TheAgitator.com
Henley on Paleos.
Thursday, December 19th, 2002The esteemed unqualified offerer ponies up his two cents. I also think Henley raises a strong point on the true motives of the Dixiecrats:
One thing alone cheers me up: their patent insincerity about constitutionalism and individual liberty and federal police power. Reading this document, you can be pretty sure that a Thurmond Administration would have enthusiastically swung the power of the federal government toward preserving segregation. You can imagine Thurmond directing J. Edgar Hoover to deal with “outside agitators,” resegregating the army and passing latter-day “fugitive slave” laws to force states outside the region to support southern efforts to retard or reverse civil rights. (Viz. the Dred Scott decision, which, taken to its logical conclusions, would essentially have re-instituted slavery in the antebellum North.)
This is an important point. Much as neo-Confederates would have us believe the Civil War (and segregation) were all about the rights of states to govern themselves free from federal meddling, they were first and foremost about, well, slavery and keeping black people from eating, sitting, swimming with white people. “Federalism” was the tool, not the principle. And in all likelihood, segregationists would’ve scrapped federalism the minute they took power and used the federal government to enforce their principles. Christina Rohweder (read her blog here) writes eloquently in the comments section about the Civil War history of “states’ rights” advocates betraying their alleged cause:
Slavery wasn’t on its way out. It, in fact, was a quite efficient system (morality aside). I find it rather funny when capitalist libertarians think that Southern plantation owners would be less rational than any other businessmen.Certainly one of the simplest ways to cause the end of slavery without war would have been to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law once the Southern states had seceded. The Fugitive Slave Law acted to push the very high guarding costs (the costs of keeping your slaves from running away) from individual slave holders and slave states to non-slave holders in free states. Caught blacks were brought to trial to determine if they were escaped slaves or free men. Judges were awarded $5 for every black determined to be free, and $10 for every black determined to be an escaped slave. You can imagine the results.
By repealing the Fugitive Slave Law the Underground Railroad would have become the primary cause of the downfall of the slave system. Eventually it would have become too expensive to use slave labor.
Having said that, I think it’s silly to pretend that such a solution was viable at the time. The pro-slavery/abolition rancor was so deeply rooted over the life of the country that by the time the Southern states seceded hardly anyone in the Union was willing to let them go. Lincoln was only a symptom of a larger political shift taking place in the North.
Probably the best book about this subject is Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. I was entirely bored by Civil War history until I read this book in conjunction with an economic history class.
I need to read the Hummel book.
To be fair, libertarians aren’t really arguing that slavery was uneconomic for the slaveholders, an argument Fogel has refuted; rather, they generally argue that it retarded the economy of the South as a whole. Poor whites in the South were much poorer than people occupying the same niche in the North, and of course the slaves were worse off still, although I’ve heard convincing arguments that materially they weren’t as bad off as the Irish.
I’d also point out that slavery produced substantial economic issues that would have determined its success or failure even if they hadn’t succeeded. With industrialization, it was simply becoming impossible to run the country half-slave/half-free; everything from tariffs to taxes to land use and industrial development had to go one way, or the other. Bigger navy to protect cotton shipments, or bigger army to pacify the territories where the raw materials were drawn from? And so on, ad infinitum.
I second the recommendation of Hummel’s book. However, it’s worth pointing out that
(a) Hummel reaches the conclusion that Lincoln could and should have let the seceding states go, in opposition to what Ms. Rohweder says;
(b) there is considerable evidence to dispute Ms. Rohweder’s claim that “by the time the Southern states seceded hardly anyone in the Union was willing to let them go.” On this subject I’d recommend Thomas DiLorenzo’s _The Real Lincoln_. While DiLorenzo, unlike Hummel, is at times too soft on the Confederacy (which makes DiLorenzo, surprise surprise, a paleo darling), he musters an impressive array of Northern editorials from 1860-61 arguing for letting the secessionists go. No less an abolitionist luminary than Horace Greeley wrote that “We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.”
Radley,
Yes, please read the Hummel book. Not only will you see that the Civil War was not a war for freedom, but also that Ms. Rohweder’s reading comprehension skills leave much to be desired.