WEBVTT NOTE Secession and the American Experience 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.360 Today the subject gets more radical still. 2 00:00:03.360 --> 00:00:06.720 The subject is the general one of secession. 3 00:00:06.720 --> 00:00:11.000 And I'm going to try to tailor my remarks in such a way 4 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:13.400 that they don't touch specifically 5 00:00:13.400 --> 00:00:18.560 on the southern secession of 1860-61, 6 00:00:18.560 --> 00:00:20.720 but instead try to speak more generally 7 00:00:20.720 --> 00:00:23.080 about secession itself as a phenomenon. 8 00:00:23.080 --> 00:00:25.040 Because then next week we talk about the war 9 00:00:25.040 --> 00:00:27.000 and we'll try and confine most of that, 10 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:29.160 if not all, to that session. 11 00:00:29.160 --> 00:00:40.160 But today I want to speak more generally about secession and whether it's legal or not, under the Constitution, and then proceed from there and see where that takes us. 12 00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:50.160 Because in order to discuss this subject, you have to know a lot of American history, so you learn a lot of it, I think, along the way, even if this is not an immediately practical discussion. 13 00:00:50.160 --> 00:00:58.160 In other words, I don't expect a lot of states to announce that they're seceding in the next couple of weeks. 14 00:00:58.160 --> 00:01:00.160 So it's not an immediately practical discussion. 15 00:01:00.160 --> 00:01:06.160 But in the course of the discussion, I think a lot of important truths about American history come forth. 16 00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:19.160 So I start off by briefly discussing two different competing theories that have existed, well, practically since the beginning of the history of the U.S. anyway. 17 00:01:19.160 --> 00:01:24.160 over the nature of the union of the states that was formed under the Constitution. 18 00:01:24.160 --> 00:01:30.160 And these two theories might be called the Nationalist Theory and the Compact Theory. 19 00:01:30.160 --> 00:01:42.160 The Compact Theory, I'll start with first, is one that is shared by Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun 20 00:01:42.160 --> 00:01:46.160 and other important thinkers in the American tradition. 21 00:01:46.160 --> 00:01:51.700 The lesser thinkers probably don't deserve to be lesser, like John Taylor of Caroline 22 00:01:51.700 --> 00:01:57.040 and St. George Tucker, who were great Virginians. These are the main theorists of what we would 23 00:01:57.040 --> 00:02:02.280 call the compact theory. The compact theory just simply holds that the United States was 24 00:02:02.280 --> 00:02:08.080 the creation of separate states, thirteen to be exact at the beginning, and that the 25 00:02:08.080 --> 00:02:14.480 nature of the Federal Union is necessarily plural. In other words, it is grammatically 26 00:02:14.480 --> 00:02:19.080 The correct, according to the compact theory, to speak of the United States in the following 27 00:02:19.080 --> 00:02:24.560 way, to say the United States are a nice place to live, because the emphasis is on the plurality 28 00:02:24.560 --> 00:02:30.920 of the union. It is composed of a series of states. That's the central thesis of the compact 29 00:02:30.920 --> 00:02:36.800 theory. And the argument is that these states sent delegates to the Constitutional Convention 30 00:02:36.800 --> 00:02:44.000 in 1787. Those delegates drew up the Constitution, and then that Constitution was returned singly 31 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:51.280 to each state for ratification. So each state, except Rhode Island, sent delegates to the 32 00:02:51.280 --> 00:02:58.560 Constitutional Convention and then each state voted as a state to ratify the Constitution. 33 00:02:58.560 --> 00:03:04.120 If some state had not voted to accept the Constitution, there would have been no legal 34 00:03:04.120 --> 00:03:08.660 or moral claim upon them on the part of the other states. Rhode Island stayed out of the 35 00:03:08.660 --> 00:03:15.500 of the Union for two years after the necessary nine states had ratified by 1788, but nobody 36 00:03:15.500 --> 00:03:22.020 seriously thought that the Constitution bound Rhode Island at that point. If that state's 37 00:03:22.020 --> 00:03:26.860 people had not used their sovereign voice to ratify the Constitution, then it did not 38 00:03:26.860 --> 00:03:32.020 bind them at that time. So that's the nature of the compact theory, that the United States 39 00:03:32.020 --> 00:03:38.060 is formed by separate sovereign states that then delegate to the United States certain 40 00:03:38.060 --> 00:03:52.060 The other theory is called the Nationalist Theory, and here we may cite people like Alexander Hamilton, 41 00:03:52.060 --> 00:04:02.060 be more likely to support this idea, Daniel Webster, and even Abraham Lincoln himself as famous expositors of this theory. 42 00:04:02.060 --> 00:04:07.060 And this view is that the United States was not formed by a group of states. 43 00:04:07.060 --> 00:04:11.060 It's not fundamentally something that's plural, but it is fundamentally singular. 44 00:04:11.060 --> 00:04:18.060 The United States is. And thus, according to the nationalist theory, 45 00:04:18.060 --> 00:04:25.060 the United States is a single whole. It is a single aggregate of individuals. 46 00:04:25.060 --> 00:04:30.060 It is not a plurality of independent states retaining their sovereignty. 47 00:04:30.060 --> 00:04:47.060 Now this has this distinction between the nationalist and compact theories is essential to understanding the question of secession or of nullification as we mentioned a couple of weeks ago and indeed of understanding much of early American history. 48 00:04:47.060 --> 00:04:55.060 Because depending on which of the two theories you support that's going to influence heavily how you think about these other matters. 49 00:04:55.060 --> 00:05:01.060 Now, the compact theorists have a very good rhetorical point in their favor, 50 00:05:01.060 --> 00:05:07.060 which happens to be the fact that the Constitution was ratified by each state individually. 51 00:05:07.060 --> 00:05:14.060 There was no national vote of a single American people, but rather each state voted individually. 52 00:05:14.060 --> 00:05:21.060 So that would seem to suggest that the Constitution and the Union that it created was formed by states, 53 00:05:21.060 --> 00:05:24.060 Because it really was formed by a single aggregate of the people, 54 00:05:24.060 --> 00:05:27.460 then why didn't that single aggregate vote to ratify it? 55 00:05:27.460 --> 00:05:29.360 Well, I mean, I would suggest, because at that time, 56 00:05:29.360 --> 00:05:32.160 no one thought of that single aggregate as having any authority. 57 00:05:32.160 --> 00:05:38.060 The authority rested in the sovereign peoples of each of the individual states. 58 00:05:38.060 --> 00:05:42.460 The nationalist theorists would argue that there is no significance whatever 59 00:05:42.460 --> 00:05:46.260 in the fact that the Constitution was ratified by states. 60 00:05:46.260 --> 00:05:47.860 According to the nationalist theorists, 61 00:05:47.860 --> 00:05:52.860 The Constitution is a creation of the whole people, taken as a single aggregate, 62 00:05:52.860 --> 00:05:57.360 and that the fact that it was ratified by states was really only a matter of convenience. 63 00:05:57.360 --> 00:06:00.360 How else were we going to ratify it? So we did it by state. 64 00:06:00.360 --> 00:06:05.360 But that manner of ratification, according to them, does not affect the character of the union, 65 00:06:05.360 --> 00:06:13.360 which is fundamentally singular in nature, a single aggregate rather than separate sovereign states. 66 00:06:13.360 --> 00:06:19.360 Now, when I say that depending on which of these theories you accept, 67 00:06:19.360 --> 00:06:23.360 you're more likely to take one or the other position on other matters, 68 00:06:23.360 --> 00:06:26.360 let me put some meat on that statement, 69 00:06:26.360 --> 00:06:30.360 and I think you can see that if you are a compact theorist, 70 00:06:30.360 --> 00:06:34.360 it is much more likely that you would favor remedies like nullification 71 00:06:34.360 --> 00:06:37.360 or even the ultimate remedy of secession. 72 00:06:37.360 --> 00:06:39.360 We'll take secession first. 73 00:06:39.360 --> 00:06:44.360 If you believe that initially the peoples of the states were sovereign, 74 00:06:44.360 --> 00:06:50.360 not some aggregate of the American people, but the peoples of the individual states were sovereign, 75 00:06:50.360 --> 00:06:56.360 and those peoples delegated certain powers to the federal government, entered into this union, 76 00:06:56.360 --> 00:07:02.360 well then it's more likely that you would believe that if those peoples of those states decided to enter the union, 77 00:07:02.360 --> 00:07:08.360 then also in their sovereign capacity they could voluntarily choose to withdraw from that union. 78 00:07:08.360 --> 00:07:12.760 Union. It does seem to follow from the nature of the compact theory that if one 79 00:07:12.760 --> 00:07:16.400 exceeds to the union through ratification one can withdraw from it 80 00:07:16.400 --> 00:07:20.080 through secession through the same mechanism that is the expression of the 81 00:07:20.080 --> 00:07:25.840 will of the sovereign people. Likewise it's easy to understand why a compact 82 00:07:25.840 --> 00:07:31.040 theorist would favor nullification because again the emphasis is on the 83 00:07:31.040 --> 00:07:35.900 states as the prime movers in the constitutional drama. They create the 84 00:07:35.900 --> 00:07:56.400 The Federal Government, they endow it with certain limited powers, and therefore, to protect their own people, the states retain the right as the, in effect, representatives of the sovereign people of their state, to protect their people against any unconstitutional power grabs on the part of the Federal Government. 85 00:07:56.400 --> 00:08:03.400 These things seem to follow from the compact theory, whereas from the point of view of the nationalist theory, both of these would be illegitimate. 86 00:08:03.400 --> 00:08:07.960 From the nationalist point of view, if the United States is fundamentally a single whole, 87 00:08:07.960 --> 00:08:10.960 then no state can withdraw from it, because it's a single whole. 88 00:08:10.960 --> 00:08:13.480 It would be artificial for one state to withdraw from it. 89 00:08:13.480 --> 00:08:17.380 No state or no people of a state retains any sovereignty. 90 00:08:17.380 --> 00:08:20.900 The sovereignty is held in common, jointly, by all the people. 91 00:08:20.900 --> 00:08:25.240 And so secession is therefore illegitimate and even an act of treason under this way 92 00:08:25.240 --> 00:08:27.040 of thinking. 93 00:08:27.040 --> 00:08:31.840 Even worse would be nullification, because for a nationalist theorist, again, because 94 00:08:31.840 --> 00:08:35.860 Because they don't believe the states retain any sovereign authority, nullification would 95 00:08:35.860 --> 00:08:39.980 be simple insubordination. There would be no other way you could conceive of it if you 96 00:08:39.980 --> 00:08:45.520 held the nationalist view. So these are in some ways incompatible theories and yet they 97 00:08:45.520 --> 00:08:50.160 were held by people living in the same country for a good long time. So it's perhaps not 98 00:08:50.160 --> 00:08:57.360 surprising that ultimately these two theories came to blows at one point. 99 00:08:57.360 --> 00:09:04.120 Now the nationalist position depends on the idea that the thirteen states that emerged 100 00:09:04.120 --> 00:09:10.520 from the war for independence from Britain and then joined together to draft the Constitution, 101 00:09:10.520 --> 00:09:16.120 ultimately in some way constituted one single people. 102 00:09:16.120 --> 00:09:21.240 The compact theorists argue that the thirteen states were very, very thirteen. 103 00:09:21.240 --> 00:09:23.280 We can think of thirteen as an adjective. 104 00:09:23.280 --> 00:09:25.640 They were extremely thirteen. 105 00:09:25.640 --> 00:09:55.640 The thing they did was thirteen-ish in the sense that every one of these states, as of 1783 or even in the years prior to that, they had their own elections, people in other states couldn't participate in them, they ran their own governments, they had their own militias, they were not responsible to or they did not owe any service to any other state, they were absolutely independent of each other, they were in no sense a single people in that way. But the nationalist view is that no, 106 00:09:55.640 --> 00:10:05.640 The 13 states did constitute a single people, and that's why we can say that the Constitution is the creation of a single aggregated people. 107 00:10:05.640 --> 00:10:14.640 Well, this is really the nub of the whole dispute, because at what point do these 13 states become a single people, if that is what is going to be claimed? 108 00:10:14.640 --> 00:10:18.640 When does this happen? And this is the problem. 109 00:10:18.640 --> 00:10:26.640 It's very difficult to pinpoint a moment at which these 13 separate independent states became a single people. 110 00:10:26.640 --> 00:10:35.640 Now, in fact, we note that in 1783, when the War for Independence was officially concluded with the treaty with Britain, 111 00:10:35.640 --> 00:10:40.640 the British acknowledged in the treaty the 13 separate states and listed them by name. 112 00:10:40.640 --> 00:10:44.640 They listed them individually by name and referred to them in the plural, 113 00:10:44.640 --> 00:10:49.640 We are acknowledging the independence of the following entities, 114 00:10:49.640 --> 00:10:54.640 not of a single consolidated blob. 115 00:10:54.640 --> 00:10:58.640 We have the fact that the initial document drawn up by these states, 116 00:10:58.640 --> 00:11:04.640 known as the Articles of Confederation, drawn up in 1777, ratified in 1781, 117 00:11:04.640 --> 00:11:07.640 even before the conclusion of the war with Britain, 118 00:11:07.640 --> 00:11:11.640 this initial document, which was later replaced by the Constitution of course, 119 00:11:11.640 --> 00:11:25.640 said this, each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence and every power, jurisdiction and right which is not by this constitution expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled. 120 00:11:25.640 --> 00:11:36.640 So here we have a formative document in the American tradition speaking of the states as retaining their sovereignty, freedom and independence which strongly indicates that they had had it already. 121 00:11:36.640 --> 00:11:39.600 This document is not granting them sovereignty. 122 00:11:39.600 --> 00:11:42.280 They possess the sovereignty and they are retaining it. 123 00:11:42.280 --> 00:11:46.420 So each state retains its sovereign status according to the Articles of Confederation. 124 00:11:46.420 --> 00:11:49.480 So they remain very 13 at that point. 125 00:11:49.480 --> 00:11:54.580 There is still, as of 1781, no indication that the 13 have become one. 126 00:11:54.580 --> 00:11:59.600 And throughout the 1780s we see independent states carrying out functions that seem to 127 00:11:59.600 --> 00:12:04.640 indicate that they are each sovereign and not having any direct political connection 128 00:12:04.640 --> 00:12:05.640 to any other. 129 00:12:05.640 --> 00:12:35.640 Now, the argument was raised that in some way, our common tradition together as members of the British Empire answering to the same sovereign, namely the British government and the king, this in effect rendered us one people, because of our common experience and our common allegiance that was owed to that single sovereign, that made the Americans one people, that in a way is why Abraham Lincoln could say, four score and seven years ago and then say, 130 00:12:35.640 --> 00:12:39.840 They then speak of our fathers bringing forth a new nation. 131 00:12:39.840 --> 00:12:45.300 He was thinking of those 13 peoples having become one in 1776. 132 00:12:45.300 --> 00:12:49.140 But compact theorists have come back at that and said, 133 00:12:49.140 --> 00:12:54.320 if that's true, that we became one people because, well, we were all British colonies together, 134 00:12:54.320 --> 00:12:57.660 then why are we not one people with Canada and Jamaica? 135 00:12:57.660 --> 00:13:00.840 That we're also British colonies and also answer to the same sovereign. 136 00:13:00.840 --> 00:13:04.120 Of course we're not one people with them. 137 00:13:04.120 --> 00:13:09.640 Were Britain and Spain and Gaul, were they one people because they were all Roman provinces 138 00:13:09.640 --> 00:13:13.880 during the time of the Roman Empire, was another argument that compact theorists raised. 139 00:13:13.880 --> 00:13:16.920 Well of course not, they were separate peoples. 140 00:13:16.920 --> 00:13:22.760 And a very significant argument was raised by a Virginia legal thinker who was very often 141 00:13:22.760 --> 00:13:24.760 overlooked named Abel Upsher. 142 00:13:24.760 --> 00:13:30.160 Upsher, in addition to being a great jurist, also served brief terms as Secretary of State 143 00:13:30.160 --> 00:13:33.280 and of the Navy in the early 1840s. 144 00:13:33.280 --> 00:13:38.680 And Upsher said, suppose one colony had held aloof from the independence movement and had 145 00:13:38.680 --> 00:13:44.000 not chosen to separate from Britain. Would the other colonies have had the moral or legal 146 00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:50.120 right to coerce that colony into participating in the independence movement on the grounds 147 00:13:50.120 --> 00:13:55.080 that that colony constituted one people with the rest of the colonies? Well, he suggested 148 00:13:55.080 --> 00:14:00.160 to ask the question is to answer it. Of course, this is an absurd proposition. It would have 149 00:14:00.160 --> 00:14:06.160 have been completely unjust to coerce any other colony, precisely because they were separate. 150 00:14:06.160 --> 00:14:09.160 They were not a single people. 151 00:14:09.160 --> 00:14:13.160 Well, that's a disputed point that one could go on at great length about. 152 00:14:13.160 --> 00:14:18.160 But what I want to suggest to you, at least, is that there are these two theories. 153 00:14:18.160 --> 00:14:22.160 Where you come down on these two theories is going to typically influence 154 00:14:22.160 --> 00:14:28.160 where your sympathies are going to lie in relation to issues like secession and the rights of the states. 155 00:14:28.160 --> 00:14:40.160 And I think by implication, my own view that the compact theory is, I think, a much more accurate rendering of what actually happened in the formation of the American Union. 156 00:14:40.160 --> 00:14:46.160 Let me move on now, briefly, to say just a couple of, make a couple of brief points about Abraham Lincoln, 157 00:14:46.160 --> 00:14:52.160 but we're going to speak about him much, much greater length next week, so I forbid us to go off on this tangent. 158 00:14:52.160 --> 00:14:57.480 I exclude myself from that proviso. I'm going to go off on the tangent for just a few moments 159 00:14:57.480 --> 00:15:03.840 to lead into the final point for today, which is the broader philosophical significance 160 00:15:03.840 --> 00:15:10.280 of the phenomenon of secession. Now, any discussion of the civil war or, again, war between the 161 00:15:10.280 --> 00:15:15.480 states or however you like to call it, must begin with a point that any professional historian 162 00:15:15.480 --> 00:15:21.240 will concede, but which most Americans probably don't realize, which is that Abraham Lincoln 163 00:15:21.240 --> 00:15:26.620 did not launch his invasion of the southern states in 1861 to abolish slavery. 164 00:15:26.620 --> 00:15:28.480 He said that over and over again. 165 00:15:28.480 --> 00:15:32.680 He said that his aim was to keep the union together. 166 00:15:32.680 --> 00:15:39.640 Now in doing so, he wound up with a million and a half people dead, wounded or missing. 167 00:15:39.640 --> 00:15:44.400 In fact, Lincoln even said in his first inaugural address that he would support a constitutional 168 00:15:44.400 --> 00:15:49.200 amendment that would forever prohibit the federal government from ever interfering with 169 00:15:49.200 --> 00:15:50.960 the institution of slavery. 170 00:15:50.960 --> 00:15:56.320 if that kind of promise would be what was necessary to keep the union together. 171 00:15:56.320 --> 00:16:01.080 The comic book version of Lincoln to which most school children are exposed regularly 172 00:16:01.080 --> 00:16:05.860 portrays him likewise as a champion of racial equality. 173 00:16:05.860 --> 00:16:11.120 But in a debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln argued that a physical difference 174 00:16:11.120 --> 00:16:15.800 between the white and black races prevented them ever from living on terms of social and 175 00:16:15.800 --> 00:16:20.360 political equality, and that inasmuch as they could not so live, he favored assigning the 176 00:16:20.360 --> 00:16:23.360 and the superior position to the white race. 177 00:16:23.360 --> 00:16:37.360 In his home state of Illinois, Lincoln did nothing during his career to challenge that state's treatment of blacks who could not vote, testify in court against whites, or attend a public school system funded in part by their own tax dollars. 178 00:16:37.360 --> 00:16:41.360 Neither were Southerners uniformly in favor of slavery. 179 00:16:41.360 --> 00:16:47.360 Southern generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee opposed slavery, describing it as a moral and political evil. 180 00:16:47.360 --> 00:16:55.360 James Henley Thornwell, one of the most influential southern theologians, put forth a plan for gradual emancipation at the time of the war. 181 00:16:55.360 --> 00:17:04.360 The letters and diaries of southern soldiers revealed that most of them believed they were fighting on behalf of the principle of national self-determination and the right of self-government, 182 00:17:04.360 --> 00:17:09.360 the same principles they believed the American revolutionaries had fought to defend. 183 00:17:09.360 --> 00:17:16.360 Moreover, every other country in the western hemisphere that abolished slavery in the 19th century managed to do so peacefully. 184 00:17:16.360 --> 00:17:25.360 The money spent to wage the Civil War could have purchased the freedom of every single slave and given them all 40 acres and a mule. 185 00:17:25.360 --> 00:17:32.360 So, in short, the matter is not nearly as neat and tidy as the popular caricature would suggest. 186 00:17:32.360 --> 00:17:37.360 Now, it is true that Lincoln's informed defenders will generally concede all of this 187 00:17:37.360 --> 00:17:44.360 and have the honesty to admit that when Lincoln initially called up those first 75,000 militiamen in 1861 188 00:17:44.360 --> 00:17:50.360 to put down the alleged rebellion in the South, he had no intention of waging a war to abolish slavery. 189 00:17:51.360 --> 00:17:58.360 What they argue and said is that as the war progressed, the meaning of the Northern War effort evolved in Lincoln's mind, 190 00:17:58.360 --> 00:18:02.360 becoming a war not only for the Union but also for human liberation. 191 00:18:03.360 --> 00:18:08.360 The more mystical among them suggests that this had in some sense been the war's purpose all along, 192 00:18:08.360 --> 00:18:16.360 But that it was only gradually that Lincoln himself became aware of the significance of the historical moment into which he had been placed. 193 00:18:16.360 --> 00:18:23.360 But there's no reason, it seems to me, that this type of argument should be raised only on behalf of the Northern cause and not for the Southern. 194 00:18:23.360 --> 00:18:29.360 In other words, isn't it possible that the South's own self-understanding also evolved over the course of the war? 195 00:18:29.360 --> 00:18:34.360 So thus, even if some people did believe they had seceded over slavery, as some certainly did, 196 00:18:34.360 --> 00:18:42.360 Is it not possible that they too may eventually have begun to appreciate larger issues at stake in the conflict just as Lincoln is said to have done? 197 00:18:42.360 --> 00:18:49.360 And here I have to refer to the work of a man I'm privileged to call my friend, Donald Livingston of Emory University, 198 00:18:49.360 --> 00:18:55.360 who has identified one of these larger issues that was at stake in the war but that so often is overlooked. 199 00:18:55.360 --> 00:19:04.360 Livingston points out that in the modern age we have seen what Livingston, for lack of a better term, calls federative polities, 200 00:19:04.360 --> 00:19:08.360 which I'll get to that in a minute, giving way to modern states. 201 00:19:08.360 --> 00:19:11.360 What is a federative polity and what is the modern state? 202 00:19:11.360 --> 00:19:20.360 A federative polity is one in which a variety of smaller jurisdictions exist, like families, voluntary organizations, towns and states, 203 00:19:20.360 --> 00:19:25.360 and in Medieval Europe institutions like guilds, universities and the church. 204 00:19:25.360 --> 00:19:29.360 Each of these social authorities has powers and rights of its own 205 00:19:29.360 --> 00:19:32.360 that the central government cannot overturn. 206 00:19:32.360 --> 00:19:37.360 Each of them is also a potential source of corporate resistance to the central government. 207 00:19:37.360 --> 00:19:42.360 Prior to the rise of the modern state political leaders who desired centralization 208 00:19:42.360 --> 00:19:49.360 therefore found themselves up against the historic liberties of towns, guilds, universities, the church and similar corporate bodies. 209 00:19:49.360 --> 00:19:57.360 Today we live in a time when people have been taught to disparage all things medieval as primitive, backward, and oppressive, 210 00:19:57.360 --> 00:20:01.360 which by the way is a view that no medievalist worth his salt would adopt today. 211 00:20:01.360 --> 00:20:08.360 But it was in the federative polities of medieval Europe that the Western practice of liberty began to take root. 212 00:20:08.360 --> 00:20:15.360 It is significant that following the dissolution of the Roman Empire, no continent-wide empire took its place. 213 00:20:15.360 --> 00:20:32.360 Ralph Reiko, who is a historian associated with the Institute, points out that instead of experiencing the hegemony of a universal empire, Europe evolved into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains and other entities. 214 00:20:32.360 --> 00:20:41.360 A long line of scholars have argued that it was the decentralized nature of European political life beginning in the Middle Ages that contributed to the development of liberty. 215 00:20:41.360 --> 00:20:48.360 The multiplicity of jurisdictions meant that the prince risked losing population and therefore his tax base 216 00:20:48.360 --> 00:20:53.360 if he engaged in excessive taxation or interference in his people's economic lives. 217 00:20:53.360 --> 00:20:58.360 They could simply move to another political unit close by if their own became too oppressive. 218 00:20:58.360 --> 00:21:06.360 The very idea of sovereignty, according to which every political order must possess a single irresistible voice, 219 00:21:06.360 --> 00:21:10.360 competent and forceful enough to make its will felt throughout society, 220 00:21:10.360 --> 00:21:13.880 was essentially alien to medieval thought and practice. 221 00:21:13.880 --> 00:21:18.080 Institutions other than the central government possessed rights that no sovereign, 222 00:21:18.080 --> 00:21:22.760 whether a king or a democratic majority, could simply overturn at will. 223 00:21:22.760 --> 00:21:26.680 So that is the concept of a federative polity. 224 00:21:26.680 --> 00:21:31.840 Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, set out parameters for what Livingston calls the modern state 225 00:21:31.840 --> 00:21:34.800 in his book Leviathan in 1651, 226 00:21:34.800 --> 00:21:40.120 that developed into unexamined premises that later thinkers took for granted. 227 00:21:40.120 --> 00:21:46.120 The modern state about which Hobbes theorized is one in which the central government is absolutely supreme 228 00:21:46.120 --> 00:21:51.120 and in which society is thought of as being composed not of independent social authorities, 229 00:21:51.120 --> 00:21:55.120 as in a federative polity, but of a simple aggregate of individuals. 230 00:21:55.120 --> 00:21:59.120 There are no truly independent social authorities in the modern state 231 00:21:59.120 --> 00:22:03.120 because nothing is thought to be independent of or prior to the central government. 232 00:22:03.120 --> 00:22:06.120 All potential for corporate resistance is gone. 233 00:22:06.120 --> 00:22:11.120 In Iran, mere individuals, by contrast, are typically helpless against a strong central government. 234 00:22:11.120 --> 00:22:19.120 Instead of a series of layers in a federative polity, society is here conceived of as a single flat plain. 235 00:22:19.120 --> 00:22:25.120 In a federative polity, when another social authority blocked the power of the central government, 236 00:22:25.120 --> 00:22:29.120 it was a normal event, even a virtue, as when, for example, 237 00:22:29.120 --> 00:22:34.120 medieval towns won many of their liberties by confronting the king and making demands of him, 238 00:22:34.120 --> 00:22:37.220 particularly when he needed their aid during a war. 239 00:22:37.220 --> 00:22:40.820 But the modern state trains its citizens to think otherwise. 240 00:22:40.820 --> 00:22:45.620 When another institution attempts to resist the encroachments of the central government of a modern state, 241 00:22:45.620 --> 00:22:47.820 it is guilty of treason. 242 00:22:47.820 --> 00:22:52.120 What was once a virtue now becomes the gravest possible crime. 243 00:22:52.120 --> 00:22:56.220 The nation, they are taught to believe, is one and indivisible. 244 00:22:56.220 --> 00:23:02.220 This new morality, cultivated in the citizenry through the modern state's formidable machinery of propaganda, 245 00:23:02.220 --> 00:23:06.220 inclines the people to view the central government's suppression of lesser bodies 246 00:23:06.220 --> 00:23:08.220 as something natural and normal, 247 00:23:08.220 --> 00:23:13.220 and resistance by those bodies as reprehensible and unpatriotic. 248 00:23:13.220 --> 00:23:18.220 Thus, in a federative polity, autonomous institutions with liberties of their own 249 00:23:18.220 --> 00:23:22.220 sometimes had to protect those liberties by resisting the center. 250 00:23:22.220 --> 00:23:24.220 Nothing in the modern state, on the other hand, 251 00:23:24.220 --> 00:23:28.220 can seriously be described as autonomous except the central government itself. 252 00:23:28.220 --> 00:23:34.220 Every other institution is fundamentally subject to and inferior to the central government, 253 00:23:34.220 --> 00:23:38.220 and no institution possesses truly inherent and inalienable liberties. 254 00:23:38.220 --> 00:23:43.220 Whatever liberties any lesser institution possesses are considered gifts of the central government 255 00:23:43.220 --> 00:23:48.220 to be revoked at will rather than held by right. 256 00:23:48.220 --> 00:23:54.220 Now it is true that the modern state could protect individuals from the oppressions of these smaller authorities. 257 00:23:54.220 --> 00:23:59.120 Thus, for example, the modern state could end slavery in one fell swoop. 258 00:23:59.120 --> 00:24:05.620 But again, as Livingston reminds us, those who favored the modern state for these reasons failed to read the fine print. 259 00:24:05.620 --> 00:24:11.020 For the modern state could also carry out great atrocities of a kind the world had never before seen. 260 00:24:11.020 --> 00:24:17.120 State slavery now re-emerged, not only in the form of the Soviet gulag and the Nazi concentration camps, 261 00:24:17.120 --> 00:24:21.720 but also in the form of universal military conscription, a largely modern idea. 262 00:24:21.720 --> 00:24:27.720 In just 4 years, nearly 3 times as many men were killed in World War I as there were slaves in the South. 263 00:24:27.720 --> 00:24:31.720 Its sequel, World War II, took over 50 million lives. 264 00:24:31.720 --> 00:24:34.720 Tens of millions would perish in slave labor camps, 265 00:24:34.720 --> 00:24:37.720 dwarfing the 11 million slaves brought to the New World, 266 00:24:37.720 --> 00:24:42.720 5% of whom went to North America in the 400 years of the slave trade. 267 00:24:42.720 --> 00:24:45.720 So what must be emphasized here, according to Livingston, 268 00:24:45.720 --> 00:24:49.720 is that what was primarily responsible for this staggering destruction 269 00:24:49.720 --> 00:24:55.220 was neither advanced technology nor the wickedness of leaders like Hitler and Stalin. 270 00:24:55.220 --> 00:25:00.520 Even the most powerful monarchs of centuries past could not have engaged in such destruction 271 00:25:00.520 --> 00:25:06.420 since their authority was hemmed in by other social authorities that had the power to thwart them. 272 00:25:06.420 --> 00:25:12.420 It was the very structure of the modern state that destroyed or co-opted all lesser associations 273 00:25:12.420 --> 00:25:19.020 and amassed all power at the center that made these terrible atrocities possible. 274 00:25:19.020 --> 00:25:22.020 And now we get to the significance from the American point of view. 275 00:25:22.020 --> 00:25:28.020 The Civil War began the transformation of the United States from a federative polity into a modern state, 276 00:25:28.020 --> 00:25:31.020 from the compact theory version into the nationalist version. 277 00:25:31.020 --> 00:25:40.020 Europeans understood that the war amounted to an attempt to transform the decentralized American system into a unitary modern state. 278 00:25:40.020 --> 00:25:45.020 In December 1866, the British spectator was delighted to write, 279 00:25:45.020 --> 00:25:54.020 The American Revolution marches fast toward its goal, the change of a federal commonwealth into a democratic republic, one and indivisible. 280 00:25:54.020 --> 00:25:59.020 What had once been a decentralized system in which the states, the Union's constituent parts, 281 00:25:59.020 --> 00:26:05.020 actively resisted the central government on a great many occasions in defense of their liberties, 282 00:26:05.020 --> 00:26:12.020 would become a unitary modern state in which any such resistance would henceforth be demonized as treasonous. 283 00:26:12.020 --> 00:26:16.020 Livingston's conclusion is that we must give the moral benefit of the doubt 284 00:26:16.020 --> 00:26:20.020 to people who were fighting to prevent the destruction of America's federative character 285 00:26:20.020 --> 00:26:24.020 and who would instead have given the world the moral example of a Federal Republic 286 00:26:24.020 --> 00:26:28.020 that acknowledged the sovereignty of its constituent parts. 287 00:26:28.020 --> 00:26:32.020 The best Southern thinkers, though of course they could not possibly have known 288 00:26:32.020 --> 00:26:37.020 just how strongly vindicated they would be after the atrocities of the 20th century 289 00:26:37.020 --> 00:26:41.020 and the crimes of the modern state, understood this principle. 290 00:26:41.020 --> 00:26:45.020 Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederate States of America said this, 291 00:27:11.020 --> 00:27:14.020 Robert E. Lee wrote to Lord Acton, 292 00:27:41.020 --> 00:27:45.020 which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. 293 00:27:45.020 --> 00:27:46.020 Livingston says, 294 00:27:46.020 --> 00:27:48.020 Had the Confederate States of America survived, 295 00:27:48.020 --> 00:27:52.020 the world would have had the model of a vast-scale federative polity 296 00:27:52.020 --> 00:27:55.020 with a strong central authority explicitly checked 297 00:27:55.020 --> 00:27:58.020 by the ultimate right of a state to secede. 298 00:27:58.020 --> 00:28:00.020 It would have shown the world, likewise, 299 00:28:00.020 --> 00:28:03.020 that an alternative existed to the modern state, 300 00:28:03.020 --> 00:28:07.020 its atrocities and its destruction of competing power centers in society. 301 00:28:07.020 --> 00:28:11.280 Instead, movements for national unification, as in Germany and Italy, 302 00:28:11.280 --> 00:28:14.780 were and are portrayed as indisputably progressive 303 00:28:14.780 --> 00:28:17.780 and as fully in line with the forward march of history. 304 00:28:17.780 --> 00:28:20.780 When in fact the world would have been spared a great deal of grief, 305 00:28:20.780 --> 00:28:25.780 had a decentralized political order remained the rule in Central and Southern Europe. 306 00:28:25.780 --> 00:28:30.780 This is why the South's failure so saddened the great British libertarian Lord Acton, 307 00:28:30.780 --> 00:28:34.280 who in a letter to Robert E. Lee in November 1866 wrote, 308 00:28:34.280 --> 00:28:39.680 I saw in states' rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, 309 00:28:39.680 --> 00:28:45.080 and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction, but as the redemption of democracy. 310 00:28:45.080 --> 00:28:50.380 Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress and our civilization, 311 00:28:50.380 --> 00:28:57.480 and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. 312 00:28:57.480 --> 00:29:03.280 Well, this is why so many people who do detest slavery have nevertheless rejected the standard morality play 313 00:29:03.280 --> 00:29:07.980 about the war that is peddled in the typical classroom and in popular culture. 314 00:29:07.980 --> 00:29:11.680 With the destruction of state sovereignty that resulted from the northern victory went 315 00:29:11.680 --> 00:29:15.840 both the main institutional restraint on the power of the federal government as well as 316 00:29:15.840 --> 00:29:21.800 the important moral example of a polity organized along different lines from those of the centralized 317 00:29:21.800 --> 00:29:26.800 states that would come to dominate the political landscape in the 19th and 20th centuries and 318 00:29:26.800 --> 00:29:27.800 beyond. 319 00:29:27.800 --> 00:29:33.040 That, and not a fondness for slavery, explains why Lord Acton, the great British classical 320 00:29:33.040 --> 00:29:59.040 Well, I think, although I could go on and talk about authorities who supported the right of secession, that was actually in your reading, so there's no need for me to reiterate that, so I'll just stop here and keep myself to the lower bound of the times of these little talks, and take a little break and then see what on earth you have to say about this, so thank you very much.