I periodically flirt with isolationism, or if you prefer, "non-intervention". Like most libertarians, I'm attracted to "high concept" political philosophy: simple rules that can be stated in a sentence or less. No arguments about causus belli, blowback, or ultimately unknowable political ramifications; just a simple "yes or no" test. Did a foreign army invade the United States? For "Yes", press one; for "No", press two, and go back to arguing about what should replace child welfare laws in the coming anarcho-capitalist society.
Besides, all the foreigners hate having us there. Why not leave, and see if absence makes the heart grow fonder? (I suspect that many nations which have come, over long decades, to regard regional peace as some sort of natural law, will get a rather nasty surprise. This might make our influence look, in retrospect, rather appealing.)
But anyone who thinks at all seriously about libertarianism will, fairly early on, be faced with a very high hurdle. There are a handful of wars in which American intervention unambiguously halted gross abuses of human liberty. World War II is one, though many end up going around, rather than over . . . arguing that the Nazis were the direct result of American intervention in World War I; or that it was justified because Japan attacked us1; or that Russia and Britain would have defeated Hitler anyway2. The American Civil War, however, is by far the highest leap; and the hardest to dodge.
In theory, every state has the right to secede, and the stated Federal rationale for the Civil War--preserving the union--was the vilest tyranny. In practice, chattel slavery was a barbarism even viler.
And so we killed 20-30% of the Confederate Army, not a few of our own, and uncounted numbers of civilians. That's not counting the wounded, who probably outnumbered the dead. All we managed to achieve, at this horrendous cost, was a corrupt and brutal occupation, followed by the "freedom" of Jim Crow, sharecropping, and "separate but equal". And it was worth it. The good guys won. We didn't do everything we wanted to, or even everything we could have, or should have. Jim Crow was putrid. But it was nonetheless so much better than slavery that it was worth the horrendous cost--in my opinion, and that of almost everyone in the world.
Hard-core non-interventionist policy doesn't have a very good model for this--at least not one that I've seen. Either the states didn't have a right to secede; or we had right to invade a sovereign nation and occupy them in order to end slavery; or you have to leap the hurdle and say "Yup, we should have left the South alone". Some libertarians do say this, and not because they're racists; the price of intellectual consistency is embracing occasional bad results. I think this is wrong, for all sorts of reasons, but I do understand the allure of consistency. Because if you don't take their position, then suddenly you no longer have a high concept policy, full of hard-and-fast rules that could be applied by any literate twelve-year old. Suddenly you're mired in arguments about which practices merit intervention, and which are merely offensive, and how much of our own national interest we are obliged to sacrifice in these sorts of humanitarian efforts.
Thus non-interventionists fairly often end up in debates over what would have happened if we'd just let the Confederacy go. Jim Henley's post on the topic is interesting and very thoughtful, but like most of these arguments, it seems to me too willing to embrace the comfortable belief that intervention never achieves any substantial positive effect. I am very suspicious of any model which validates someone's policy preferences by proving that there are absolutely no tradeoffs. This is what drives me crazy about the supply-siders: rather than facing the implications of what they advocate, they resort to fairy-tale scenarios in which all the problems magically disappear. One occasionally stumbles across Pareto improvements in the policy world, but they are rarer than hens' teeth.
It is true that slavery was on decline in the developed west in the late 19th century, but that story, at least as I understand it, is rather complicated. Britain and Spain abolished slavery in far-off colonies; it was not economically important to most voters. The numbers involved were comparatively small, relative to the British Empire's population; something less than a million, compared to 4 million slaves in the American South. In Britain, slavery's economic importance was declining as industrial production replaced agricultural commodity trade as the economy's main engine of growth. In Brazil, too, it was a relatively weak institution, declining due to competition from foreign labor. In Russia, the serfs were not quite equivalent to chattel slaves, and in any case, there too, they were freed under the aegis of an absolute monarch who wanted to modernize the economy.
But in the American South, slavery was still a vital and thriving economic institution at the time of the Civil War, as economic historian Robert Fogel has shown in his brilliant Time on the Cross. Would it have been eliminated quickly? Even if it had declined economically, would the Confederacy have gotten rid of an institution that was central to its foundation?
I think it's rather more plausible to believe that a breaking away would have strengthened the institution. For one thing, an independent Confederacy could have relegalized the slave trade, outlawed since 1808. (This might well have had the side effect of extending slavery elsewhere, as Confederate-supported slave trade brought new sources of cheap supply to areas where immigrants were making slavery uncompetitive.) For another, I think Jim is massively overestimating the number of slaves who escaped; estimates I've seen put the number of runaways at about 1,200 a year, out of a population of 4 million. That's even with the basically non-existent enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Escaping turns out to be very difficult when you need a travel permit to be anywhere more than a few miles from your house, as any Russian defector can attest.
It's hard to imagine any scenario in which more than a handful of blacks ended up in the north; the slaves mostly didn't escape, and if they'd been free, it seems doubtful that we would have allowed them to immigrate in massive numbers. The best case scenario seems to be 4 million blacks nominally free but subject to a more vicious version of Jim Crow, unmoderated by the safety valve of northern migration.
That slavery would have ended, eventually, is probably true. But how "eventually"? Obviously, if slavery would have ended in 1862, then our invasion was counterproductive; on the other hand, if they had just managed to get rid of it last year, I imagine that most people, probably even Mr Henley, would vote in favor of a retrospective invasion. But how about 1900--would it have been better to leave another two generations of blacks under the lash? What about 1920? 1950? How many generations of suffering are enough to justify intervention? No evil lasts forever, after all; if nothing else, eventually the sun will go nova and incinerate us all with magnificent even-handedness. How long before that happens are we entitled, or even obligated, to say "enough!"--and make it stick?
1 Er, yes, in response to naval activity in their sphere of influence, thousands of miles from the continental US
2 Really? Without our meddling, decidedly interventionist Lend-Lease and merchant shipping programs? More to the point, would they have liberated the camps before Hitler finished his Final Solution?
3 Much harder to escape your owner than to legally board a train.
"Either the states didn't have a right to secede; or we had right to invade a sovereign nation and occupy them in order to end slavery; or you have to leap the hurdle and say "Yup, we should have left the South alone"."-MM
I don't really follow the argument above. It seems to me that Megan is mixing two lines of thought that ought to be kept separate: one is the Kissinger/Bismarck argument against isolationism on the grounds of national interest and the other is the Clinton/Blair argument for "humanitarian intervention."
Megan seems to view the Civil War chifly from the latter perpsective as an humanitarian effort. I think that's a misunderstanding. President Lincoln was intent upon preserving the union at all costs. He considered that goal paramount in pursuing America's national interest. Much as he despised slavery, ending it was clearly less important in his mind:
Also, I think it's important to distinguish a civil war from a foreign intervention. Lincoln did not see his incursions into the South as an invasion of a foreign country, but the preservation of unity in a single country.
I guess I look at libertarianism a bit differently than you do. I think libertarianism is a way of organizing our society to make sure the government interferes with our lives as little as possible. But, it doesn't really have a position one way or another regarding other nations.
If the populace decides to invade Canada for sport, that isn't really an issue one way or another for a libertarian (assuming no conscription).
MM--
nice, if it were true. please cite your background that shows Slavery as Lincoln's 'motivator' from Day 1 ~1861.
"Do states have a right of secession? That question was settled through the costly War of 1861. In his recently published book, The Real Lincoln, Professor Thomas DiLorenzo marshals abundant unambiguous evidence that virtually every political leader of the time and earlier believed that states had a right of secession.
Let's look at a few quotations. Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address said, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it." Fifteen years later after the New England Federalists attempted to secede, Jefferson said, "If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation . . . to a continuance in the union . . . I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate'."
At Virginia's ratification convention, the delegates said, "the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression." In Federalist Paper 39 James Madison, the father of the Constitution, cleared up what "the people" meant saying, the proposed Constitution would be subject to ratification by the people, "not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong." In a word, states were sovereign; the federal government was a creation, an agent, a servant of the states.
On the eve of the War of 1861, even unionist politicians saw secession as a right of states. Maryland Congressman Jacob M. Kunkel said, "Any attempt to preserve the Union between the States of this Confederacy by force would be impractical, and destructive of republican liberty." The northern Democratic and Republican parties favored allowing the South to secede in peace.
Just about every major northern newspaper editorialized in favor of the South's right to secede. New York Tribune (2/5/60): "If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861." Detroit Free Press (2/19/61): "An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful could produce nothing but evil - evil unmitigated in character and appalling in content." New York Times (3/21/61): "There is growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go." Professor DiLorenzo cites other editorials expressing identical sentiments.
Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, "It is poetry not logic; beauty, not sense." Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives "to the cause of self-determination - government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth." Mencken says, "It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves."
In Federalist Paper 45, James Madison guaranteed, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." The South seceded because of Washington's encroachment on that vision. Today, it's worse. Turn Madison's vision on its head and you have today's America.
Professor DiLorenzo does a yeoman's job in documenting Lincoln's ruthlessness and hypocrisy and how historians have covered it up. The Framers had a deathly fear of federal government abuse. They saw state sovereignty as a protection. That's why they gave us the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. They saw secession as the ultimate protection against Washington tyranny.
Walter E. Williams
c16-01
April 1, 2002
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/02/lincoln.html
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=the+real+lincoln
"Every week another apologist for President Bush compares "Bush’s fight for Iraqi freedom" to Abraham Lincoln’s "fight to free the slaves." The American civil war was not fought to "free the slaves," as Thomas DiLorenzo and other scholars have thoroughly documented, any more than the purpose of Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq was to "bring freedom to Iraqis." The freedom excuse was invented after it became impossible to maintain the fictions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connections to Osama bin Laden. Bush has yet to tell the real reason he invaded Iraq.
In the US today, demonization and propaganda substitute for facts and analysis. Professors and journalists are quick to lend their names and voices to the untruths that rule our lives. Just as Hitler’s foreign policy was based in propaganda, so is Bush’s and Blair’s.
The success of propaganda enhances government’s illusion that it has a monopoly on truth. It is the monopoly on truth that gives the Bush regime the right to define the "Iran problem," the "Syria problem," the "Lebanon problem," and the "Korea problem" and to apply coercion in place of understanding and negotiation.
Secure in its possession of truth, the Bush administration refuses to talk to the enemies it has manufactured. It will only fight them.
When scholars, such as John Walt and Stephen Mearsheimer, or President Jimmy Carter, who has tried harder than anyone else to achieve Arab-Israeli peace, point out that Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians is a cause of Middle East turmoil, they are immediately denounced as anti-Semites. Columnists and academics who know nothing about the Middle East or its troubles nevertheless know what they are supposed to say whenever anyone mentions Israel in any critical context. And they have no compunction about saying it, the truth be damned.
Without commitment to truth, science, justice, and debate falter and disappear.
The belief in truth is fading from our society. It is unclear that scientists themselves any longer believe in truth or the ability to discover it..."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts190.html
"In theory, every state has the right to secede, and the stated Federal rationale for the Civil War--preserving the union--was the vilest tyranny."
What you mean is, in your "theory." It's amusing that you take your libertarian cliches as revealed truth, which somehow 99% of the population are too thickheaded to understand. In the "theory" of northerners like Lincoln, the states gave up their sovereignty when they formed the union, and a state had no more right to secede from the Union than a county has to secede from a state. Anyone can propound a "theory," but no one can prove one. Not verbally, at least.
"Just about every major northern newspaper editorialized in favor of the South's right to secede."-MEH
The right to secede could have significant benefits. I'd be the first to go to San Francisco to try to persuade it to leave the Union.
President Lincoln saw the balkanization of North America as a disaster. The Union and the Confederacy would have shared a *very* long land border with infinite possibilities for conflict.
The Federal Constitution is a permanent peace treaty between the states. It has to be enforced.
Then there was the slavery question. Secession would *not* have solved it for the north by putting it into another country, which would have remained economically entangled with us.
The existence of slave (or otherwise artificially cheapened) labor in an economy destroys the value of free labor. A free man cannot live competing with slave labor. The surplus he needs is taken by the slave's owner.
The southern states recognized this. Many had laws against teaching slaves skilled trades, such as carpentry. Many had laws against teaching slaves to read. Such laws were regularly flouted. The incentives, for both slave and owner, were too great.
If the south had industrialized it might very well have been with slave labor. What then happens to the people on the left end of the bell curve among the free population?
I'm not sure I can oblige you there, but since most of Megan's comments are about what the Confederacy would have done in the absence of Union action, I'm inclined to think that the Confederacy's motivations are pretty darn relevant here.
And I have plenty of citations on the Confederate's 'motivator':
Jefferson Davis offered a Congressional compromise in December 1860 to avert secession. It consisted entirely of a Constitutional Amendment to protect slavery forever. In his first message to the Confederate congress, shortly after Fort Sumter, he reflected upon the circumstances that led to secession, and identified only slavery as motivation.
On December 7, 1860, Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown delivered an open letter to the people of Georgia, endorsing secession solely because of the threat of abolition. He said that Georgians “can never again live in peace with the Northern abolitionists, unless we can have new constitutional guarantees, which will…effectively stop the discussion of slavery in Congress.” Since slavery was widely seen as benefiting only the rich, fully half of the letter was devoted to persuading poor non-slaveholding whites to support secession. “May our kind Heavenly Father avert the evil, and deliver the poor from such a fate,” he prayed, after warning of the various consequences if blacks were made their equals.
Georgia’s Robert Toombs resigned from the U.S. Senate on January 7, 1861, and gave a farewell speech in which he answered the question “What do the rebels demand?” He identified four Southern demands. The first was that Southerners should be allowed to take their slaves with them, and keep them as property, if they immigrated westward. The second was “that property in slaves shall be entitled to the same protection from the government of the United States, in all of its departments, everywhere, which the Constitution confers the power upon it to extend to any other property.” The third and fourth demands were that fugitive slave laws be vigorously enforced, and that persons helping slaves escape captivity be extradited for their “crimes.” No demands were identified that did not directly relate to slavery. The month prior, Toombs had proposed a similar seven-point Constitutional compromise to avoid secession; all seven points were about slavery.
In his Corner-Stone Speech of March 21, 1861, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens said “[O]ur peculiar institution - African slavery as it exists among us - the proper status of the negro in our civilization,…was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” He further explained that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon this great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Four Confederate states issued declarations stating that they were seceding because of slavery. Mississippi's read: “[I]t is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
Henry Benning, Georgia’s Commissioner to the Virginia Secession Convention, on Feb. 18, 1861, encouraged Virginia to secede with this argument: “What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. This conviction, sir, was the main cause.”
The Confederate Constitution explicitly forbid any laws impairing the "right of property in negro slaves" (Article I, Section 9, #4). It also guaranteed that slaveowners would be able to take their slaves to any other states (Article IV, Section 2, #1), enforced fugitive slave laws (Article IV, Section 2, #3), and guaranteed that slavery would be allowed in any and all new territory acquired by the Confederacy (Article IV, Section 3, #3).
The Confederacy's motivations for seceding are unmistakable, and the CSA holds the notoriety of being perhaps the only nation in the history of the world founded expressly to protect slavery. At least in hindsight, that was worth fighting. And I say this as a seventh-generation Georgian, descended from multiple Confederate soldiers.
Alan Vanneman: West Virginia *did* secede from Virginia during the Civil War.
For those who believe that the states have the right to secede, or that secession wasn't about slavery, I highly recommend Lincoln's first inaugural. People can disagree with his argument, but it's certainly not frivolous. I would think his point that there is nothing in the Constitution that allows for it to be compelling to Dr. Paul's supporters.
There is also the problem that allowing secession as the democratic choice of the South ratifies slavery. Approximately one-third of the population of the South were black slaves. They certainly weren't asked what they thought about secession but about 20% of the South's share of the House of Representatives was due to that population. (3/5's of 33% being about 20%.) It was the prospect that even this artificial political power wouldn't suffice to safeguard slavery for long if slavery wasn't allowed to expand into the new territories that precipitated secession. Moreover, if we assume that the third of the population held in slavery wouldn't agree with secession, then there was no clear majority support for secession even in the South. So why, exactly, should we defer to the decision of the southern states to secede?
In Brazil, too, it was a relatively weak institution, declining due to competition from foreign labor.
I had thought that slavery was a much bigger and stronger part of the economy than in the American South. Brazil had a larger share of the transatlantic slave trade than any other country. Even today it has the second or third largest black population of any country, behind only Nigeria and possibly Ethiopia.
And yet, with no equivalent to our Civil War, Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880's.
My limited reading puts the slave population of Brazil at under a million, owned largely by sugar planters in a few states. The large number of afro-brazilians has to do with the colonization pattern of the Portuguese, which resulted in relatively little female immigration. The men married African and Indian women at higher rates than Americans.
For one thing, an independent Confederacy could have relegalized the slave trade, outlawed since 1808.
Wouldn't that have been entertaining, what with the Royal Navy (and later, other navies of Europe) treating slave ships as only slightly better than pirates and paying the captains and crews "head money" for every slave freed.
Forget about the Civil War (a.k.a., "The War of Northern Agression") which invariably leads to irrationally heated discussions because of its intimate association with the slavery issue.
Has any reputable political scientist ever attempted to formulate any kind of *universal* rational analysis of when secession is or is not justified? For example, if Quebec ever actually decided to secede from Canada, would the rest of Canada be *morally* justified in using force to stop them? Why or why not?
Or suppose that 51% of the people in southern California voted to secede from the USA and form the Independent Republic of Aztlan. What *moral* right does somebody in Vermont have to stand in their way. .... And would the moral calculus be different if the seceding entity were say the village of Possum Scat, Idaho (population = 20) instead of Southern California (population = 20 million -- or whatever it is)?
I'm not sure what you mean when you say, "In theory, every state has the right to secede...." I assume you mean States rather than states (a problem throughout your post), and it seems more likely than not that you mean Constitutional theory, rather than libertarian theory or political philosophy.
If so, I think you are wrong that States have (or ever had) a right to secede as a matter of Constitutional theory (see e.g., Prof. Akhil Amar), but at the very least it's worth noting that this is a contested proposition that does a lot of work in your argument.
Love the footnotes, Megan. An homage to David Foster Wallace?
I've found Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War to be a fair and convincing argument against the wisdom and necessity of the Civil War.
I am not sure that slavery is necessarily cheaper than all alternatives. Being assets, if they were injured or killed, that would be a financial blow. As opposed to a factory worker who was injured or killed, the factory owner could just stop paying them and hire someone else.
Also, since the Constitution relates entirely (at least at that point in time) to federal power, I am not sure how it should have instruction on secession. So one strict reading of the Constitution would not find federal power to prevent secession.
ps - apologies if my first paragraph is vague, I could not bring myself to type certain words
Interestingly, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations even comments directly on slavery. He finds that, regardless of the morality involved, it is simply economically disadvantageous. IIRC, his reasoning was something along the lines of: In a community with a lot of poor and unskilled workers, you can hire laborers at nearly their true minimum wage - that is, enough resources to house, feed, and clothe them, but little else. With slaves, you still have to pay the resources to house, feed, and clothe them, but you also pay for transportation and enforcement, and the labor you get is less motivated and less effective.
I think we can all agree to the moral horror involved, but I find it more interesting to think that it's simply the wrong choice, even from a completely amoral and self-interested viewpoint.
I'll leave the Civil War arguments to you experts.
Ron Paul has made a truly significant question the heart of his campaign. It is:
Should the US "pull out" and let the rest of the world be left to solve problems as it may?
In fact, I'd argue that it's the only really strategic question raised by any of the candidates. The only ones even remotely comparable are the "abolish the IRS" tax plans, but tax system changes are small beer compared to upsetting the entire world order.
Even if you don't buy Paul's "end of empire"/"save a trillion dollars a year" argument, the question of America's role in the world is worthy of discussion. The major candidates differ on tactics (Obama's talking and McCain's fighting representing the ends of the spectrum) but none promise to change our strategic role as the mostly beneficent hyperpower.
I'm not sure that libertarianism as a doctrine has anything deep to say on the subject, other than the general notion that "less government is better" applies to foreign affairs, too.
I'll leave the Civil War arguments to you experts.
Ron Paul has made a truly significant question the heart of his campaign.
Ron Paul, incidentally, comes down fairly hard on the "Lincoln was a tyrant and the American Civil War should not have been fought," side. He talked about it on Meet the Press.
I was a little surprised to not see his name in this post; I thought that this was part of the continuing series on him.
One thing Megan is overlooking is that even if one assumes secession was permitted under the Constitution (which I would argue is NOT the correct interpretation of the document, but we can leave that aside), secession didn't devolve title in US military bases to the Southern states.
The South started the Civil War by firing on Fort Sumter. There wasn't an issue of "letting them go", because the Confederacy attempted to take US property by force, an action that it knew would result in a war.
Actually I believe keeping millions of human beings in chattel slavery is much closer to qualifying as the “vilest tyranny.”
In theory, every state has the right to secede, and the stated Federal rationale for the Civil War--preserving the union--was the vilest tyranny.
Weird theory, and one subscribed to by precisely zero existing federal states.
How would the theoretical power of succession be wielded? By plebiscite? State legislature? What about counties or cities that didn't want to go along . . . could they secede from the seceding state--remaining in the union or going off their own way? If not, why not? Isn't that the vilest tyranny? Can individually held properties arbitrarily secede or rejoin the union when the notion strikes the owner? Can this decision be altered around tax time?
Preserving the territorial integrity of a nation isn't vile or tyranny. Asking the governed (whether states or individuals) to submit to democratic outcomes adverse to their parochial preferences is the essence of democracy, not its abrogation.
Our republic was designed lots of protection for minority interests, but they are necessarily incomplete. Secession is, in its way, a perfect protection of minority interests . . . if you lose the vote, you just opt out of the whole system. That's a formula for anarchy which no government could survive. And that's why your theory of a right to secession is fundamentally flawed.
" ...Preserving the territorial integrity of a nation isn't vile or tyranny....."
Are you saying that George-III was correct in 1776, and the American colonists were wrong?
Well let’s see the Colonists in 1776 didn’t have any representation in Parliament, were subjected to laws and taxes they didn’t have a say in, were under threat of having their locally elected leaders replaced by appointees of the Crown, and had repeatedly made overtures to both Parliament and the Crown asking them to remedy this situation along with repeated violations by the government of rights that were considered natural to all Englishmen at the time (e.g. jury trials, freedom of speech and the press, etc.). It was only after a period of years of trying to resolve this peacefully that the Colonists finally made the decision to secede.
The South on the other hand had representation in Congress, were able to petition the courts to petition for remedies of their grievances, were able to elect their own leaders, the only “right” they were in danger of losing was not their “right” to hold other human beings in chattel slavery but their “right’ to spread the peculiar institution into the territories. It was only when their preferred candidate lost his bid for the presidency that they decided to try to secede from the Union, form an illegal and unconstitutional army, and fire on an American fort.
It takes a special kind of stupidity to think that the two situations were even remotely the same.
That’s a good point about secession meaning that you have “opt[ed] out of the whole system.” That “system” being the protections afforded to you by our Constitution – meaning that if a State secedes and is no longer part of the United States, it no longer has the protections that States have.
In which case by firing on an American fort, the United States has the right to do whatever the hell it wants to you just as it would any enemy country who commits an act of war.
I suspect that many nations which have come, over long decades, to regard regional peace as some sort of natural law, will get a rather nasty surprise. This might make our influence look, in retrospect, rather appealing
Indeed. I, myself, sometimes long for an isolationist foreign policy, thinking that, absent an American Hegemon, on a long enough timeline, after lots (LOTS) of unfortunate blood, the world will come to a mostly homeostatic state that doesn't involve the US acting as the World's Daddy. Better for them long-term. Better for us, short and long-term.
But then I start thinking in specifics. The only thing absolutely stopping, say, Russia from exerting a very negative local hegemony over Poland or Romania is America's Global hegemony. Not to say Putin is interested in invading Eastern Europe, just that it would be unthinkable for him to do so at present. Could the American people really stomach a return to brutal Russian martial law (or even Russian puppetry) in Eastern European countries that have, since communism's fall, been our most loyal and reliable allies?
What about me? I have friends who live and hold citizenship in both Romania and Estonia. They are terrified that the US will go isolationist and that Putin will then exercise control over their governments. How am I supposed to square their lives and liberty with that noninterventionism, when effortless diplomatic engagement on behalf of my nation (i.e. a few bored divisions in Germany) could preserve both?
Civil wars are entirely unrelated to a discussion of a non-interventionist foreign policy. Basing your opinion about non-interventionism on a civil war makes no sense; a civil war is outside of the scope of non-interventionism.
Once upon a time I bought Walter W. William’s argument whole heartedly. The idea that the South was oppressed by an imperialistic federal government appealed to my redneck brain. And many of the things that Lincoln did during the course of the war had a rather totalitarian cast to them. So I felt pretty betrayed when later on in my life I started reading original source documents relating to the Civil War period and found out that Lincoln had been slandered and the South white washed.
Obviously this is not the place to launch into a polemic on the subject (You can find a hastily written essay that I wrote on the subject here). But I would suggest that people who frame Civil War around the question of whether the end of slavery was worth the cost are missing the point. The issue that caused the Civil War was whether slavery should be allowed to expand.
Lincoln (and the vast majority of the North) did not feel that the end of slavery was worth war. But they also felt that the expansion of slavery had to be stopped at all costs.
Amidst all the talk about how slavery would have died a natural death it is forgotten that people were making such predictions since the country was founded. And yet slavery went from strength to strength. The number of slaves in the South grew faster than the white population so that slaves made up a greater proportion of south by the time of the civil war then did at the time of revolution. In the context of this growth the argument that slavery was bound to die a natural death seems weak.
Consider this quote from a leading southern politician by the name of Robert Toombs…
In 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions. The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons. What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish. We are constrained by an inexorable necessity to accept expansion or extermination. Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. All just reasoning, all past history, condemn the fallacy.
That is not to say that slavery could not have died a natural death. But in order for it to die a natural death, its growth had to be stopped. And the only way it could be stopped was for slavery to be confined to the South. This is what Lincoln wanted to do. He bent over backward to promise the South that he would not outlaw slavery or take any steps to interfere with it in the South. But he never agreed to insure that slavery was given a free hand to expand even though he knew that was the only thing that would keep the South from leaving. When it came down to a choice between saving the union without bloodshed and stopping the expansion of slavery, Lincoln choose to stop the expansion of slavery.
The real question that needs to be dealt with by those debating the morality of the civil war is whether slavery would have kept expanding if the South had been allowed leave the union unmolested. If you think that South was keen on the expansion of slavery only because they feared political dominion by North, then I guess you would have to argue the negative.
But the words of the Southern leaders themselves clearly demonstrate that they understood that the economic health of slavery depended on expansion. So I think it is hopelessly naive to believe that they would let go of their imperialistic ambitions just because they formed their own nation. In another words, a Slaving owning south would have expanded its territory at the expense of weaker nations to the south.
If you wish to educate yourself on this subject a good place to start would be The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire by Robert E. May.
I think slavery would have declined in the South on its own. If not by nature than by necessity as their economy was going to need to change due to new competition from Egypt and elsewhere.
However I think an independent South would likely be a more agrarian and racially segregated society than our South. I'm not sure if racial segregation would still be the law as the kind of pressures South Africa faced might occur to them in the imagined timeline. Still it's plausible segregation would have lasted much longer, possibly into the 1980s or even 1990s. The lack of pressure from the North, and likely reduced number of immigrants, to this South would plausibly have such an effect.
Internationally the effects of a smaller US is possibly more significant. World War I might be altered and after that European history becomes rather different. I think the idealistic elements would still exist to ultimately pressure an end to Southern segregation, but the old Empires might also exist as more politically unified Commonwealths. Or not, I'm just speculating.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —
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Megan, you're clearly wrong on one point. You write:
But in fact the Confederate Constitution specified:Sec. 9. (I) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.
"How would the theoretical power of succession be wielded? By plebiscite? State legislature? What about counties or cities that didn't want to go along . . . could they secede from the seceding state--remaining in the union or going off their own way? If not, why not?"
As far as legalities go, the states came first. Local governments derive their powers because the states delegate power to them. Likewise, the federal government derived its power from powers delegated by the states to it, first when they formed the Continental Congress, and then when they ratified the Constitution. There's no legal provision for a part of a state to secede, unless the state itself provides for succession in its constitution (as Texas did). OTOH, there's a fairly good argument that, by not mentioning secession at all in the federal Constitution, the states did reserve that power to themselves. (Governments don't have rights, they have powers. The federal government has only the powers granted to it by the Constitution, and making war on states that peacefully seceded isn't in the list. OTOH, the federal government certainly has the power to respond to an attack, and the Confederates fired first...)
But for real hypocrisy, look at how West Virginia was formed. At the same time Lincoln's government was preparing to bring the seceding states back into the union by military force, his Army was at best aiding a portion of one state in seceding from that state, and at worst tearing a chunk of Virginia loose and setting it up as a new state whether or not the residents agreed. (I doubt it was possible to conduct a fair election on the subject at that time.)
On the third hand, the violations of the rights of the southerners were trivial besides their long-standing violation of the rights of their darker-skinned population, and they were determined to compound that crime by continuing to expand slavery to the west. It is quite clear that the trigger for secession was the election of a President who had no plans to eliminate slavery but would not tolerate the expansion of slavery. Years before Lincoln was elected, southerners had already resorted to violence in pursuit of the continuing expansion of slavery, trying to influence elections on the question in Kansas and Nebraska by murdering anti-slavery advocates in the street, and even assaulting a northern congressman in congress itself.
What Lincoln really did when he invaded the Confederacy:
1. Ended up getting 600,000 Americans killed.
2. Insuring that the South will forever hate the north and those self-righteous bastards that live there.
3. Keep you yankees in fear that one day (maybe the next 9/11) when you are under attack from the outside, we will stick the knife in your back.
The problem with taking sides in the Civil War is that both sides were populated with assholes - one side wanted to enslave black men, the other side wanted to enslave everybody. The only half-decent folks were the Abolitionists. They were quite liberal and forward-thinking for their time, but having gone to a college founded by prominent Abolitionists and being aware of their personal beliefs and practices, I know that they would be considered rather primitive by modern standards and wouldn't be very popular today. But then, they weren't too popular in *their* time either - most Southerners AND Northerners hated them.
So, like I say, it's hard to take sides in that war.
- My "Southern" credentials are rarely matched and can't be beat, being at Amundsen-Scott Station and all
"3. Keep you yankees in fear that one day (maybe the next 9/11) when you are under attack from the outside, we will stick the knife in your back."
Uh, what? As a Yankee, I have no f-ing clue what you are going off on here. I'm more worried about Northerners and West coasters sticking the knife in America's back these days, not the South.
In my lifetime, ironically, its been felt the South has become more loyal, energetic, and rather ruthless in defending and perserving the union, then the old Unionists.
Stipulating arguendo that the rebel States violated no explicit constitutional provision by seceding (Lincoln's cogent contrary argument in the First Inaugural notwithstanding), the question then falls to Congress under its Article I Section 8 powers. There is an explicit Congressional power to suppress insurrection, and therefore the Union Army was free to act under statutory authority, specifically the Crittenden-Johnson Act of July 1861. The constitutional question could only have logically arisen after the statutory hurdle had been cleared by repeal of C-J or by victory in the field rendering the act inapplicable. Nothing secedes like success.