When Lew asked me to deliver the first talk for this program, I was flattered but intimidated, particularly because of the topic.
I've not spent a lot of time in my career studying historians as such.
I've read some history books off and on.
on, but I knew also that many of my colleagues, maybe all of my colleagues in this program
could do a better job talking about this subject than I could and so I urged Lew to get a substitute.
So if I don't do a good job tonight, you know whom to blame.
The talk tonight is called Historians of the State and Liberty. In a way, whenever we talk
about the state, we're talking about liberty. Unfortunately, however, that's a proposition
that is not obvious to many of the people who write history. In fact, if they thought
about it at all, some of them would probably insist that the state is actually an engine
for Bringing About Liberty.
One sees claims of that sort in some history books.
My view is that the state is in practice as opposed to in the dreams of certain intellectuals.
The institution that serves for the most part to deprive people of liberty and wealth and
dignity and many of the other good things that otherwise would exist if the state would
When I talk about the state, I'm talking about liberty almost as its complement, logically speaking.
I want to just run through some of the things that have struck me as an amateur historian over the years,
reading what historians have to say about various episodes in American history,
History. What Little History I Know is about the United States. And when I talk tonight, I'm going to be talking mainly about academic historians. There still are historians who write for the general public, and it's a damn good thing that some of them are still around because they're still writing books that are readable.
I just began a book today on the airplane coming down here called The New Dealers' War by a man named Thomas Fleming who is one of these very successful non-academic historians.
And the first thing that struck me was that, my God, these are nice sentences.
As an editor I'm really alive to that kind of thing.
But it's very nicely written, and it doesn't have the kind of self-importance and puffery
that afflicts almost everything written in academia these days.
So such people are around, but nonetheless, increasingly in this century, academic historians
have been the ones who've taken over the writing of history, and by this time they write the
The Great Bulk of what is seen as serious history, as opposed to just entertainment.
And so they're the ones I'll have in mind.
Now historians come in all kinds, good, bad and indifferent.
Many of them are just indifferent.
All right, you can shrug your shoulders.
Go ahead and be an existentialist about these guys.
Some of them are just atrocious.
So classify them under bad, but but there are actually some good historians as well
And I don't want to give you the impression because I'm going to be speaking mainly
Critically that no good history has been written in the past hundred years
Indeed the other people who are on the program have done a good deal of writing good history themselves
So so there there's a small sample, but but there are a number of others
They don't add up to a big percentage of the history profession, but they do exist.
One of the things that you may make an effort to do this week is just try to find out who
some good historians are, what some really good history books, worthwhile books are by
asking us.
I'm always pleased when I can recommend something that I found worthwhile because I will say
I have to say that probably 95% of the time I spent reading in my life would have been better spent playing basketball or anything, but nonetheless I have to say that there are exceptions to these rules.
Now, whenever you get into any historical topic, you find that it gets very picky, it starts to turn on little details, and the debates get about minutiae, in many cases, or what at least appears to the outsider to be minutiae.
But, I'm going to be talking mainly about the level of historical interpretation and
appreciation that you might find in, say, a college textbook in American history, as
opposed to what all the specialists say.
I'm not myself knowledgeable enough about every topic I'm going to touch on to speak
with authority about what every specialist has said.
But I do know fairly well what is the kind of received opinion that is dished out to
millions of students every year in universities and colleges.
And that's in the long haul probably more important than what the specialists say because
the specialists just read one another and many times that's as far as it gets.
Let's start out by just raising the question, what sort of people are the academic historians
these days. Indeed, for the past hundred years or so, the answers are the same. And when
I ask that, I'm thinking about what kind of people are they, ideologically. And the answer
is that, overwhelmingly, they are leftish. They are mostly left liberals. A good many
Many of them nowadays are left radicals of some kind, and that's become the case mostly
in the past 30 years or so.
In 1971, David M. Potter wrote in one of his books, quote, most American academic historians
have thought of themselves as the political heirs of the progressive tradition.
And I think that's correct.
I think it still stands today, although as I say, there has been a movement toward more
real looniness in the historical profession as the race class and gender people have come
into considerable sway, but it still seems to me that the progressive outlook on matters
is pretty much where the profession finds itself and has found itself since the progressive
era. So this has been going on for quite a long time and it means that most of what is
dished out is the progressive interpretation. I try to find some data. This is not exactly
on the Point, but it's still interesting and bears on the point. Data on the political
affiliations of people who teach history, and I found that efforts had been made in
at least six campuses, I was able to find information about. Someone had gone down to
the courthouse and had looked up members of faculties and found out whether they were
are registered to vote as Republicans or Democrats or not affiliated with any party. At Princeton,
the history department has, this is as of about a year or two ago, 26 Democrats and
one Republican. Stanford has 22 Democrats and two Republicans. Dartmouth, 10 Democrats,
0 Republicans, Cornell, 29 Democrats, 0 Republicans, Colorado, 27 Democrats and 1 Republican, and
lest you think that down here in the south things are different.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is a giant factory for producing
and PhDs in History has a faculty with 49 Democrats and one Republican. So you can add it up.
It's about 95% of the people who are registered with one of the major parties, Democrats.
Now, I hasten to tell you, I don't hold any brief for Republicans.
But I still think those data are quite extraordinary, and the situation that exists in history departments
is even more desperate than they suggest, because it's not just that they're Democrats.
There may be in the general population sensible Democrats somewhere, but these are not among
them, these democratic history professors.
So we're dealing with a profession which is simply identified itself as on the left, which
is even unwilling to tolerate contamination in its midst by people who represent something
like half of the general population. So it gives you some inclination, some idea about
and what kind of profession this is, and it matters because historians deal with all sorts of things.
If we were looking at people who did work in astrophysics or geology or something,
it might not make much difference what their ideology or political affiliation happened to be,
but that's not the case in writing history because ideology infuses a great deal of written history
History, and the effect of this is to bias what people say in a variety of ways, and
I think the closer you get to the present day, the greater the bias becomes. I have
found that when historians write about the 18th century, they seem to me to be far more
even-handed than they are when they write about the 20th century. They almost seem like
about cheerleaders or demonstrators in the street, depending on the question before them,
when it comes to recent events.
And in some cases, like Ralph Reiko, you know, who's been an actual participant in history
for the past couple of centuries, there are people like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who's
also been a participant out there in the very kinds of events that he writes about.
So if you think he's dispassionate about it, you need to think again.
The way these progressives go about looking at history tends to take certain forms.
One is that they tend to see class conflicts as driving forces, and sometimes this is a
kind of a muted Marxist conception of class conflict, but usually it's a little foggier
than that. It's basically some kind of a contest between the rich and the poor in which the
poor are poor because the rich are exploiting them in one way or another. In the past 30
years or so, it's taken the PC form, so that non-whites and women and homosexuals and other oppressed groups have all been sort of the losing class, and we heterosexual white guys have been the dominators.
and you know that never hit my block but I'm still hoping anyhow that's that's
come to be another way to do class analysis and when when you look at
history that way historians tend to see workers farmers or these PC oppressed
I had a colleague years ago who referred to this phenomenon as the theory of infinite and
and Increasing Misery, something along those lines.
On the other hand, businessmen in general, particularly more successful and big business
people and bankers, are the oppressors and victimizers, and that's always the case.
In fact, these people don't play any useful role in society whatsoever, and it would be
be good if they were simply extirpated.
Historians talk about reform when they mean something that works in the direction of what
they believe to be helping the oppressed.
So when something seems to be pro-labor or anti-business, that's reform.
If there's any kind of change in law or practice that works in apparent opposition to the interests
of labor, particularly unionized labor, or in favor of business, that's reaction as opposed
to reform.
And so taxes are generally looked upon as good things, especially if they are taxes
because it graduated rates on income or wealth, and that's because in the eyes of the historian,
a lot more redistribution of income and wealth is desirable, and again, it's always desirable,
no matter what period of history you look at, some additional redistribution is a crying
need of society.
Things imposed by the government on business in any way are always good because those are
ways in which society, historians often talk about society doing things, society rises
up and resists capitalist abuses and excesses.
And that's good, of course, because just as businessmen perform no useful social role,
in itself is nothing but an unmitigated evil, just the kind of agglomeration of practices
by which property people exploit everybody else.
Free markets, of course, are always bad.
There's never anything good said about them.
Maybe it's between the lines sometimes.
If you look at something like economic growth or the fact that we're all vastly better off
materiality than people were fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago well
that's just because something happened where's that come from it's not because
of capitalism and it's not because of entrepreneurship and it's not certainly
not because of anything that happened that required the market system to
permit its happening if you're a deconstructionist you might say that
Historians privilege the state. They take it for granted, and they take its legitimacy for granted.
They may find its policies better or worse, but the idea that there wouldn't be any policy,
that is that there would be just laissez-faire in some respect, is not even thinkable,
and certainly it's inconceivable that there wouldn't be any state.
Why? There'd be chaos, wouldn't there? That's what I'm told, at least. So they assume there's always going to be a state, and the more it's used to come to the rescue of the oppressed, the better it is.
Now because they think of the world in these terms, whenever they talk about causation, and all historians are constantly talking about causation, whether they use the word or not,
They impoverish their analysis because when we think about causation, we're thinking implicitly, if not explicitly, about counterfactuals.
We say if A caused B, we're saying in a world that didn't have A, that's a counterfactual world, it didn't exist, but we say things would have worked out differently.
But if you can't imagine a world without the state, you lose contact with a whole lot of counterfactuals that would inform you as to how things might have worked, but for the actions of the state.
So this is a built-in infirmity of the progressive outlook.
They do talk about liberty sometimes, but when they do, they talk about it in a collectivistic sense.
They talk about national independence, for example.
There are two main occasions for talking about liberty in American history.
One is when the American Revolution takes place, and the Americans get liberty.
But what the historians are really saying is that one state replaces another.
and they think that was liberty.
When the slaves are emancipated in the 1860s, the slaves get liberty.
But if anybody ever uses the word individual liberty in the ears of the historians,
that's a kind of code word meaning some Neanderthal is talking.
Individual liberty, well that's just what primitive people might say.
I want to take a quick look at some of the episodes and I'll go back to the colonies
and say a few words and move along fairly quickly.
Just to give you how I find these topics have been treated in so far as they help us understand
a little better, the progressive historical outlook on a variety of topics.
Everybody agrees that the British North American colonies were a part of an imperial mercantilist system.
As I said before, historians are fairly sound if they go far enough in the past.
During the colonial period, the British government imposed a variety of restrictions
In their predictions on the colonists, they forbade them, for example, to manufacture certain items.
They couldn't manufacture hats for quite a while.
They were not permitted to manufacture iron products such as tools.
Even though the North American colonies produced a great deal of iron,
the colonies were a major source of iron production in the world in the 18th century,
The British also imposed starting in the 1650s, what were called the Navigation Acts, and
these were regulations on international commerce.
For example, if you wanted to bring something from overseas or ship your own products elsewhere,
you had to do that in a British ship.
Had to have a British captain and most of the crew members had to be British.
Now when I talk about these restrictions, you want to remember that the colonists were
were inveterate lawbreakers.
So it doesn't mean that they obeyed all these restrictions,
but the government did impose these restrictions
and from time to time made efforts to enforce them.
Certain goods were enumerated,
which meant that when they were exported
from the United States,
they had to be not sent to their ultimate destination,
but they had to be sent first to England.
Now you may be asking yourself,
Well, why did they impose these restrictions?
And the short answer is what's now called, in economics, rent-seeking.
There were organized interest groups in England who stood to benefit from having these kinds of restrictions imposed on the colonies,
so that people who made tools didn't have to compete with tool makers in North America.
Hat manufacturers, the same thing.
And these navigation acts obviously were intended to prohibit the competition of French ships
and Dutch ships and Spanish ships in trade and so forth.
So this was a way of trying to get rid of competition, which is one thing that producers
are frequently found trying to do.
The land regulations that were imposed by the British government were perhaps the most
important of all. They didn't matter in the beginning because there were so few colonists
that they didn't have the ability or even the interest of getting very far from the
coastline. But increasingly, the colonists became interested in going farther west. And
when they did that, they always got into squabbles with the native people who lived there and
And when the Indians would kill the entrepreneurs who were out there trying to grab land, they
would clamor for the British Army to come and protect them.
And this was expensive, and the British government tired of always having to bail out these colonial
land grabbers.
And finally, after immense expense born in the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian
War, the British drew a line in the sand, so to speak, along the Appalachians and said,
don't go beyond there. You just create too much trouble and we're broke anyhow, so stay
out of there. And of course, the colonists didn't want to stay out of there, so they
They continued to go there anyhow and in 1774, the British government got even more serious
and it passed something called the Quebec Act, Quebec Act, I guess in English, and it
said all that land out there that we just told you you couldn't go to is now part of
the province of Quebec and you're still not supposed to go there.
and they went there anyhow, of course, but nonetheless, this was another issue in the
British colonial system and I think ultimately probably the most important economic provocation
for the American Revolution.
Now, economic historians particularly have studied these imperial restrictions that were
placed on the colonists and they've gone about this in what you might roughly call
cost-benefit terms. They've tried to add up how much benefit the colonists got, say, from the protection they received from the British Army and Navy,
and from certain subsidies and bounties that were paid for various crops they produced, such as indigo.
And then they've tried to, against those benefits that the British provided, estimate the cost of this system.
In fact, for example, they had to pay more for shipping when they had to send everything via Britain instead of sending it directly to Europe.
And when they do this exercise, they usually find that it's almost a wash, depending on the exact numbers you use.
There wasn't any great benefit or any great cost for the colonists to be part of the British imperial system.
But the thing that never comes into play here, which is our refrain tonight, is that these restrictions were invasions of the individual liberty of particular colonists.
If I wanted to make hats in Pennsylvania, the law was telling me you can't make hats, and that infringed on my economic liberty.
If I wanted to make something out of iron, ditto.
If I wanted to get in my ship and carry products straight to Spain,
the government was telling me you may not do that.
So all of these things constituted infringements on the individual liberty of specific persons.
And that's the sort of thing that never gets brought in,
and much less given any value in this kind of cost-benefit way of looking at historical
events. It just disappears. It's not counted. It's not counted in any kind of cost-benefit
analysis. These days, when the government project is going to be made and the economists
in Washington, D.C. do a cost-benefit analysis to say whether it's worthwhile, there's never
any account taken of the fact that the funds for that project have to be taken by force
from individuals in the form of taxation, that certain people will lose liberties as
a result of the construction of the project. Their property may be condemned, for example.
That just doesn't enter into this mode of analysis. And so something is lost. And if
you think about events in this cost-benefit term, not only are you thinking about it in
aggregates, when it would be more sensible to think about these events as they affected
specific individuals, but you're finding yourself completely stumped when you go back and see
the colonists going to revolution talking about preserving their rights as Englishmen
or talking about their desire for self-government. Well, if it's just costs and benefits, who
Who cares about that stuff? Well, some people cared enough to put their lives at risk for
self-government or to preserve what they call the rights of Englishmen.
And that brings us to the American Revolution. That's one where I think the historians have,
as they tend to do, have rooted for the winners. I haven't read enough about the American Revolution
This has been written by British writers to know whether there's a nationalist take on it from the other side.
But most historians write, as what Lew Rockwell called, court historians, at least with regard to the revolution, therefore it.
They see it as a kind of success and they call it liberty, although what it was, was the creation of a new state, the United States government.
And that should give people pause more than it usually does.
Now, when that war was fought, the revolutionaries were not able to find a lot of people willing to pay for it,
and that was the main difficulty they had in mounting opposition to the British, getting financing for their efforts.
So, the Revolutionary Army was an extremely rag-tag group. It's not all myth that they
were wrapping their feet in rags at Valley Forge. They were just very ill-equipped and
often low on equipment and arms and ammunition, and not a very good match, most of the time,
for the British troops.
So what they were able to do, they did by issuing paper money, fiat money, which immediately
depreciated and within just a few years became worthless.
And they had currency reforms, that's a funny word they used to reform.
Money reform is what a government does when it gives up its last effort to create money
and starts again creating the same kind of money that it hopes by renaming the experiment
that people will be more gullible the second time around.
In addition, the revolutionaries just took a lot of property.
They just confiscated things as they came to them.
That's a time-honored way for armies to operate, by foraging, and they did a lot of that, sometimes
with and often without leaving Farmer Jones a note for two cows and a pig. The American
Revolution owes you.
So what we got at the end of that war was that the British decided it wasn't worth the
It's interesting, I think, that the historians say very little about the Tories. They were, by the way, among the people whose property was taken away by the Tories.
But that wasn't liberty. That wasn't liberty. The people were left with a new government, and whether they would be more or less free than they had been before depended on how that new government treated them.
It's interesting, I think, that the historians say very little about the Tories. They were, by the way, among the people whose property was confiscated, and many of them were simply driven out of communities, sometimes tarred and feathered on top of it.
And it would be interesting to hear more about them than the historians have told us.
The Constitution of the United States has been studied to death, and it's still being studied to death, even by historians.
One of the most famous of the original progressive historians, Charles Beard, wrote a book, what was it, 1913,
The Constitution was not the work of enlightened statesmen. It was the work of interested elites, particularly merchants and people who had come into the possession of bonds issued by the United States.
The work of interested elites, particularly merchants and people who had come into the possession of bonds issued by the United States or by the individual states to borrow money for the war, traders, bankers, you know, the kind of people progressives love to hate.
and they were the ones who had got together and conspired in the Philadelphia State House in 1887 and put together the Constitution and then presumably rammed it down the throats of all the ratifying conventions in the states.
And the bearded interpretation of the Constitution pretty well took over the profession, I think, for a number of decades, until it was challenged in the 50s and 60s.
And after that, historians began to be a little more even-handed about the nature of the making of the Constitution.
Forrest McDonald wrote a book, a historian named Brown wrote a book, and these always got cited along with Beard's work as if they were more thorough than Beard, more up-to-date, and they refuted Beard in some way.
But in the 1980s, a Ph.D. student of mine from the days when I taught at the University of Washington, Bob McGuire, and another fellow, Bob Osfeld, went back and, as it were, reworked this debate again from the ground up in a statistical fashion by getting measures of everything that Beard
McDonald and Brown had talked about in a literary way, and the upshot of a number of articles that were published in very good economics and political science journals by McGuire and Oelsfeld was that Beard pretty much had it right.
that the people who voted for the Constitution at the original 1887 creation of it and the people who voted for it at the ratifying conventions in the individual states
did indeed tend to be, very strongly, merchants, holders of government debt and so forth.
And the people who opposed the Constitution did indeed tend to be small farmers, small business people and people who live far from the coastline.
Those are the sort of people who have been identified as the anti-Federalists from time to time.
The Anti-Federalists don't get much press in the textbooks and that again is a shame
because they were a very large group of people and many of them had very strong feelings
and equally strong arguments I think and yet they got dismissed because they were the losers
and historians tend to look upon them as hicks. Hamilton and Madison could write pretty powerful
Pro's and these Anti-Federalists could barely read and write, sometimes, not always, some
of them were quite literate too. Some of them even have universities named after them now
like George Mason. But nonetheless, that's the characterization that has come down to
us. Now, when historians make this judgment about the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists,
What they really never do, so far as I've noticed, is that they never show any appreciation
of the principal reason the anti-Federalists didn't want the Constitution, which was their
fear of political centralization.
They said, this Constitution puts too much power in one place, and centralized power
tends toward tyranny.
North Carolina is plenty big enough. It takes us several days to go from where we live to the state capital if there's business going on there that affects us.
It's impossible for us to go from our homes to the national capital. So if important things are being done there, we're going to just be left out.
We're going to have to rely on delegates. We're not going to have the same control over things.
People are not going to understand our problems as well, and they're going to tend to get together and feather their own nests at our expense.
So the fear was that the Constitution would centralize power and jeopardize liberty.
And sure enough, if you go look at what happened in the 1790s, that's just what happened.
Under the Washington administration and the Adams administration, even worse, the Federalists started getting very nasty indeed with people's liberties.
And I think that too is one of the episodes that the textbooks pass over far too quickly.
Indeed, when we look at the early nation in this period, particularly up to the election of Jefferson, we see some interesting things.
Unlike the textbook view, which is that the Constitution is ratified, the new government begins to operate, and then we just have a blissful continuity, at least until the Civil War,
The new nation was a very much iffy creation.
It was by no means clear to many people that it was even going to survive, because it had
many opponents, and it still faced very powerful pressures from outside forces.
It had little or no military prowess, and the Spanish and the British lay on its flanks,
And to make matters even worse, many of the Americans who had drifted out into the Trans-Appalachian
area were at best indifferent to the government of the United States and in many cases they
were actively hostile to it.
So much so that some of them got together in western Tennessee and decided to found
on their own state, after the man who perhaps should have been known as the father of our
country, Benjamin Franklin. So the state of Franklin, which never really quite existed
but was thought to exist for a while, operated as some kind of a legal fiction between 1784
in 1788 and maybe it's better to call this a secession movement and the Franklin secessionists
took pains to go down, send people to New Orleans to talk to the Spanish about getting
some assistance, that is arms and ammunition and troops who would come up and help them
Defend Their Secession Movement. Meanwhile, up in Massachusetts of all places, the farmers
were more than restive about a variety of issues in the western part of the state, particularly
the way they were being treated by the courts. And so in 1786, they mounted what has become
known as Shay's Rebellion and that I think was a very important event particularly in
frightening the elites who wrote the Constitution in 1787, the very next year because it struck
them as indicating the jeopardy of property rights and that the masses were going to get
out of hand and perhaps start dispossessing the property classes.
So of course one of the things that the Constitution does is guarantee every state a Republican
form of government.
In other words, it created an apparatus for coming to the armed assistance of governments
such as that of Massachusetts in 1786 should they require it to defend themselves.
In Kentucky, the people out there were scheming with the Spaniards, and as if they had no
loyalty at all, they also began to scheme with the British, trying to see which one
would come and help them out, and they were also thinking of secession.
So when you look at all these things, what you see is not, we get a constitution, boom,
there's this fine United States of America that just sails gloriously into the future.
It's not like that at all. This country was extremely uncertain for many years after the
Constitution was written. One of the grievances out there was again the Indians and the fact
that the United States Army was not being made available, not even the militias from
the states frequently made available to come out and defend people against Indian attacks.
Now to add injury to insult, Alexander Hamilton, that most Federalists, of all the Federalists,
you may already know that Jefferson, that Washington was more or less a puppet ruler,
and that Alexander Hamilton was the real power in the United States during the Washington
Administration. Hamilton decided at one point during his fiscal creations in the early 1790s
that the provision of the Constitution allowing the government to impose excise taxes needed to
be exercised lest the people decide that it's having never been exercised they would never
are tolerated. So Congress passed an excise tax on whiskey. Now, Americans were big drinkers in those days, and besides that, whiskey was an important article of trade out in the frontier, because transportation was very difficult and costly, and so the only things that would pay to transport were things that had a lot of value per pound.
Well, whiskey was something that satisfied that criterion. So whiskey was almost a medium of exchange. It was like a money you could drink out in the frontier, and it was probably the most traded article in the trans-appalachian area in the 1790s.
So to, first of all, put an excise tax on was extremely antagonizing to the anti-Federalists
because excise taxes had a long and bad tradition in the minds of people of this political leaning,
going way back in English history.
In those days, people thought of the excise tax collector as a kind of home invader.
You know, might come in to actually invade your home and find out what kind of property you had that was subject to tax.
And so, they didn't like the idea of any excise tax, but for it to be placed on whiskey, of all things, made them hopping mad.
So, they decided they wouldn't pay.
This was decided sort of drunkenly.
That's not a joke. Most people were more or less drunk all the time in those days, because
besides being a medium of exchange, whiskey was a basic food stuff, really. It was a major
source of caloric intake. Not everywhere was it whiskey, in some parts of the country it
was other beverages, but whiskey was the most common one. So they decided they wouldn't
would stand for this, excise tax on whiskey, and when the tax collectors came around to
set up shop, they would either intimidate the householder so he wouldn't rent space
to the tax collector, or they'd intimidate the tax collector by telling him to get the
hell out or they were going to kill him, or in some cases they would actually attack the
tax collector and beat him up or threaten to shoot him, and in other cases they would
I really like this movement. This was back when people had some pride, and they wouldn't just take anything like sheep.
But needless to say, Hamilton thought this was a complete outrage, and he was always
looking for an opportunity to lead another military expedition.
So they got one together, it took a few years, and finally in 1794, with Virginia Governor
General Henry Lee, that's Light Horse Harry to you. Light Horse Harry Lee leading the
militias drawn from Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They got
together almost 13,000 troops and that's about as big an army as General Washington
And they tried to find somebody to arrest. And they had a lot of trouble with that because there weren't too many of the some 7,000 rebels who just showed up and presented themselves for arrest. So they had to go house to house, more or less, until they found some people who were said to be active whiskey tax protestors. And they finally arrested, I think, about 50 of them.
and they marched them back to Philadelphia and put them on trial for treason.
All but two of them were acquitted and of the two who were convicted,
President Washington magnanimously pardoned them.
So, if you put all this together, what do you have? A lot of pomp and stomping around with troops to no particular avail, except to show that the government is serious about collecting taxes, and it won't tolerate tax rebellions.
George Washington went out and reviewed the troops while this military operation was organizing.
And I just will say in passing that if we have to have Washington as the father of our country,
it would have been better that we be orphans.
I, some time ago, I stopped actually using the name George Washington. I just now refer
to the blockhead because that was what some contemporaries called him in celebration of
his military prowess. He was the object of much contempt by officers in the French and
British armies because he was such a military nincompoop. But fortunately for him, he was
He was even less inclined to fight than Lincoln's generals in 1861, so he didn't show up to
fight very much during the revolution, and that was all for the best.
And finally, the French showed up and saved the rebels' cookies.
But Washington was one thing.
If he wasn't a great general, he was a notorious land grabber, and part of his blockheadness
was that he had gone out there to the West as a very young man and made a fool of himself.
And then he had gone back, not having learned his lesson the first time, and started the
The French and Indian War, almost single-handedly by his incompetence, and he even had the Indians
laughing at him that time, they made a mockery of him, that's a nice story you should read.
Washington claimed 63,000 acres in the Trans-Appalachian area, and a lot of it he got by fraud, I'll
I'll just quote one sentence from Thomas Slaughter's book, The Whiskey Rebellion.
He lied, broke the law, and betrayed public trust in pursuit of private gain.
That's a genteel way to put it.
But in a way, it was apt that the father of our country was a land grabber because the
country was built on land grabbing.
And my speculation has been the quintessential American occupation, and still is today in a way.
Now this is not a new picture for you, I hope, but the reason I'm putting it up is because I want to emphasize something.
The United States was an expansive empire. It's not usually called an empire, it's called a nation, but it was an empire.
At the time of the Peace of Paris, when the Americans became independent, they lived between about right here and right here
and hardly anybody more than a hundred miles from the coast and altogether there were about two and a half million of them that's about the same number of people who live in the Seattle Tacoma area today stretched over a thousand miles here very thinly clinging to the coast and that's as far as they had gotten in over 150 years but look what they had just
Just under the terms of the Peace of Paris that settled the war, they had land all the
way out to the Mississippi River.
No wonder Jefferson spoke of land for the thousandth and the thousandth generation.
He didn't do his math very well, maybe, but you can get the picture he had in his mind.
This was just an endlessly vast area, huge, unthinkably big area, even if you only went
out to the Mississippi. But very quickly, the Americans decided that was not enough,
and they wanted more land, and so they began to take it by conquest or by intimidation
and Purchase until they had scooped up the entire continent, and of course it then took
a long time, it took another hundred years or more before they had managed to people
that area to some extent, much of it's not, not much people even today, and if you've
I've been there, you know why, but nonetheless, a great deal of this continental expanse was
extremely valuable potentially, and Americans wanted to own it and exploit its potential
value. So land policy became a central, some might say the central kind of government action
in American history. Now, in a sense, you could think of this as a form of vast privatization.
It's owned by the government of the United States, and they proceed in various ways to
hand it over to private owners. In that sense, it's one of the biggest privatization projects
in the history of the world, I suppose. They handed it over in a whole variety of ways,
But privatization suggests that the government was bearing some kind of a loss by transferring
this territorial expanse to private owners.
But you can also see it as something the government used for its gain.
When we look back, we think government was small until the 20th century.
And by the way we measure the size of government nowadays, it was.
It didn't spend much money and it didn't collect much tax.
But it didn't need to. It had land. And in the 19th century, that's what everybody wanted,
to get hold of that land. And the government could use that land in lieu of money to reward
its supporters, its followers, its favorites. And this could be done by Hamiltonians and
and Jeffersonians Alike.
You look at the way the land was transferred, you see an extremely uneven pattern.
These are original entries when some action is taken to transfer title to a private party.
Sometimes it's a sale, sometimes it's a homesteading when we get out here past 1862.
It's cashing in a bounty that the government has issued as a claim to the public lands.
And if you look, if you can see that well, you probably can't from way back there.
But a number of instances are indicated on here of military bounties.
And possession of this public domain was used by the government to finance its military
operations.
If you didn't have money to pay soldiers, you paid them in land bounties.
And that was done repeatedly in the early 19th century.
So in here, the second war with England, there's a military bounty here,
coming after the war with Mexico, another one here.
In the later 19th century, you've got lands being used to reward not soldiers so much
as corporations, railroads, what have you.
The picture here shows you areas in which land grants were made to railroads.
The fact that you can see a big line like that on the map tells you
That's a lot of land. That thick line on the top, which was the land-grant area for the Northern Pacific Railroad, was 80 miles across.
And every other section in that area was given to the Northern Pacific Railroad.
So the government started doing this in the 1850s, first with the Illinois Central Railroad and after the war for the transcontinental railroads.
So a great deal of land was transferred or something like 180 million acres transferred to a handful of railroad corporations, mostly by the Republicans, in the 1860s and 1870s.
Some scandals grew out of this and they stopped doing it in the 1870s, but by that time they'd given away a great deal of land to their political pals.
Ultimately, it was land policy that led to the War of Secession, because in that area
that was unorganized in states in the 1840s and 50s, the question was, will slavery be
Permitted or not, if it is, it means that the slave state is going to have two pro-slave senators.
And up to that time, the interests of the slave states had hinged on their ability to dictate, as it were,
or at least to resist anti-slave policies in the Congress by having a sufficient number of senators.
and so the fight over organizing slavery or anti-slavery provisions in the new states to be created was essentially a land policy question.
Historians have tended to look at it as a moral question about slavery but it was only indirectly that and finally when it resulted in war it was not that at all
at all because in 1860 neither side really, that is to say, the Union wasn't talking about
destroying slavery. In fact, Lincoln was prepared to have an amendment passed to the Constitution
that would guarantee slavery where it existed at that time. So you can't say that the North
North had a holy cause of abolishing slavery because it had nothing of the sort, and nonetheless
when the slave states seceded the Lincoln government went to war against them and we know what happened
to some extent.
The War of Secession was the most destructive war of American history.
620,000 dead, 400,000 wounded, vast property destruction, financial cost of about $3.3 billion,
which was vastly more than the governments of the United States had spent for everything they'd ever spent for up to that time in American history.
It's hugely costly. These things are recognized by historians, but what's not recognized is the sense in which a constitutional revolution took place as a result of that war.
Even historians talk as if there's been a continuous constitution in force in the United States from the time of initial ratification to the present day.
And it's absolutely wrong because the first constitution was destroyed by the secession.
And a new nation was created. It looked the same because they just apparently added three amendments.
But the upshot of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments was to change the character of the system from one of federalism
Capitalism, to want of national domination. Now it didn't immediately become national
domination because after 12 years all the United States troops left the defeated states
and they began to run their own affairs in large part, but there had been a revolution
nonetheless because from that time forward the ultimate check that the states might exercise
over Federal Domination of their Affairs was gone. Never again would any state think, oh,
well if worse comes to worse, we will just leave this political organization. We'll just
secede. And that had been an option not just of southern states, but of many states of
the Union in the period prior to the Civil War. New England states came close to seceding
during the Second War with England. So this was a commonplace option for states to think
about in the antebellum period. And indeed, two of the states, when they ratified the
Constitution, reserved the right to leave the Union, should they find that to be necessary.
That didn't cut any ice when war came. It was just a matter of who could win on the
on the battlefield. But nonetheless, the understanding of what kind of a political organization the United States was to be, was changed forever by the outcome of the war. Genuine federalism was destroyed, political centralization became a trend.
Not a rapid trend for a while, but from the beginning of the 20th century onward, quite rapid.
And statism began to grow, slowly at first and then much more rapidly in the 20th century.
Are we going to take a break before, till nine and then take a break or finish then?
Okay, I'll just go ahead and say a little more and then we'll take some questions then.
I have a tendency to over prepare for a speech and I've done that once again.
Once again, let me say a little bit about the 20th century.
I'm skipping over some wonderful topics that I myself have worked on in the late 19th century, but I'd be happy to talk about that privately with you if you're interested.
Progressivism is, I think, in a way, the most important event other than the Civil War in our history.
In a book I wrote, I have a pathetically brief chapter on it, but the one thing I admire about that chapter is the title.
was called at a bridge to modern times, and I think that's exactly what it was.
The society that lived and worked and cooperated in the United States prior to 1900 was quite different, worked quite differently,
thought about itself differently than the one that's operated here in the last century.
And the progressives were the ones that brought about that change.
In the beginning, there was no grand movement.
In fact, there's no grand movement ever of progressivism.
They had a party once in 1912, but that was a transitory thing and an unsuccessful one at that.
But despite their not being coherently organized, the progressives were immensely effective
in bringing about the realization of their vision.
When you look at their specific platforms at local level, state level and nationally,
it looks as if they're for all sorts of things.
And some of the things look good.
They're for referendum and initiative and recall to keep the politicians in line.
It looks like they're anti-political.
So, who wouldn't like that? Unless he's a politician.
On the other hand, there are all sorts of things that involve bureaucratic management of natural resources, of public utilities, of transportation.
The one common denominator that all the progressive schemes, but those voting procedure changes
I mentioned, except for those, the common denominator of all the progressive proposals
is make government more active and stronger.
Use government power to deal with some perceived problem.
So in that sense, the progressives are statists.
They're collectivists.
They're against the classical liberal type of thinking that had been a very strong if
not always dominating in the 19th century.
When Wilson was running in 1912, he had a kind of a program that he put under the label
New Freedom, and I think captures a very important kernel of what was changing.
What was wrong with the old freedom?
Well, what was wrong with it was that for the progressives it was backwards.
The old freedom said, government should leave people alone.
Let them manage their own affairs.
Do not use force against people unless they use force against their fellows.
The progressive said, use force.
And the condition that you bring about by the use of force, call freedom.
of Freedom. That's the new freedom. We're going to set people free by force. That sabotage,
rhetorical sabotage of the understanding of freedom is one that became very effective
and one that I think has lasted to this day. The progressives had many policy successes,
Things like creating the Federal Reserve System, ratifying the Income Tax Amendment, many changes
at state and local levels as well, but nothing was more important than their rhetorical success
in changing the terms that Americans used to think about the nature of their society
and the nature of freedom and the relation of government to it.
Well why don't I stop my talking here and let you ask questions or make comments and
see what's on your mind.