Shades of Grey (and Blue)

by Roderick Long

Libertarians have long been divided over the American Civil War. Herbert Spencer and Ayn Rand favoured the North; Lord Acton and Murray Rothbard, the South. Recently, the Cato Institute and the Objectivist Center have published articles defending Lincoln as an emancipator, while the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Ayn Rand Institute (on the same side of an issue for once!) have slammed Lincoln as a statist dictator.

I have good friends on both sides of this dispute. But I can’t work up much enthusiasm for either the Union or the Confederacy.

When libertarians on one side point out that the Union centralised power, violated civil liberties, committed vicious war crimes, was hypocritical on secession, ignored avenues for peaceful emancipation, and cared more about tariffs and nationalism than about ending slavery, I agree and applaud; but they lose me when they start calling the Civil War the “Second War of American Independence” and portray the Confederates as freedom fighters.

Equivalently, when libertarians on the other side point out that the preservation and extension of slavery was central to the South’s motivations for secession (as seems clear from what secessionists said at the time of secession, as opposed to what they said in their memoirs years later), and that the Confederacy was just as bloated and oppressive a centralized state as the Union, equally hypocritical on secession and equally invasive of civil liberties, once more I agree and applaud. (As I like to say, the Confederacy was just another failed government program.) But they too lose me, when they start calling Lincoln a great libertarian and the consolidation of federal power a victory for liberty.

And then each side denounces the other side as apologists for evil. Enough already!

In response to one of the blue-versus-grey flamewars that flare up regularly in the Letters to the Editor here in Alabama, I penned the following missive, which was published in last week’s Opelika-Auburn News:

Recent letters debating the causes of the Civil War have failed to distinguish the question “to what extent was the South's decision to secede motivated by the desire to perpetuate slavery?” from the question "to what extent was the North's decision to prevent secession motivated by the desire to end slavery?"

As J. R. Hummel shows in his book Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, these questions have different answers: protecting slavery was central to the South’s reasons for seceding, while antislavery sentiment was at best peripheral to the North’s reasons for resisting secession.

To their joint discredit, both Union and Confederacy waged war against the principle of free association. Southern rebels claimed the right to exit the Union, but hypocritically denied slaves the same right to exit the plantation.

President Lincoln, for his part, stated plainly that his “paramount Object” was “to save the Union,” and “not either to save or to destroy slavery.” If there had been no slaves, Lincoln would have sought to crush secession anyway. (And with conscripted troops!)

North and South alike, then, championed compulsory over free association. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Civil War was an unjust war on both sides.

Finally, I must take issue with Greg Creech’s suggestion that because “slavery was a vital part of the American economy ... its quick demise would have meant fiscal disaster.”

First, given the different incentives involved, wage labor is far more economically productive than slavery, and would have brought greater prosperity, not less. (The postwar South was impoverished because an occupying army had ravaged its infrastructure, not because slavery had ended.)

More importantly: even if abolishing slavery had been economically disadvantageous, liberty remains the natural right of all human beings. There is no honor in choosing expediency over justice.

Roderick T. Long
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Auburn University

One respondent complained that I was judging slavery by a modern yardstick. Sure, he said, slavery is wrong by our standards – but Southern slaveholders couldn’t be expected to see things our way; after all, slavery had been practiced for centuries. He seemed quite willing to condemn Lincoln for waging a war of conquest, however – despite the fact that wars of conquest have been practiced for centuries too.

This idea that we mustn’t judge earlier eras by our standards is an insidious form of relativism. It has a grain of truth to it, of course; it’s harder to recognize a moral error when everyone you know thinks it’s dandy, so those who fail to rise above the limitations of their era should be judged less harshly. Still, moral principles are universal; they’re not just “our” standards. In any case, the United States was founded on the principle that all human beings are free and equal by natural right. Immediately after the American Revolution, slaveholders tended to feel embarrassed about slavery, and to talk vaguely about phasing the institution out over time. They knew it was wrong. The “nothing wrong with slavery” view didn’t become dominant in the South until later; that position was the result of cynical economic interest, not thoughtless acquiescence in tradition.

As I have written elsewhere:

[T]he American Revolution brought a dramatic increase of freedom to whites throughout the colonies. Northern whites, still riding the wave of revolutionary libertarian fervor, actually used their newly expanded options to increase the options of blacks, by enacting a series of laws leading ultimately to the abolition of slavery in the North. But in the more agrarian South, where slavery was more deeply entrenched, whites were less attracted to the cause of the emancipation (though they often paid it lip service).

Later economic and political developments cemented Southern whites' attachment to slavery still more firmly. Specifically, Eli Whitney and Katharine Greene's invention of the cotton gin made plantation farming more profitable, while the Constitution's three-fifths compromise (treating each slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation) gave slave states a disproportionate voting bloc in Congress, and thus an added incentive to continue slavery. In order to take advantage of the expanded economic options offered by the cotton gin and the expanded political options offered by the three-fifths compromise, whites in the slave states needed to make sure that blacks' options remained severely limited.

But to maintain the slave system, the South had to retreat from the libertarian principles of Jefferson and the revolution. Southern governments found it necessary to impose greater and greater restrictions on the civil and economic liberties of whites in order to keep blacks in subjection. Many states made it illegal for slaveowners to free their slaves; and there was soon no freedom of speech or press for whites who advocated abolition. In some cases, speaking against slavery was punishable by death.

Once secession finally came and the Confederacy was established, suppression of white freedoms grew even greater, as the central government, in the name of military necessity, extended its controls over every aspect of life. Internal passports were required for travel, traditional civil rights like habeas corpus were suspended, currency was devalued, and most sectors of the economy were nationalized. In their desperate quest to maintain their control over blacks, Southern whites found themselves compelled to establish an authoritarian political order that ended up claiming their own freedom as well.

This retreat from the principles of the American Revolution in political practice was accompanied by a parallel deterioration in political theory as well. During the 1810s and 1820s, the great intellectual spokesman for the South — the defender of agrarian interests against Federalist neomercantilist regulation — was John Taylor of Caroline (author of Arator, Tyranny Unmasked, and An Inquiry into the Principles of Government), whose political outlook was deeply Jeffersonian and libertarian — with the predictable exception of a massive blind spot about slavery. Taylor refused to face the tension between the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the institution of slavery; but later Southern intellectuals would face that tension — and resolve it in the wrong direction.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the ideological champion of Southern interests was not John Taylor but John C. Calhoun (author of A Disquisition on Government and A Disquisition on the Constitution). To his credit, Calhoun was a fierce opponent of centralized power, and came up with some rather ingenious ideas for curbing its growth (e.g., veto rights for minority factions); to this extent, Calhoun stood squarely in the Jeffersonian tradition. But the need to avoid that tradition’s radical implications for the legitimacy of slavery drove Calhoun to repudiate the principles of ’76. Human rights, Calhoun maintained, rest on legal custom, not on the Laws of Nature — and the exercise of political authority does not depend for its legitimacy on the consent of the governed, but is a natural and inevitable feature of the human condition. By tossing the Declaration of Independence out the window, Calhoun was able to develop a Southern political ideology that could accommodate the institution of slavery. (Blacks were not one of the minority factions to whom Calhoun contemplated offering veto rights!)

The process of decay did not stop there. In the 1850s, the new ideological spokesman for the South was the arch-communitarian George Fitzhugh (author of Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters and Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society). In Fitzhugh’s system, the need to justify slavery resulted in a full-scale assault on the Jeffersonian tradition in all its aspects; every vestige of libertarianism was methodically uprooted. Combining the right-wing nostalgia for an idyllic traditionalist feudal past and the left-wing hunger for a scientifically organized socialist future, Fitzhugh championed the Society of Status — an organic, hierarchical view of society in which every person has an assigned social role that carries with it both compulsory duties of obedience to one's superiors and a guarantee of support, security, and paternalistic oversight from those same superiors. Black slavery, in Fitzhugh’s vision, was just a special case of the general principle that no person, black or white, is entitled to be the master of his or her own destiny.

Not all defenders of slavery accepted Fitzhugh's philosophy, of course; but the general way of thinking which his works represented was becoming pervasive in Southern society. By 1862, the Confederate journal De Bow’s Review was trumpeting the slogan “The State is everything, the individual nothing.” (Some of the people who wear the Confederate flag on their jackets might want to think that one over.) The need of the Southern white culture to maintain dominance over its black population had led it to adopt principles which ended up threatening the freedom of its own white members.

It was not inevitable that Southern whites would choose to close their eyes to the injustice of slavery. That was their choice to make, and they made it. What was inevitable, or close to inevitable, was that this choice, once made, would have costly consequences — that it would have a corrupting influence on both their institutions and their ideals. ...

I don’t mean to be giving the Union a free ride here. In the Civil War, both the North and the South decisively turned their backs on the ideals for which the American Revolution had been fought. The North's drive to subjugate the South had an effect on the North analogous to the effect the South’s drive to preserve slavery had on the South. More authority was centralized in Washington; civil liberties were routinely violated; income taxation and Federally administered conscription were introduced; and an ominous cult of national unity spread through the American consciousness. The result was a Federal government with vast new powers — a fledgling Leviathan that quickly proved too tasty a treat not to be captured by the corporate élite. And so we are left, at the end of the twentieth century, with a burgeoning American police state whose primary victims, ironically, are the very blacks whose liberation was supposed to be the moral justification of Union victory. 

Let’s retire the blue and the grey. My colours are the sea-green banner of liberty¹ and the black flag of anarchy.

¹Some readers have asked me to explain the reference to the “sea-green banner of liberty.”  The sea-green banner was the emblem of the Levellers, the first mass libertarian movement in history. The Levellers came to prominence in the 1640s, during the English Civil War, when – to their credit – they found themselves at odds with both King and Cromwell. They had a crucial influence on later classical liberal thinkers like John Locke.

For some online versions of Leveller tracts, see www.constitution.org/lev/levellers.htm. I particularly recommend Richard Overton’s delightfully titled

An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny, Shot from the Prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords, and All Other Usurpers and Tyrants Whatsoever; Wherein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms and Properties of Mankind are Discovered and Undeniably Maintained; the Late Oppressions and Encroachments of the Lords over the Commons Legally (By the Fundamental Laws and Statutes of This Realm, As Also By a Memorable Extract Out of the Records of the Tower of London) Condemned; the Late Presbyterian Ordinance (Invented and Contrived by the Diviners, and By the Motion of Mr Bacon and Mr Tate Read in the House of Commons) Examined, Refuted, and Exploded, As Most Inhumane, Tyrannical and Barbarous, by Richard Overton, Prerogative Archer to the Arbitrary House of Lords, Their Prisoner in Newgate, for the Just and Legal Properties, Rights and Freedoms of the Commons of England.

(And if you’ve got a spare $675.00 you feel like getting rid of, check out this massive hard copy collection, edited by my friend Jim Otteson.)

So if there’s a libertarian colour, it’s sea-green. (Unfortunately, I haven’t seen pictures of the Levellers’ banners, so I don’t know what shade of sea-green they used.)