American, and they're Lincolnian Americans, and we don't communicate very well.
Now one reason why you can't take Southern secession seriously is because of slavery.
The United States, in invading the South, created the greatest atrocity of the 19th
century.
If you look at the destruction, I won't go into all of that.
It got away with murder, and its alibi was emancipating slaves, or if that's not exactly
what's said, one hears, well, the war was about slavery, you know what I'm saying?
Nobody actually invaded to free slaves, but somehow it was about slavery.
Well, if it was, no one knows what that means.
It's never spelled out in detail when it's said rhetorically.
Well, if it was about slavery, then it's hard to take Southern secession seriously.
How can you take the idea that Southerners were fighting for liberty when they will do
not extend liberty to the African population in their borders?
Now this was the argument that Samuel Johnson gave against the succeeding colonists in the
18th century.
He asks, why do I have to hear constant yelps about liberty from the drivers of slaves?
Good question.
And it has to be admitted that slavery was a moral stain on southerners and a moral stain
on the American colonists.
All the colonies had slavery in the late 18th century.
Only 10% of southerners, however, own slaves.
So we're not talking, we're talking about a rather complicated matter.
Okay, so what I want to discuss is the moral issue of the moral, I want to look at the
secession from the moral point of view of what is the relationship between slavery and
secession.
There was almost universal agreement among antebellum Americans, north and south, on
and the moral status of slavery.
This usually isn't brought out, but most everybody agreed about it, North and South.
Most agreed that abstractly considered, if you just think about it as abstract proposition,
slavery is immoral, but they also thought that it must be acquiesced in out of practical
necessity.
Larry Tice, who's written a wonderful book on the pro-slavery arguments, has called this
is the negative pro-slavery argument and has shown that it was first deployed not by Southerners
but by late 18th century Northerners responding to Samuel Johnson-type criticisms from Europeans
after Americans had gained their independence. It was a stark part of what he calls a counterrevolution
that swept the North at the turn of the century and eventually the South as Americans recoiled
from the more radical implications of the democratic ideals of the revolution.
Now even Calhoun's teaching that slavery is a positive good was not the radical doctrine
hitherto unknown in America that historians have tirelessly said it was.
Calhoun carefully separated the question of, quote, slavery in the abstract, as Southerners
called it, from slavery as a practical moral question.
He tried to make clear that his point was only about the latter and that the institution,
He said under the institution the African population had in fact made remarkable progress and was capable of further improvements.
He called the institution, quote, an experiment which should be given a period of time and he put no limit on the improvements Africans were capable of.
But what was this universal practical necessity that forced acceptance of slavery?
It was in a word, white European supremacy.
Most Americans, North and South, the vast majority, believe that America was a white European polity and that neither the Indian nor the African population would ever participate as social and political equals.
This is the common assumption.
Now let's see how this assumption works in Northern policy in regard to Africans.
Northern manumission laws were designed to rid the North of its African population.
It was not actual slaves that were freed, but those born after a certain date upon achieving
a certain age.
By 1860, the formerly slave-trading state of Massachusetts had reduced its African population
to around 1%.
In many states, emancipation was accompanied with a period of apprenticeship.
New Jersey, for example, abolished slavery, but only after defining those freed as apprentices
for Life.
Most northern states passed laws prohibiting the entrance of free blacks or severely restricting
their entrance. Free blacks were shut out of New Jersey. Massachusetts at one time prescribed
flogging for non-residents who stayed longer than two months. Ohio at one time passed a
law expelling the entire black population. A number of states erected constitutional
The Language of Oregon's Constitution was typical.
Quote, no free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall ever come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contract, or maintain any suit therein.
and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such free Negroes who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them therein.
The state of Indiana's constitution read almost the same way.
Now, Illinois once allowed free blacks to enter, but only if they posted a bond of $1,000 each.
A lot of money back then.
But after 1848, white supremacy became even more insistent in some northern and western states.
Illinois, for example, changed its constitution in 1848 to absolutely exclude the further entrance of free blacks or mulattos.
In 1853, the legislature of Illinois enacted statutes to enforce the ban.
Oregon's constitution banning the entrance of free blacks passed by a vote of 8 to 1 in 1857.
Now, once in a northern state, blacks were tightly managed.
Just to give you one example from Illinois, which was admittedly a pretty rough state for this sort of thing,
its revised statutes after 1833 say,
If any person or persons shall permit or suffer any servant or servants of color to the number of three or more to assemble in his, her or their outhouse, yard or shed for the purpose of dancing or reveling, either by night or day, the persons or persons so offending shall forfeit and pay a fine of $20.
And it's the duty of all coroners, sheriffs, justices, judges, justices of the peace, judges who learn of such assemblages to commit the servants to the jail of the county and on view of proof thereof, order each and every such servant to be whipped, not exceeding 39 stripes on his or her back, end quote.
So you can get the point, you know.
Now, Illinois is worth pondering because it was Lincoln's state and because he supported its oppressive black codes and never objected to them throughout his career.
Let's look at Illinois. Once in Illinois, blacks were not citizens. Remember back then, only a state could make you a citizen.
Once you became one, then you had the privileges and immunities of citizens everywhere.
You're not a citizen if you're in Illinois, in black. You could not vote.
You could not even serve on a jury and you could not even testify against whites in court.
If somebody started messing with your property, you had to get somebody to help you go to court.
To my test file on your behalf.
You could not marry with whites and you were forced to pay taxes for a public school system
that excluded black children. No segregated school system.
There's none. Lincoln voted for and supported these laws because he did not believe that free
blanks would ever have social and political equality with whites. He held to this position
throughout his career and repeated it publicly everywhere in language that cannot be disguised.
In one of the debates with Stephen Douglas, September 18, 1858, he declared, quote,
I will say then that I am not, I am not nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way
Today, the Social and Political Equality of the White and Black Races, that I am not or
have ever been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to
hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.
And I will say in addition to this, that there's a physical difference between the white and
black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms
of social and political equality.
And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the
position of superior and inferior. And I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having
the superior position assigned to the white race."
Now these laws in Illinois and Lincoln's remarks here give new meaning to the bumper sticker
Land of Lincoln, to the license plates, Land of Lincoln.
I lived in Illinois for 15 years and saw that every day.
Land of Lincoln.
All right.
Lincoln meant every word of this as his career shows.
He voted against voting rights for blacks
in the first year he was in the legislature of Illinois.
He refused to sign a petition from a black friend of his,
acquaintance of his, requesting that blacks
be allowed to testify in court.
He voted against abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia during his undistinguished
and only term in Congress.
Against enormous pressure from friends and foes alike, he adamantly refused to use blacks
as troops during the war, until Congress forced him to do so.
He said they would be fighting with the Confederacy if you let black troops come in.
And when they were used, he insisted on paying them seven dollars a month, whereas whites
received thirteen dollars a month.
And that stuck.
Near the end of the war, he helped draft the new constitution of Louisiana.
And just as Lincoln had always publicly opposed the granting of citizenship to blacks in his
in his own state, so he refused to acknowledge black citizenship and suffrage in Louisiana,
even for black union veterans.
He relented only under pressure from Congress.
Now throughout his career, Lincoln was opposed to universal emancipation as being an evil
greater than slavery itself.
And the reason is equality wouldn't be possible, so you have emancipation with no equality
and all of these restrictions, then you're going to have social chaos.
It's better to manage this alien population.
Listen to what he says.
What?
Free them all and keep them among us as underlings,
as they are in Illinois, not citizens, can't use accords.
Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?
What next?
Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?
My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.
Whether this feeling is caused with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if indeed it is any part of it.
A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.
We cannot then make them equals.
That was the assumption that Americans had.
What then was the moral solution to an alien population that people believed was never to be socially and politically integrated into the polity?
That was the moral issue.
Slavery wasn't the moral issue.
It was an abstract natural right proposition, because most people agreed on that.
The problem was a practical one.
Now, what do you do with these alien people? Now, Lincoln confessed, here's the greatest
of all American statesmen, so great that you can't even comprehend it, he confessed that
he was blocked at every turn in thinking of a solution. Quote, if all earthly power were
given to me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution, end quote.
Well, you know, abolitionists knew what to do.
I mean, they had pretty radical positions, but there were things you could do.
Anyway, accordingly, Lincoln acknowledged...
One reason he said that, of course, is because everybody was hedged in.
It was just something...
Given the assumptions and the way people actually were, it was a real problem.
Accordingly, Lincoln acknowledged the common moral understanding of northerners and southerners on this question.
He said, we agree on all the basic moral issues.
He says this, August 21st, 1858, and many other places, at a debate with Douglas.
Quote, before proceeding, let me say, I think I have no prejudice against the southern people.
Lincoln often called himself a southerner.
He was from Kentucky, married into a southern family.
He said, well, you know, we southerners don't think like some of you on these issues.
Who would say things like that? He had the kind of cultural background.
I have no prejudice against the southern people.
They are just what we would be in their situation.
Think of Illinois.
If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it.
Here the common belief of Americans that slavery abstractly considered is wrong, and Lincoln
is acknowledging that even for Southerners. They wouldn't introduce it. Why? Because they
think it's wrong. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. Here
the common belief among Americans that the consequences of universal emancipation will
This I believe of the masses of the North and South.
When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than
we, I acknowledge the fact, here, the common belief that slavery is an unfortunate inheritance
of British colonialism, end quote.
Insofar as Lincoln had any solution to the problem, it was, one, gradual emancipation.
He didn't even talk about it for the first 46 years of his life, but gradual emancipation
accompanied by a period of apprenticeship, two, compensation of slaveholders.
He always believed in compensating slaveholders.
He had a great respect for property, except when the war came, but anyway.
and three, eventual deportation of Africans out of the United States.
That was a fundamental policy and I want to talk about that.
The American Colonization Society, which promoted deporting blacks out of the United States,
including among its members Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Francis Scott Key, Andrew Jackson,
Millard Fillmore, John Marshall, James Monroe, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and so on and so on.
Henry Clay, who had been president of the society, was Lincoln's mentor on matters of slavery, economics, and politics.
Much of Lincoln's writings are almost cribs from Clay. He loved Clay.
Like Clay, Lincoln had a high moral vision of slavery as a period of tutelage whereby Africans acquired the dispositions of a superior civilization in religion, law, and liberty.
This is a common thing Southerners would say, too.
These could be taken back, quote, by the African to his native clime to educate and enrich his posterity.
Lincoln always thought of blacks as an alien people out of their, quote, native land, end quote.
Whereas most southerners thought that blacks' native land was Virginia and Georgia and so on.
According to his biographer, J.G. Randle, Lincoln placed deportation at the top of his presidential policy agenda and observed that, quote,
One can hardly find any subject on which Lincoln argued and pleaded more earnestly than on this, end quote, deportation.
In two State of the Union addresses, in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and in a number of other policy statements,
Lincoln urged that the federal and state governments buy slaves and deport them to an appropriate place.
He had argued for this during the debates with Douglas.
In 1857, he proposed that the Illinois legislature appropriate money to colonize free Negroes
out of the state.
He introduced a constitutional amendment in 1862 to buy and deport slaves.
Lincoln engaged the State Department to arrange a treaty with England, France, the Netherlands,
and other colonial powers to sell or to lease a place for free Negroes.
The Secretary of State was ordered to explore the possibility of settlements in Haiti, Liberia,
New Granada, Ecuador, Senkwa, Suriname, British Guiana, Honduras, and even the Amazon. Preferably
a hot place. At one time, he proposed deporting the entire slave population to Texas. This
was when Texas was fighting. Florida was also considered. Even in the last months of the
or Lincoln proposed to his cabinet raising $400 million to compensate slaveholders if
they would return to the Union and ratify the 13th Amendment by July 1st, 1865.
Now compensated emancipation was always tied in Lincoln's mind to the policy of deportation.
And he did say that the deportation would be at their will, that the slaves would have
to give their consent.
But once the federal government has a policy of deportation by consent, consent gets pretty tacit.
We now start talking about tacit consent.
So you don't want to have federal government talking about deportation of anything or anybody.
Okay, for 45 of his 56 years, Lincoln never raised the issue of slavery.
Nor did he make any effort to improve the conditions of blacks in Illinois.
Lincoln took up the topic of slavery only after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in
1854.
This act abolished the Missouri Compromise Line that extended to the west, allowing slavery
to the south but ruling it out to the north.
The territories would now decide, after this Kansas Act, whether or not to allow slavery.
Most commentators agree that Lincoln turned to the slavery question as a way of reviving
a moribund political career. He was dead politically. As many today play the race card to gain power
and to centralize power, so Lincoln played the slavery card. He heated up passions by
inciting fear that the Kansas-Nebraska Act now opened the door to the extension of slavery
into the West and to the Northern States as well.
In other words, if any state could decide
whether it would have slavery or not,
then, you know, for all you Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
God knows what the slave power could do.
They'd all be voting for slavery or if, you know, and so on.
So, but this was largely a contrived issue,
this fear of slavery in the West,
as Daniel Webster pointed out.
There was no probability of the plantation system
and Moving West. By 1860, there were only 17 slaves in all of the Western Territories.
This was, you know, it heated up passions. Lincoln gave high-minded speeches about slavery
being wrong and why it should be forbidden in the Western Territories. But it was not
slavery as such that bothered him or his audience. As anyone reading the Black Codes of Northern
It was the entrance of Negroes, free or slave, into the West, but once in the territories, slaves could pass through an apprenticeship system, for example, and be free.
So indeed, diffusion of the African population westward was one scenario of eventual emancipation that Jefferson and other southerners had once entertained.
A Reduction of the Black to White Ratio in a State would ease the difficulty of social and political integration, 5% Black to White, but not 30% or 25% or 40%.
But diffusion had been blocked by the demand that the northwestern territory should be
an African free zone.
For example, John Randolph freed his slaves in his will and bought farms for them in western
Ohio.
But the citizens of Mercer County, Ohio, forced them out.
The slaves returned to Virginia and asked to be made wards of the state, and they were.
The Virginia didn't want to keep having these wards of the state to take care of.
It was this fear that the western territories would be a dumping ground for blacks and not
a moral passion to stamp out or to restrict slavery that animated Lincoln's speeches and
inflamed his audience.
We really have to stress that.
It wasn't a moral passion.
People say, well, Lincoln was anti-slavery, et cetera, et cetera.
But we've got to look at this ugly white supremacy.
The territories, he said, quote, should be kept open for the homes of free, white people, end quote.
Quote, is it not rather our duty, he asked, to make labor more respectable by preventing all black competition, especially in the territories, end quote.
And he has some more colorful language to describe those who are coming in.
And one example he gives, he has a little story, he likes to tell stories, of a farmer with a vegetable garden and a fence around it and his neighbor lets his hogs out and they come running through, knock the fence over and go run over the cabbages and everything and just make a mess of it.
The Western Territories of the Garden, The Fence, the Missouri Compromise Line, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Knock the Fence Down, and you're going to have all these black hogs coming in.
Keeping all blacks out of the territories would solve the problem of miscegenation, which Lincoln viewed with horror.
He declared in his speech, 1857, June 26, that, quote,
A separation of the races is the only perfect prevention of amalgamation,
but as an immediate separation is impossible,
the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together.
If white and black people never get together in Kansas,
they will never mix blood in Kansas, end quote.
What I would most desire, he said at another place,
would be the separation of the white and black races.
Now the myth of the moral grandeur of Lincoln is rooted in the debates with Douglas where
Lincoln is supposed to have raised the moral horizon of Americans by rediscovering the
radical egalitarian implications of the statement in the Declaration of Independence that all
men are created equal.
The moral quarrel between Lincoln and Douglas was briefly this.
Lincoln has argued that the founders did not include Africans in the declaration's claim
that all men are created equal, but rather tacitly understood a certain kind of man developed
by a certain kind of culture.
Lincoln argued that Africans and indeed all men, independent of culture and tradition
and law, were included.
Here Lincoln appears to have taken the high moral ground.
But this is an illusion. For in the debates he also holds that there is a physical difference
between blacks and whites which rules out social and political equality, and that blacks
are to remain in a subordinate position. This is very clear in the debates. A proposition
that he and Douglas agree on, quote, I as well as Judge Douglas am in favor of the race
to which I belong having the superior position, end quote.
Now how are you going to reconcile the radical egalitarian claim, supposedly coming from
Lincoln's answer is that the egalitarian principle applies only to new states.
Where slavery is already established by law and custom, slavery can remain, and it would
be criminal to subvert it, for example, to disobey the fugitive slave laws in the name
of natural rights.
Lincoln was reduced in the debates with Douglas to the moral absurdity that blacks were included
in the inalienable natural rights affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, but that
they could not exercise those rights in the United States.
He said that on many occasions and in some cases so clear that he could not be misunderstood.
Here's a passage, quote, Negroes have natural rights as other men have, although they cannot
enjoy them here.
And even Taney once said that the Declaration of Independence was broad enough for all men.
But though it does not declare that all men are equal in their attainments and social
position, yet no sane man will attempt to deny that the African upon his own soil has
has all the natural rights at instrument vouchsafes to all mankind, end quote.
In other words, in order for blacks to enjoy the natural rights that no time, circumstance
or tradition can alienate, they must be deported to Africa.
Anybody get the irony of that?
So it turns out natural rights, it depends on where you are as to where you have them.
Lincoln said many times that the Declaration did not imply that blacks were equal to whites
in all respects and that they could be justly placed in conditions of ordination where they
were not equal.
Now, in what respects were they equal or unequal?
On this most important moral question, this greatest of all American statesmen had virtually
nothing to say.
In what respects are they equal?
That's the big deal.
What are they?
He says there's a physical difference, and not merely a cultural one, and he says that
blacks are not equal in color, and perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.
Lincoln mentioned only one sense in which they were equal, and he mentions it a number
of times.
Quote, and the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned,
he is the equal of every man, white or black, end quote.
That sounds all very well, but consider, the free man in a free society must also have
He must have control of the means of producing the bread.
He must have the right to earn it somewhere and to protect that right in the courts when it is violated.
But he cannot earn it at all in Lincoln's, Illinois, because the Constitution of that state prohibits his entrance.
And even if he's in the state, he's not a citizen, does not have use of the courts, and cannot vote, and severely restricted.
The right to earn, the right to eat the bread he's earned with his own hands, tell it like it is, Abe.
But he can't, you know, that's all very well, but that's an abstract thing that you can use to heat up passions.
You've got to be able to actually earn the bread somewhere and be able to go to court to protect your earnings.
On March 2nd, 1861, Congress passed what would have been the 13th Amendment.
This amendment protected slavery forever. No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said state.
You notice what that said. It didn't say that Congress will never have the authority to interfere with slavery. It didn't say that.
It said the Constitution can never be amended to give Congress the authority.
The only other place where it is said that the Constitution can't be amended is that every state has a right to equality in the Senate, equal representation in the Senate.
So what this amendment does is it ties slavery to the very idea of the Union.
It's internal to the Union.
If you suggest an amendment to abolish slavery via the Federal Government, you are throwing into question the Constitution itself.
Amazing, amazing. Lincoln approved it.
In his first inaugural, he says, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
Because he had always maintained just that.
So if the South had stayed in the Union, slavery would have continued as long as the states desired, as far as the Federal Government goes.
Now, as strange as it may seem, there was no serious political opposition to slavery throughout the entire antebellum period, at least not in the form of national political parties.
A few abolitionists were elected here and there in state elections, but no political party of any importance even raised the question of emancipation.
Van Buren's minute Free Soil Party did include a compensated emancipation plank, but it was flatly rejected at the polls, sort of like Pat Buchanan's try.
Nor were Lincoln and his associates above inciting racist fears and attacking Van Buren's courageous proposal.
The North didn't invade the South over the moral question of slavery.
This is clear. There was no national party arguing for emancipation.
Lincoln was opposed to emancipation and so on.
And slavery would have been protected by this constitutional amendment, the Dred Scott case protected slavery.
I mean, how could you protect it anymore than it was? So why do they secede?
The answer is a complicated one and cannot be even partly adequately taken up here, but it can be said right away, there was no single reason.
It's the first thing. It's a big region. Different states seceded for different reasons.
Just to give an example, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas voted to remain in the Union even after the Confederacy was formed.
They were strongly Unionist.
They reversed themselves only after Lincoln decided on invasion, which they considered both unconstitutional and immoral.
These four states certainly did not secede over slavery.
Now, here's another thing we think about. Had Jefferson lived in Madison and Washington, all those were pro-union people, had they lived to see that happen, had they lived to see Massachusetts troops coming over the border of Virginia, there's no question in my mind that Jefferson would have been a Confederate, that Madison would have been a Confederate, that George Washington would have been a Confederate. Even though these were Union men, because Virginia was a Union state, it always had an investment in the Union.
is that the South was American.
In other words, its secession was an American thing.
Whereas our nationalist historians have pictured the South as a kind of weird, crazy section
that tried to destroy the last best hope on earth so they could enslave human beings.
When you think of Jefferson as a confederate, you've got a real problem with understanding
Herman Melville puts it this way in a poem, if I can remember it correctly.
He who has seen Lee has seen Washington and must hide the thought, so fraught with grievous meaning is it wrought.
You've seen Lee, you've seen Washington, and you just have to suppress that.
If one had to pick one cause of secession around which the other causes revolved in orbit, it would have to be the 40-year long moral and constitutional conflict surrounding the Northern policy of imposing a protected tariff.
I don't think this was the major cause. I don't think there's a major cause. There are many, many causes, including people just getting sick of constant rancor in the air.
Sometimes there's just people you don't want to live with anymore.
If one had to pick one, okay, Charles Adams has written brilliantly on this.
His book is out there, Winning the Course of Human Events.
But British, it's interesting that British pundits such as Charles Dickens, as he points out,
Lord Acton and Karl Marx, all agreed on the basic cause of the war.
The War. Mark supported the North, but he had no illusions as to what the war was about.
Quote, the war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further not for
any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern
lust for sovereignty, end quote. What we have is the modern state getting the artificial
from 1820 to 1860, the United States was in a condition of bitter sectional conflict over tariff and surrounding issues.
As of 1860, about 75% of American exports were agricultural staples.
Nearly all of this came from the South and was exchanged for British and European manufactures.
The South raised little objection to a tariff in 1816 to pay off the debt for the War of 1812.
The result was a 25% tax on woolen, cotton and iron manufacturers.
A 30% ad valorem tax on various goods and a 15% duty on all other imports.
The 1816 tariff was to have expired in three years but was extended to 824.
Under this tariff, Northern profits on manufacturing climbed as high as 25%.
Charles Wiltz observes that, quote, tariff sentiment rose with rising profits. The protectionist
movement came to be as completely sectional as slavery itself, end quote. Now this spectacular
The labor increase in northern profits prompted an increase of the tariff in 1824.
The minimum duty on cotton goods, which had been set at 25%, was raised to over 33% for a stunning average rate of 37%.
South Carolina's economy depended almost entirely on exporting staples on an unprotected world market.
A year after the new tariff in 1824, the price of cotton dropped from 21 cents per pound to 12 cents a pound in one year.
The next year it dropped again to 8.8 cents a pound.
From 1825 to 1827, her exports declined from 11 million to 8 million.
Not satisfied, the North again raised the tariff to the unbelievable high average of 50% on
durable goods in 1828. This is called the Tariff of Abominations. Now this was done
in full knowledge of what it would do to the South Carolina export trade. The response
of South Carolina was nullification until the tariff came down to 10%. A compromise
was reached on durable goods at around 19%, eventually where it hovered until Lincoln's
Now, Lincoln ran on a Republican Party plank that proposed raising the tariff back to the high level that had prompted South Carolina's nullification, back to the tariff of abomination.
So this is... Not only that, but listen to what Southerners had to listen to. Wendell Phillips was a major leader in the Republican Party.
It is just what we have attempted to bring about. It is the first sectional party ever organized in the country. It does not really know its own face, and calls itself national. But it is not national, it is sectional. The Republican Party is a party of the North pledged against the South.
Now what historians will tell you is when the Republicans elected an anti-slavery president, the South seceded.
You're supposed to believe that they loved slavery so much that the mere whiff of anti-slavery drove them out.
None of this stuff is mentioned, that they had to listen to leading Republican leaders say this was a sectional party,
and the Republican party got no votes in the South. It was a sectional party.
Now it was clear to the South that the North would use its majority in Congress to pursue its interests, even if it meant wrecking the southern export trade.
Accordingly, South Carolina succeeded and Congress immediately raised the tariff to 47% average on durable goods on March 6, 1861, before Fort Sumter.
Lincoln said that South Carolina could stay in the Union if it liked, but he would collect the revenue.
Like Rome, the North would live by tribute.
Lincoln sent troops to Fort Sumter where the tariff was collected.
South Carolina resisted paying tribute to the Union, and as their fathers before them had done,
they drove the tax-collecting military from the fort with no casualties.
None of this had anything whatsoever to do with the moral issue of slavery.
If you go to Charleston on East Bay Street, right on the water, you'll see a huge, the biggest building there, a huge marble building, the U.S. Customs House.
Look at it sometimes. It kind of looks like the Lincoln Memorial.
Okay, I'm not going to read any more about the tariff business, I think you get the point of that.
Lincoln was a Hamiltonian mercantilist, which you'd learn from Clay.
I want to turn now to the Northern abolitionist argument that secession of the North was the best way to solve the problem of slavery.
And Jeffrey Hummel, of course, has written a wonderful book on this, Emancipating Slaves and Enslaving Free Men.
To appreciate this, let's consider what would most likely have happened if the South had not succeeded.
Now again, our subject is the moral issue of slavery. This is what we're thinking about.
The Constitutional Amendment making it impossible to change the Constitution to allow Congress to interfere with slavery would have been ratified by the states.
No question about it.
Slavery would last as long as the states wanted to, and the federal government would have no power.
How long did Lincoln think it might last?
He said it might last a century, he just didn't want it to go west, he didn't want any blacks in the west, that was the problem.
But in the south it could last a century, work its way out.
He drew up a private emancipation bill for Delaware, which was never published, in which the apprenticeship period was quite long.
On his scheme, slavery would not have been eliminated until 1914.
In his State of the Union Address, December 1st, 1862, he proposed what would have been
another 13th Amendment to the Constitution that required slavery be abolished January
1st, 1900.
His proposed 14th Amendment would compensate slaveholders who had remained loyal to the
These were presented before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Had the South stayed in the Union, slavery would have had an ironclad protection and could have easily stretched into the 20th century if Southern states had desired it.
What would have been the prospects of emancipation in the South had the Confederacy secured its independence?
It is reasonable to think that the South would have abolished slavery in a reasonable period of time and probably sooner than the schedule projected by Lincoln.
By the 1880s slavery had entirely vanished from the Western Hemisphere.
Only in Haiti, in the United States, was its abolition accompanied by violence.
There had long been an abolitionist tradition in the South, especially in Virginia.
By 1830, there were more abolitionist societies in the South than in the North.
In 1832, the Virginia legislature was called by the governor to do something about slavery.
It passed a resolution to abolish slavery in Virginia, but ran into difficulties when writing the statute.
The bill was tabled.
It was just at this time that the abolitionist frenzy swept down from the North, urging immediate
and uncompensated emancipation.
The circulation of pamphlets, urging a slave uprising, poisoning water in the wells, murdering
the families of planters in their sleep, as John Brown did and was praised for doing,
did not strengthen the moderate forces of abolition in the South.
Thomas Hart Benton, who had worked to secure the right of a jury trial for slaves in Missouri,
Sirfdom, a European form of slavery, was abolished in England not by statute, but over centuries by judicial review under the common law.
A great deal of Southern jurisprudence was rooted in this principle.
Let me explain it. The principle was laid down in common law by Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in Somerset's case, 1771, namely that slavery, being a violation of natural law, could be justified only by positive statute, and that such statutes must be strictly construed in the light of natural law.
So if you had any wiggle room, you nudged the statute for interpretation, you nudged it in the direction of natural law.
To take an instance, a Virginia statute provided that, quote, slaves shall hereafter be brought into this commonwealth and kept therein one year or so long, at different times as shall amount to one year, shall be free, end quote.
But the statue had a proviso that excluded a slaveholder from another state who had become a citizen of Virginia and took a specified oath within a certain period of time.
In Murray v. McCarty, 1811, Judge Joseph Cable construed the proviso strictly so as to grant a slave, Nancy Murray, her freedom.
Chief Justice William Gaston of the North Carolina Supreme Court in State vs. Manual, 1838, carried the principle of strict construction and the direction of freedom so far as to hold that whenever a slave became free by any lawful means, he also became a citizen of his state with the same rights as other citizens.
Now, recall that Lincoln was opposed to making black citizens in his state. He said, quote,
the state of Illinois has the power, or no, to make, yes, to have the power to make black citizens, I should be opposed to the exercise of it, end quote.
Dred Scott sought his freedom and that of his wife and daughters in a suit brought before the Circuit Court of Missouri.
The Southern Court granted Scott his freedom and his family, basing the decision on a long chain of precedents in Southern state courts rooted in Lord Mansfield's ruling in the Somerset case of 1771.
That a slave entering territory where slavery is prohibited by law is instantly free.
Scott lost his freedom when the case went to the Supreme Court of the United States on appeal in 1857.
So you have a lot of cases where slaveholders lose in the state courts in the South and then they win when they appeal to the federal courts.
Free blacks flourished in the South as businessmen, slaveholders, there were a number of slaveholders, about 6% of free blacks were slaveholders.
One quarter of the blacks in New Orleans were free. In many places, especially urban areas, slavery was developing into an apprenticeship system and slaves were able to buy or work out their freedom.
William Gilmore Sims of Charleston, South Carolina was the greatest Southern literary figure and planter. He thought slavery was a benevolent institution.
But he had no difficulty in abandoning it either, should circumstances change.
In the 1850s he argued that slavery would be eliminated in the border states in about 20 years.
His reason was that the border states, quote, will become manufacturing, end quote.
It's elimination of the deep south, he thought, would take longer.
His prediction was reasonable. By 1860, about half the blacks in Maryland were free, not by statute,
but by having purchased their freedom through apprenticeship.
Just a few other examples.
Well, I won't mention Jefferson Davis' wife adopted a young black boy at seven years old who was being abused, he was an orphan.
She took out papers for his freedom and they adopted him into the family.
He lived, slept and ate and played with the Davis children as a member of the family in the Confederate White House during the years they were in Richmond.
The Union Army seized him by force when Davis was captured and despite Mr. Davis' efforts over the years,
to find him and to quote, look after Jim's education, end quote, he was never heard from again.
You can read the letters the children wrote back and forth to him and about him.
That Lincoln, who never did anything in Illinois to improve the conditions of blacks, would
have freed and adopted a black orphan and raised him up with his own children in the starkly
segregated north of Washington is unimaginable.
Finally, the long-suppressed story of blacks who identified themselves as Southerners were loyal to the Confederacy and saw the war as an opportunity to improve their condition as gradually becoming known.
Blacks were used by Confederates both as workers and as troops before they were so used by the North.
Blacks were everywhere in the Confederate Army. When white regiments marched off to war, they were often accompanied by an equal number of blacks.
For example, there were some 30,000 body servants in the Army of Northern Virginia alone.
in Virginia alone.
Given the informality of Confederate units, some of these and other blacks served in
military capacities.
An Afro-American scholar recently observed, quote, when you eliminate the black Confederate
soldier, you've eliminated the history of the South.
We share a common heritage with white Southerners who recall that era.
We shared in the plantation scheme of things as well as the forces that fought to keep
them, end quote.
Nor should this be surprising as another Afro-American scholar observed, quote,
Students of African-American history should have been able to predict with a great degree
of certitude that some, if not most, black southerners would support their country as
did most white southerners during the Revolutionary War.
Black and white fought on both sides, demonstrating that it is possible to hate the system of
slavery and love one's country, end quote.
Irvin L. Jordan, another African American pioneer in black confederates,
has estimated that up to 25 percent, 65,000 out of 261,000 free Negroes in the South,
and 15 percent, 600,000 out of 4 million slaves, actively supported the South in its struggle for independence.
and it was this use of blacks that so irritated northerners and urged Lincoln to arm blacks
because here the south are using the blacks so we need to subvert their war effort.
Early in the war Confederate commanders such as Patrick Claiborne had argued for arming
blacks as early as August 1863 the Jackson Mississippian insisted that slavery should
should not be, quote, a barrier to our independence.
If it is found in the way, if it proves an insurmountable object to the achievement of
our liberty and separate nationality, away with it, let it perish, end quote.
Later the Confederate cabinet agreed to abolish slavery five years after the end of hostilities
in exchange for British and French recognition.
Now finally, in the last year, the Congress authorized raising 300,000 black troops.
Some states were already raising black troops. Jefferson Davis issued order number 14, which
required that slaves be fully emancipated and treated equally with whites. Quote, no
slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation
of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a free man.
And again in the order he says, quote, all officers are enjoined to a provident, considerate
and Humane Attention to Whatever Concerns the Health, Comfort, Instruction and Discipline of these Troops and to the Uniform Observance of Kindness, Forbearance and Indulgence in their Treatment of Them, and especially that they will protect them from Injustice and Depression, end quote. And unlike Black Union Troops, they receive equal pay. Okay, let me just end now because we're getting to the... What is missing from nearly all American history
The historyography is the humanity of the South, I mean, the South aren't human beings, they're just cardboard figures stuck as in a Byzantine mosaic to explain American, self-congratulatory American nationalism.
There aren't any blacks there that love their country and would be willing to move up and help.
Most Southerners who could rethink things, they were just stuck in this artificial creation that American nationalism needs.
There were 10,000 Jews that fought in the Confederacy. The five civilized Indian tribes of Oklahoma fought for the Confederacy.
They were represented in the Confederate Congress and in a rare act of magnanimity in American Indian relations were promised a state,
Not a Federal Reservation, but their own state. Indians would have their own state if the Confederacy gained its independence.
Okay, nearly all American historiography after 1865 is nationalist. This is what we've got to fight.
And based on the moral assumption that the Union should have been preserved at all costs,
In the 19th century, the heyday of empire and wars of unification and consolidation,
an American empire might have seen something worth trying.
But we have learned since then, through fatal experience,
about the evils of vast-scale modern states and what they bring in their wake.
Libertarians should begin a new historiography, rooted in the moral proposition
that secession in 1860 was a good thing.
It was the only rational and humane solution to all the problems confronting the Federation at that time.
When two men are about to come to blows, it's best to separate.
To write the history from the assumption that the peaceful dissolution of the Union in 1860 was a good thing
would bring to light a vast array of facts and moral possibilities
and spectacular moral losses that have been hidden from view.
This is what a paradigm shift does. It brings new things out.
It would open up new political possibilities that are today closed off because of the limits.
Because the limits of politics are in large part the limits of human historical self-understanding.
A lack of moral imagination prevents us from even entertaining this thought.
A disability brought on by over a century of state-enforced national propaganda.
How might we ask that there be two unions and a land from sea to shining sea?
Old 19th century nationalist habits are hard to break, even when their rationale has vanished.
But suppose America had conquered Canada, as was attempted on at least two occasions.
Suppose now that the Canadian states and legally called conventions of the people should secede,
leaving Alaska disconnected from the continental United States.
One can hear the objections.
The Austrian arrangement could never work.
Canada would not be viable.
What about defense?
There would be constant war between the two states, as in Europe.
And what about detached Alaska?
But in fact, the arrangement works quite well.
Every possible scenario brought forth to exhibit the horrors that would have occurred
if secession of the South had been allowed or dwarfed by the actual horrors that occurred in suppressing it.
And let me just read this last passage, a little longer than passage.
Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, had been a unionist who nevertheless believed in the right of the state to succeed.
After the war, he looked into the future and thought he saw a dark era of consolidationism emerging in Europe and the modern world,
what we would later know as eventually totalitarianism.
And he took comfort in the fact that the South had not only resisted this disposition of the modern state to centralize power,
but it erected constitutional principles to prevent it.
If you want to know why the South seceded, just read the Confederate Constitution.
It's a constitution designed to prevent decentralization.
Don't pay any attention to the pundits.
Don't listen to anything Stevens or Davis. Just read the Constitution.
That's why they seceded.
Then he said this, quote, depend upon it, echoing the language of Jefferson and the anti-Federalists, quote,
There is no difference between consolidation and empire, no difference between centralism and imperialism.
If the worst is to befall us, if our most serious apprehensions and gloomiest forebodings as to the future in this respect are to be realized,
If Centralism is ultimately to prevail, if our entire system of free institutions as
established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an empire is to be established
in their stead, if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being
enacted, then be assured that we of the South will be acquitted not only in our own consciences
but by the judgment of mankind of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe and from all
the guilt of so great a crime against humanity."
Stevens had no idea how great the crimes against humanity would be that future modern consolidationisms
would have to answer for, nor how long it would take for historians to free themselves
from the Legitimating Myths and Ideologies in Which Consolidationism Has Wrapped Itself.