Last time I tried to suggest to you, perhaps not as directly as I might have,
that the phenomenon of secession in general, as opposed to the Southern secession in particular,
which we'll talk about more today, can in fact be a very progressive force,
rather than a reactionary one, as it's sometimes portrayed.
Oftentimes, even today, the phenomenon of secession is portrayed as something backward,
Something that runs against the grain of the forward direction of history.
And I try to suggest last time that, in fact, there's much to be said for secession.
That, in fact, in many cases, it is the civilized way in which differing peoples learn to live with their differences.
They simply part in peace.
Well, this week it will be a little bit of a continuation of last week.
and it will consist primarily of raising some, we might call, forbidden questions.
I specialize in that. Asking questions that I'm told are closed and never to be raised again,
those are the ones that interest me the most. So I want to raise a few of them and then we can discuss things later.
Now, again, because we're doing this in tandem with the book, there's no real need for me to go through everything that's in the book.
You can look at that for yourself.
Unfortunately, my chapter on the Civil War was cut in half by the publisher,
as was much of the book.
It was just cut and sliced because they wanted to make it nice and short and accessible.
And so one of the most common criticisms that the book got was,
this book is too short. It doesn't have enough details.
Yeah, I agree. I couldn't agree more. You're absolutely right.
Well, in any event, what I want to do is pick up from last time
and then draw us into this Southern issue
by continuing on with a few additional considerations on the phenomenon of secession
and begin with an argument that was used actually by Jefferson Davis,
who was, of course, the president of the Confederate States of America,
the eleven contiguous southern states that ultimately seceded.
And Jefferson Davis, who was anxious to defend his conduct in that of the South after the war was over,
wrote a lengthy defense, as did Vice President Alexander Stevens,
and one of the arguments that Davis made on behalf of the right of secession in general
involves the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Now, this is not an argument that is universally accepted by any means.
Obviously, Lincoln didn't accept it, or there wouldn't have been a war.
But, nevertheless, it is worth thinking about. It is food for thought.
The Tenth Amendment, as you may recall,
says that all powers that the states did not delegate to the Federal Government are reserved to the states or the people.
Now, the relationship between that and secession is pretty much as follows.
The states, nowhere in the Constitution, delegated to the Federal Government a power to suppress secession.
Now, there is a power in the Constitution to suppress insurrections,
but an insurrection is something rather different from an act of secession.
and insurrection is a kind of an uprising in which typically the governor of the state would request federal assistance.
No southern governor called for federal assistance in this case.
But the point is that the states never delegated to the federal government any power to suppress secession
and there's nothing in the Constitution that expressly forbids it to the states.
So if the states have not delegated a power and the exercise of that power is not prohibited to them,
then it remains a reserved right under the 10th Amendment.
So, in effect, a real shorthand way of thinking about the 10th Amendment is that if something is not mentioned in the Constitution, then we presume that that power rests with the states.
Well, secession is not mentioned in the Constitution, then that power rests with the states.
In fact, sometimes it's been suggested that the fact that the Constitution does not mention secession is a point against the Southern position,
But what I'm suggesting is that, from the Southern point of view, that's a point in favor.
It's precisely because it's not mentioned in the Constitution that it's assumed to be a power of the states.
In fact, it's perhaps revealing that the Confederate Constitution of 1861,
that was very similar to the U.S. Constitution and modeled on it, obviously,
almost identical with a few small but nevertheless important exceptions,
It is significant that in there there is no mention of a right of secession.
And that's not necessarily because the Confederacy was opposed to states seceding from it,
but rather because of simple consistency.
If the southern states had said that there's no need for an express allowance of secession
in the governing document in order to make it legitimate,
then they wouldn't have to put one in their own document.
If they had, then they would be implicitly admitting they'd been wrong in the first place.
So there's the argument from the Tenth Amendment that was offered by Davis and then has been picked up by others.
There are other arguments I might mention. One of them is drawn from the reading that I signed for last time.
And that's the argument that there were at least several attempts around the time of the Southern Secession
to amend the Constitution in order to clarify its position on secession.
Again, the document is silent on the question, so there was an attempt to clarify what is the constitutional position.
And for instance, just to give one of those several examples,
Representative Thomas Florence of Pennsylvania introduced in January 1861 a proposed amendment to the Constitution
that provided that, quote, no state or the people thereof shall retire from this union without the consent of three fourths of all the states, unquote.
Well, the importance of this example and others that were like it is that if it was clear to everybody that secession was simply prohibited,
then it doesn't seem that there would be any need to clarify the document.
I mean, if secession is prohibited, then why would you amend the Constitution to say,
nobody can secede without the consent of three-fourths of the states?
If everybody just knows, nobody can secede.
And it is relevant that John Marshall, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835,
had said, in the famous case of Gibbons versus Ogden, that limitations of a power
furnish a strong argument in favor of the existence of that power.
So that is to say, when we see the power of secession being limited in these proposed constitutional amendments,
according to Marshall's reasoning, although I'm sure he himself didn't favor secession,
The very fact that there was an attempt to limit the power of secession strongly implied the existence of that power in the first place.
Another argument that is raised in the article that you read is this one.
I'm not as persuaded by this one as I am by some of the others.
The argument is this, the war ends and I'm going to give away the punch line and the northern states win.
But when the war is over, the Southern states as one of the conditions for their, I guess we might say, readmission to the Union, although even that language is problematic because in Lincoln's perspective, they never seceded in the first place.
He would never say readmission, but for convenience we'll say readmission.
One of the requirements was they had to relinquish the right of secession.
The Southern states had to expressly relinquish that right.
And the professor whose article you read raises the point how could the southern states be required to relinquish something unless they had it in the first place?
Again, the fact that they are being required to give it up strongly implies they must have possessed it in the first place.
Now, the reason I'm not persuaded by that, although I think it's at least worth considering, is that probably what was happening is that the U.S. government just simply wanted to dot every I and cross every T
and make absolutely certain that everybody understood what was going on.
I don't think they were necessarily conceding that there had been a right of secession.
I think they just simply wanted to make absolutely clear that there sure isn't one now,
at least for the states that are returning.
Now, we also have the fact that there are a great many illustrious figures from American history
who are on record as being in favor of a legal right of secession.
And I cite at least several of them in the book, and one of them is William Rall, who's got a book called A View of the Constitution from 1825.
Now, it's not any big deal that William Rall wrote a book in 1825 in which he argued, among other things, that as a last resort measure, the states did possess a right of secession.
That's not that significant, because, you know, any bozo can get a book published.
and the fact that he publishes one is not significant.
What's significant is who the guy is and who was reading his book.
Rall was not known for being a supporter of the rights of the states.
He was a so-called capital F Federalist.
He was a supporter of a strong central government.
So you would not expect him to favor a right of secession,
but yet he concedes in his book that in fact one exists.
But secondly, it seems to be the case anyway,
This seems to be the case anyway, although this is somewhat disputed, but it seems to be the case that from 1825 until 1840,
Rawls' book A View of the Constitution was the constitutional law textbook that was used at West Point,
which was the most influential military academy in the U.S.
So it is perhaps not without significance that those men were reading a book that allows for the right of secession.
There are still others. There's Thomas Jefferson. I love driving people crazy with this.
There's one particular person, I won't mention his name,
who's constantly disputing with me the idea that Jefferson favored secession.
He said it repeatedly, throughout his career, he said it repeatedly,
that although he didn't necessarily favor it at any given time,
he did believe that as a last resort, again, it could be done.
He said in one of his inaugural addresses that the time for separation has not yet come.
He doesn't say that there is no such thing as separation.
But he also said that if, you know, if it should turn out that for matters of practicality
or whatever reason that it's better that we be two or three confederacies, then, you know,
let it be so.
There's no point in making an idol out of the Union and waving incense before it.
The Union is just a practical arrangement.
It's not a god.
We have William Lloyd Garrison.
Now, Garrison, remember, I mentioned, let's say, two weeks ago, was the best-known abolitionist
in America, probably.
And I cited him as a mainstream abolitionist in the sense that he was somebody who, he
was against, he was dead set against the U.S. Constitution. And when I say he's a mainstream
abolitionist, what I mean is that among abolitionists, they were all, abolitionists per se are kind
of extreme, but among them he was in the mainstream in believing that the Constitution was very
much to be criticized because it supported slavery. And I suggested when I gave the example
of Life, Alexander Spooner, who argued that the Constitution did not support slavery.
There is actually an argument to be made along those lines.
The point I want to make here is that Garrison, in fact, had long called for the secession
of the northern states from the Union.
In fact, his slogan was, no union with slaveholders.
And he required that members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in fact, take a pledge
that they would work toward the dissolution of the American Union.
Now this is very radical stuff, but Garrison's position was motivated by two factors.
The first was that Garrison was a moral purist.
He believed that he and all of the North were tainted with the sin of slavery by virtue
of their association with the southern states and the fact that they had to go along with
the fugitive slave clause.
And he didn't want to be tainted in that way. Let these sinners go in their own way. Let them go and we're going to have our own country.
But secondly, it was a more practical reason, not just idealism, but practicality motivated Garrison.
His view was that if you have the northern states leave the Union, then they are no longer part of the United States,
and therefore not obligated to return runaway slaves, because they're not under the same Constitution any longer.
So slaves could run away up north and there'd be no obligation to return them.
And he believed that this would make the institution of slavery prohibitively expensive,
particularly in the upper south, because the slaves would just run away.
It would basically be all but impossible to get them back.
And that, in turn, would put pressure on slavery in the ever lower south, down to the deep south.
And he believed that the whole institution would ultimately collapse.
And I cite at the end of the Civil War chapter that in fact something sort of like this is exactly what happened in Brazil where there was a part of the country where slavery had been abolished and there was no legal recognition of the institution, so the slaves fled there, nobody could get them and the institution collapsed peacefully.
So a peaceful resolution of the slave question, Garrison believed, could be brought about through secession. Interesting.
It's worth noting, by the way, that a lot of the most conservative Southerners, planters who felt like they had a lot to lose,
tended to be the least supporting, least in favor of secession, precisely for this reason. It was going into the unknown.
Who knows what could happen to slavery in these new circumstances or in the turbulence that could follow secession.
At least in 1860, at least they had the Supreme Court on their side, they had the Dred Scott decision, they had a lot of things going for them.
The prospect of secession was really unclear what it would lead to.
We also have Alexis de Tocqueville, who is significant because he is far and away the most perceptive foreign observer of the United States ever.
His book, Democracy in America, which came out in the 1830s, has pretty much, as far as I know, has never been out of print.
And that's pretty good. I mean, given that most books, you look in the remainder bin three years down the road,
The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states, and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their sovereignty, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people.
If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so.
And in fact, so influential was Tocqueville that the great British classical liberal Richard Cobden,
who was a great libertarian who had helped to work against the Corn Laws in England,
which had made food artificially expensive for the average man and so on and so forth,
and so forth, Cobb had immediately accepted Tocqueville's analysis and said that this does seem to be the correct position.
And then you could cite still others. You could cite President John Quincy Adams and still others in favor of the idea of there being a right of secession.
It's also interesting to note how many northern newspapers supported the southern secession in 1861, early 1861.
You see newspapers in New York, Massachusetts, Maine, all over the place, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, writing articles and editorials saying that, in effect, if it was legitimate for the 13 colonies to separate from Britain, then it's at least as legitimate for the southern states to secede from the United States.
This is the principle on which the country was founded. If it was in fact founded on principles, surely this is one of them.
And you see this quite frequently. You don't see it in every Northern paper, but it's quite surprising.
If you've been led to believe that secession is just some strange doctrine that the Southerners dreamed up one day, it would seem surprising.
But in fact, secession had been, if not quite on the table all the time as a mainstream subject of political discussion,
it was at the same time not altogether absent from political deliberations in America.
In fact, throughout the 19th century, you would periodically hear the topic of secession raised.
I mentioned in one of our discussion sessions a few weeks ago that, in fact, in just a matter of about 11 years, the New England states, or some parts of them at least, threatened to secede at least three times in just a matter of 11 years.
It's a matter of 11 years. In 1804, 1803 and 1804, you see movements in that direction in New England
because they were against the Louisiana Purchase, which among other things they believe is going to dilute
the influence of New England in the Union. They went to great lengths to try to bring about the secession of New England
and bring about the secession of New York. And it was under those circumstances, by the way,
that Aaron Burr had his famous duel with Alexander Hamilton, because the plan was,
Aaron Burr was the Vice President at the time, Thomas Jefferson couldn't stand him, so Burr decided he would try some other chapter of his political life, try to become Governor of New York.
And the thinking was that maybe Burr would support secession. The New England Federalists hoped that we get Burr elected Governor of New York and he'll secede along with New England.
And when Burr lost the election, he bitterly blamed Alexander Hamilton, who had been bad-mouthing him through the whole election.
and he wound up, as you know, shooting Hamilton who then died after hours of terrible agony.
That was all, in effect, indirectly related to the New England Secession Plan at that time.
In 1808 and 19, we see, at least in Massachusetts, some talk of secession
because Thomas Jefferson has imposed an embargo such that no shipping is allowed to leave the United States for foreign ports
and of course that devastates the maritime economy of New England and so they threaten secession again.
Finally, at the end of the War of 1812, we have the Hartford Convention at which secession is threatened again, at least implicitly.
New England states are dead set against the war and they began making demands of the federal government
that New England's interests need to be better protected in this union.
For one thing, we need to require that there be a two-thirds majority when there is a declaration of war forthcoming from Congress.
See, today you don't have to worry about that. There are no declarations of war anymore, but in those days they had them.
And so the requirement that the New Englanders wanted was that from now on we should require two-thirds majority
to make sure that the country really is behind a war before we get involved in it.
or they wanted to require that no president could serve two consecutive terms
or no president in two consecutive terms could be from the same state.
Now this is all directed at Virginia because if you know the history of the presidents,
Jefferson is from Virginia and he was president for two terms
and then Madison is from Virginia and was president for two terms
by the time of the Hartford Convention in 1814.
How little did they know that then it would be James Monroe for two terms, also from Virginia.
It would be very difficult to stop this, but that's what they tried to do,
is that we're sick and tired of these Virginian presidents,
they don't know anything about New England interests,
and so we need to amend the Constitution in these and other ways.
And the strong implication was that if these amendments do not in fact pass,
then we need to consider secession, because they said then we will meet again,
this time in Boston next year, and see what our options are.
and what those options are. And everyone understood that to mean that it was an implied threat of secession.
Well, in fact, the war ended right around the same time as the Harvard Convention.
In fact, as New Englanders were heading down to Washington with their list of demands
and proposed constitutional amendments, they got word that the peace treaty,
the Treaty of Ghent had been signed and the war was over.
And now, all of a sudden, attention began to shift to them in the rest of the country.
The federalist party, which was the dominant political party in New England, was completely destroyed by this.
They were viewed as being unpatriotic, even treasonous.
And interestingly, by the way, that happens to be, at least in large part, the reason that during the Mexican War in the late 1840s,
And interestingly, by the way, that happens to be, at least in large part, the reason that during the Mexican War in the late 1840s, that the Whig Party, which wasn't necessarily gung-ho about the war, nevertheless, you know, they waved the flag and went along with it, because they saw what happened. If you're ostentatiously anti-war, your whole party can just be blown to smithereens.
Smithereens. But these are examples of secession or threats of secession. In 1798, as I indicated
in a previous week, Thomas Jefferson's friend John Taylor argued that Virginia should secede
because of the Alien and Sedition Acts. And we might cite other examples. There were murmurings
of Massachusetts secession over the admission of Texas into the Union as a slave state in
the 1840s. So it's not as if this just comes out of nowhere, a bunch of crazies think it
up in 1860 and 61. It's a part of the American political conversation.
Okay, good. It's also worth noting, I think, one final point along these lines is that
when you consult soldiers' diaries and letters, it's interesting to see how they themselves
conceive of the war. And this is useful because you can only learn so much from what official
What do actual political sources say, a Senate resolution or a presidential speech?
That doesn't necessarily get to the heart of what the average person is thinking.
Well, what was the average person thinking?
Well, thankfully we don't have to speculate wildly on this,
because there's a whole book that's been written,
it was written about ten years ago by James McPherson,
wrote a book called For Cause and Comrades.
It was originally, in the manuscript version, it was called What They Fought For,
which is easier to understand, I think.
But I guess the answer is the title he came up with, For Cause and Comrades.
What's interesting is that you see the two different competing understandings of the American Union
contained in Northern as versus Southern soldiers' letters.
For one thing, we do notice that in most of these letters,
we see patriotic motives cited as to why they're fighting.
We don't see acknowledgement that they're fighting for or against slavery,
In the northern case, the principle is that we are fighting for what our ancestors gave us, which is this great union of states.
The southern soldier typically is arguing, we are fighting for what our ancestors gave us, which is the right and principle of self-government.
Well, in a nutshell, really both of those things are fighting for the right and principle of self-government.
Which is the Right and Principle of Self-Government.
Well, in a nutshell, really, both of those things came from our ancestors.
But in a way, you can see that nationalist versus compact theory right there.
The northern soldier arguing that the fundamental thing about the United States is that it's one.
It's fundamentally one thing.
The southern contention that, no, the United States is fundamentally a plural thing.
It consists of individual states with their own rights of self-government.
And I'm fighting to vindicate that.
Those two views that we've seen throughout the 19th century up to that point,
there they are, right there on the battlefield.
All right, now a few other little things I'd like to say,
and then we'll have our adjournment.
I sure wish that I had some water, but that's okay.
That's quite all right.
Make me enjoy it all the more when we actually get it.
One of the scholars who's associated with the Institute as an adjunct scholar is Thomas D. Lorenzo, who's a professor at Loyola College in Maryland.
He writes a book. It seems like he's writing in his sleep while he's eating. I don't see how he's as productive as he is.
But he has a book out, a new book on Lincoln. He's got two books on Lincoln that have been controversial.
He's got a brand new one that's just out, oh I would say it's been out for a month at most, called Lincoln Unmasked.
And I want to make reference to a couple of the points that he makes in that book because I think they are serious points.
These aren't just trivial potshots that he's taking, unfair or silly.
These are serious arguments that are typically not raised but I think need to be raised.
Now, what I mentioned last time in the discussion was that the idea of a modern state is such that there is one sovereign voice and there is no other competing jurisdiction that is equal to that sovereign voice.
Everything is subordinate to that one overriding sovereignty.
And I said that this is the modern political idea.
And this was not a pre-modern idea, that in the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, there was another way of organizing political life, where you had a series of layers in society.
You've got this jurisdiction, that jurisdiction, you've got states, you've got institutions with liberties that cannot be trampled.
Whereas today, pretty much throughout the Western world, you have a single flat plane.
And in fact, I think the European Union is trying to do that to all the countries, too.
and all the countries, too, make that a great big flat plane where there are no competing jurisdictions.
And I think this idea then becomes taken to the nth degree by people like the great totalitarians of the 20th century, like Stalin and Hitler.
And I don't mean to say that if you don't agree with me, then you basically agree with Hitler
and you want to put people in concentration camps, so that would be unfair.
I'm not suggesting that, but I am suggesting that it is interesting to know sometimes what Hitler thought about something.
And now Hitler, I'm sure, had some good ideas, like I'm sure he believed that people should breathe and eat food and, you know, listen to the radio.
So, I mean, it doesn't necessarily prove anything, but I don't think I would want to be on Hitler's side if I could avoid it on most issues.
Well, it's interesting to note that if you read Mein Kampf, which is this, you know,
Hitler's ponderous book that he wrote in the 20s, what does he have to say about the
American Civil War? Well, he's totally in favor of the Northern cause and Lincoln's
cause, totally in favor of it, and he's totally against the idea of states' rights. Surprise,
surprise, surprise. Hitler despised the tradition of states' rights in Germany, because it,
You know, why do you think? Because it was an obstacle to him.
Because it was an obstacle in the way of the exercise of absolute power.
And so, he's quite clear about this.
Hitler, in fact, promised that the Nazis, quote,
would totally eliminate states' rights altogether.
Since for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content,
the nation, the people,
It is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests.
In particular, we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation,
and the state representing it, state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power.
He said, the mischief of individual federated states must cease and will someday cease.
National Socialism as a matter of principle must lay claim to the right to force its principles
on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries.
And then as I say he actually goes on and comments specifically on the American Civil War
and has nothing but the most withering contempt for the southern cause
because it runs exactly counter to this fundamental principle.
Another important contribution of the DiLorenzo book is that DiLorenzo is interested to look at
We're going to look at how the Lincoln mythos, you might say, is being employed today.
What purpose it serves today? There are no slaves in the country to free, so why would people refer to Lincoln?
What purpose does it serve? Well, it so happens that the Lincoln legacy,
because it involves so many departures from settled law, such as throwing tens of thousands of political prisoners in jail,
or shutting down 300 opposition newspapers or censoring telegraph messages.
Well, as a result of that, the Lincoln legacy can be and has been cited on behalf of all manner of political atrocities,
from the decimation of civil liberties to the waging of war against civilian populations.
The religious veneer of Lincoln's political rhetoric seared into the American consciousness
and Business, the idea of the U.S. government as an instrument of God's will to be employed
without mercy against any force so impious as to resist that holy will.
This conception of the Federal Government works even for politicians who might feel
uncomfortable with openly religious language. The idea of a righteous central authority
steamrolling all opposition, ipso facto wicked and perverse, of course, as part of the inevitable
The historical forward march of history fits quite nicely into just about any nationalist agenda, left or right.
This is why the Lincoln myth is so stubborn, so resistant to evidence, and so difficult to overturn.
The entire American political class has a vested interest in its preservation.
Eric Foner, the Marxist professor of history, who has spent much of his career at my old alma mater, Columbia University,
has even cited Lincoln on behalf of the preservation of the Soviet Union.
In February 1991, an article called Lincoln's Lesson
that Foner wrote for the Nation magazine,
he denounced the secession movements in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia on Lincolnian grounds
and called upon Gorbachev to suppress them
with the same ruthlessness that Lincoln showed the South.
According to Foner, quote, no leader of a powerful nation should tolerate the dismemberment
of the Soviet Union.
And he said, the Civil War was a central step in the consolidation of national authority
in the United States.
The Union, Lincoln passionately believed, was a permanent government.
Gorbachev would surely agree.
Well, for all the talk about slavery, there it is in a nutshell.
The Civil War and Lincoln's legacy involved the violent suppression of independence, exactly
This is really what Foner wanted to see in the Soviet Union.
What better condemnation could we ask for than that?
Now again, I refer you to some of the violations of civil liberties that are at least briefly referred to in the book.
And it's important to remember these.
And it's important not to say, well, Lincoln had to do this, and what else is he going to do?
Of course he had to throw people in jail, and this and that.
The point to make here is that Lincoln has now provided the ideal pretext for anybody since then to do things like that.
Because then, because Lincoln is viewed as almost a demi-god, people can simply say, well, even Lincoln did thus and so.
So how can you object? Even Lincoln censored the telegraph messages.
Even Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. So how can you object to it?
So in fact, over the past year, the controversy involving wiretapping developed.
It was just only a matter of time.
You had to just sit not too long to wait for the even Lincoln did it crowd to start making their arguments.
And sure enough, Republican Party loyalists began making precisely this argument.
Well, how can you object to what George W. Bush is doing, even Lincoln did this?
And so there it is. That's why they love him. They love him. It's a pretext for everything.
Now, De Lorenzo, incidentally, raises a good and useful response to that
it's okay because even Lincoln did it and it's wartime and you got to do what you got to do argument.
He quotes Supreme Court Justice David Davis, who was a personal friend of Lincoln,
from the 1866 case X Party Milligan, in which he wrote,
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people equally in war and peace
and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men at all times
In fact, if it were the case that government were simply to be given carte blanche during wartime, to act as it wished,
all that would be necessary to whittle away the people's liberties would be to concoct, or even provoke, an endless series of crises.
Now, pointing all this out does not mean that the government is simply to be given carte blanche during wartime.
The way to whittle away the people's liberties would be to concoct or even provoke an endless series of crises.
Now, pointing all this out does not make you a neo-Confederate, or whatever that means.
The Confederate government also was too big and countenanced or promoted intolerable enormities.
The point simply is that some of these arguments that I've raised here are not raised ever,
and probably ought to be by a free people.
And yet, it is understandable that the issue of slavery still lingers in the back of our minds.
That for all this, after all, slavery was ended.
I did try to address that point to some degree last time about the nature of the modern state
and the bad things it gets up to, as well as the good things.
But it is not plausible to suggest that slavery could have lasted much longer, even in an independent South.
If slavery being abolished everywhere, the Confederacy would have been an international pariah.
And it is unreasonable to suppose that it could have long withstood the inevitable and overwhelming international moral pressure
to which its isolated position would have exposed it.
And according to Jeff Hummel, who wrote a highly acclaimed book called Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men,
the fact that emancipation overwhelmed such entrenched plantation economies as Cuba and Brazil
suggests that slavery was politically more abundant anyway.
Slavery was doomed politically even if Lincoln had permitted
the small Gulf Coast Confederacy to depart in peace.
The Republican-controlled Congress would have been able to work toward emancipation
within the border states where slavery was already declining.
In due course, the radicals could have repealed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
With chattels fleeing across the border and raising slavery's enforcement costs,
The peculiar institution's destruction within an independent cotton South was inevitable.
And again, I've just added, as I've noted last time, that every country that abolished slavery in the Western Hemisphere in the 19th century managed to do so peacefully other than the United States.
The last forbidden question I will raise, though, is this one, and this actually is in the form of a question rather than an answer.
And that involves trying to think about the alternate universe in which the South had peacefully seceded.
What would have happened?
And I think there is something that's worth thinking about.
Suppose, for instance, World War I comes along.
Now, what would have happened?
Would both countries, would both the Confederate States of America and the U.S.,
would they both have intervened in World War I?
I think that's doubtful.
Maybe neither one of them would have intervened in World War I.
And it is not a crazy theory, but quite mainstream to suggest
that World War I ushered in countless horrors in its wake.
It gave impetus to the Nazi movement certainly because the Versailles Treaty
embitters the German population and they just become sitting ducks for a hyper-nationalistic politician like Hitler
to exploit their resentments over Germany's treatment.
It was, in a way, the handmaid of the Bolshevik Revolution, World War I.
The strains that war exacted from the civilian population and the fighting forces
were too great for the regime to survive.
And so a terrible, lawless, czarist regime gave way to an even worse and more lawless Bolshevik regime.
There is practically no trend in Europe that was not shockingly exacerbated by that conflict.
And particularly when Woodrow Wilson decided to involve the United States in it,
that seemed to tip the balance such that it now became possible to impose this type of bitter settlement upon Germany.
Well, what would have happened if there had been two unions in this geographical territory now called the United States?
What would have happened? Maybe one of them wouldn't have entered the war.
Maybe then you wouldn't have had it tip so heavily in one direction.
Maybe you wouldn't have had all these unfortunate trends being exacerbated quite so badly.
There are so many things to consider in this what-if universe that we are not permitted to entertain
because it is taken for granted that the one moral position to take was the suppression of secession.
Maybe it wasn't, and maybe this opens up a whole field of other possibilities and other ways that the unfortunately tragic 20th century might have unfolded.
Well, that's what I leave with now. Well, I just run to get some water and then we will resume when I can.