Believe me, the last thing I want to write about is about race relations, slavery, the Civil War, etc. I grew up in integrated military; color of someone's skin made no more difference to me than the color of one's eyes or hair, an incidental characteristic. My best friend in fifth grade was black; I graduated from a border city high school; I've dated blacks and Latinas; I worked with or for Indians, Native Americans and Jews. I know what it's like to be different; my dominant language when I started kindergarten was French, and the school at one point considered holding me back in kindergarten. (I was easily capable of doing college work by 6th grade or 11 years old, and I was advised to finish high school early (at 16).
I rather hated having multiculturalism shoved down my throat in college, even in a Catholic university located in the middle of a barrio in southwestern San Antonio. What exactly was the motivation? That the brightest and best of America's youth were somehow secretly bigoted and needed some condescending elitist to point us on the "right path"? I recall seeing then unknown black author and visiting lecturer Alex Haley, best known for tracing his family roots back to Africa, not for intrinsic merit, but I was required to attend and was worried about grade-related repercussions if I didn't attend. Nobody told me to befriend Henry in fifth grade: not our Moms, teachers, clergymen, the government, etc. I was more of a social liberal then with a blind faith in benevolent government (although I've always been pro-life and a fiscal conservative).
Still I had reservations about identity politics even back then. One memory sticks out in particular. My best friend in college was RC, a Latino education major. The University of Texas was making a recruiting trip to campus (for grad students). UT hadn't yet responded to my application, despite a perfect GPA in two intellectually demanding majors, math and philosophy. Ramon, not interested in grad school, reluctantly agreed to accompany me as moral support. I never got more than a passing, disinterested glance from any of the recruiters, while they literally swarmed around Ramon, at least 5 at one point. They wouldn't take no for an answer from a visibly annoyed friend. (Maybe I hoped to get lucky with one of Ramon's rejected recruiters.) At one point, a frustrated Ramon pointed me out and asked, "Why aren't you talking to Ron? He wants to go to your school."
There were campus activists. of course, who quickly protested alleged discriminatory faculty member hiring, not enough Chicano representation. (The college is run/sponsored by the Sisters of Divine Providence and many faculty, including my beloved philosophy department, were staffed by religious, probably working for a nominal salary. For example, the two top philosophy professors were the Czech-American niece of the Houston archbishop and an Irish immigrant priest, not your typical "gringos".) I was personally pissed off over noisy protests interrupting my classes and signed a counter-protest petition. (I was also angry over smears, including one with an Hispanic surname who was one of my professors (very nice, professional academic nun/sister), and I couldn't get a single protester to tell me the basis behind the smear. Still, some of the protesters were casual friends in the dorm. One day they pulled a prank on me, which they are probably still laughing about today. One friend called me over to hold his sign while he tied his shoe. Almost immediately, I was being pushed to move: I was "holding up the line". I'm sure someone probably took a picture of the manipulated, involuntary protester before I figured out what was going on and quickly left the protest line. In a weird sense, it showed that I didn't let political disagreements interfere with my relationships. For example, two of my best friends happen to be pro-abort; my favorite cousin is a Trumpkin.
It seems almost every major libertarian forum I follow (e.g., Reason, Cato Institute, FEE, etc.) has come out over the past year given kerfuffles on Confederate statues, flags, alt-right marches (including Charlottesville) with articles reminding those of us libertarians who are critics of Lincoln's invasion of the South that the war was about slavery.
I'm used to others, particularly libertarians, disagreeing with me. I almost laughed when I read another libertarian's response to one of these presumptuous Civil War pieces, paraphrased: "Imagine that! A libertarian trying to tell me how to think about something! How very Statist of you! Get off of my cloud!"
First of all, the Southern states left the Union with slavery still intact in the Constitution, the Fugitive Slave Act still on the books, and the author of the Dred Scott still heading SCOTUS. Lincoln was okay with slavery practiced in existing states; that was clear in the 1858 Douglas debates and in his inaugural address. Why did the Southern states secede after Lincoln's election? This question is beyond the scope of this post, but let me suggest that the South did not believe their interests would be served by the tilt towards the majority Northern states. For example, Lincoln opposed admitting new slave states. This meant diluted, dwindling regional influence/increased marginalization of the South. In fact, Lincoln was elected without a single Southern vote. The South saw the handwriting on the wall: a decline of federalism in favor of a strong central government.
Tom Woods does an excellent job in this essay explaining the competing interests of other private sector institutions as a check on the State sometimes described as decentralization, federalism and/or the principle of Subsidiary. Consider this extract:
Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy at Emory University, has identified one of these larger issues, and it was one that Southerners did indeed appreciate. In the modern age, Livingston observes, we have seen federative polities giving way to modern states. A federative polity is one in which a variety of smaller jurisdictions exist — like families, voluntary organizations, towns and states, and in medieval Europe institutions like guilds, universities, and the Church. Each of these social authorities has powers and rights of its own that the central government cannot overturn. Each of them is also a potential source of corporate resistance to the central government. Prior to the rise of the modern state, political leaders who desired centralization therefore found themselves up against the historic liberties of towns, guilds, universities, the Church, and similar corporate bodies.Lincoln's conceptualization of the Union was a perverse second American Revolution celebrating a majoritarian federal government, unfettered by and intolerant of lower government or private sector institutional resistance:
Livingston’s conclusion is that we must give the moral benefit of the doubt to people who were fighting to prevent the transformation of the United States into such a state, and who would instead have given the world the moral example of a federal republic that acknowledged the sovereignty of its constituent parts. "Europeans at the time of the War for Southern Independence," he writes, "recognized that the Union was engaged in a Jacobin revolution to create a unitary state. Marx and Mill rejoiced in the project of destroying the federative order, as did the British liberal journal The Spectator, which declared in December 1866: "The American Revolution marches fast towards its goal — the change of a Federal Commonwealth into a Democratic Republic, one and indivisible." The so-called "Civil War" was in fact America’s French Revolution."Second, if the "real" purpose was to abolish slavery, let's not forget the Southern states had been the ones blocking abolitionist-friendly legislation and/or constitutional amendments. It would seem that Lincoln would have been glad to be rid of the politically troublesome Gulf Coast/lower East Coast states which would have only obstructed his "abolitionist" agenda. As I've pointed out in prior posts and comments, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued not at the beginning of the war but years into the conflict and didn't apply to the remaining Union slave states. The thirteenth amendment was adopted several months after the end of the war and Lincoln's assassination. In fact, multiple states had seceded before Lincoln took office, and his inaugural address specifically rejects his constitutional authority to end the practice of slavery where it exists, he supported an amendment to protect said interests, and he was particularly concerned about the loss of US tariff interests in the South. Now today's abolitionists might argue that Lincoln didn't really mean what he said in his address, but that's a stretch, because he was echoing what he had written and said earlier on the record. And let's not forget, Lincoln's views on existing slaves were nuanced. For instance, at least at one point in his career, he opposed full citizenship of emancipated slaves (including their right to vote) and looked at ways of moving blacks back to Africa or other colonies.
Now the pro-Union libertarians are right that the Civil War was consequential in the sense slavery was abolished as a consequence (although I and others would argue that the way it was handled resulted in a century-old Cold War against the civil rights of blacks). For many of us, the end doesn't justify the means. In fact, the rest of the US and the civilized world had ended slavery without over 600,000 war dead. Back to Tom Woods:
But one may certainly ask whether the abolition of slavery had to be brought about in a manner that resulted in 1.5 million people dead, wounded, or missing; overwhelming material devastation; the undermining of the concept of civilized warfare; and the destruction of the American constitutional order in a way that forever strengthened the federal government at the expense of the self-governing rights of the states. Every other country in the Western hemisphere that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully. It is rather unflattering to assume that Americans were so savage that they were the only people for whom a negotiated settlement of the slave issue was simply impossible.
It is not plausible to suggest that slavery could have lasted much longer, even in an independent South. With 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 their isolated position would have exposed them. And according to Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, whose study of the war has been hailed by mainstream historians, "The fact that emancipation overwhelmed such entrenched plantation economies as Cuba and Brazil suggests that slavery was politically moribund anyway."....
This latter point recalls the earlier suggestion of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison: a division of the Union would have hastened the end of slavery. It so happens that, as Hummel observes, this is precisely how slavery was destroyed in Brazil. The institution essentially collapsed there after being abolished in the Brazilian state of Ceará in 1884. A hastily passed fugitive slave law was largely ignored, the value of slaves fell dramatically, and within four years the Brazilian government had acknowledged the reality of the situation by enacting immediate and uncompensated emancipation.
Finally, I bristle at the notion that the Southerners were rebellious over and beyond the Founding Father, that they were "traitors". They had no ambition to conquer and annex the Union. The Union states were more populated, and their economy was more diversified and prosperous. They had a standing military, a Navy that blockaded the South. The Southern states were fighting a defensive war; they wanted to secede peacefully. When the Confederates defeated the Union at Manassas, they did not march on to nearby DC., The discussion of Ft. Sumter is particularly disingenuous; South Carolina were willing to pay for the Union-held property, but Lincoln refused to consider it. And not a single Union soldier was killed during the bombardment of Ft. Sumter. Lincoln manipulated the situation to bait the South into firing the first shots, as if to morally justify the disproportionate invasion against the South that exercised its rights as a free people to secede from the tyranny of the Lincoln government.
