone.” A state coerced into the Union is “a subject province” and may never be “a co-equal member of the American Union.”
The New York Journal of Commerce editorialized on January 12, 1861, that opposing secession changes the nature of government “from a voluntary one, in which the people are sovereigns, to a despotism where one part of the people are slaves” to the federal government.
This was the view of the majority of Northern newspapers at the time according to Howard Cecil Perkins, editor of the two-volume book, Northern Editorials on Secessiotn.
There was also a vigorous secession movement in the “middle states” — Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York — in the late 1850s, as described by William C. Wright in The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States
It does not seem clear to me AT ALL that secession was either unconstitutional or not perfectly in keeping with the original intent of the Founders.
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