from lewrockwell.com
Genesis of the Civil War
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
The historical event that looms largest
in American public consciousness is the
Civil War. One-hundred thirty-nine
years after the first shot was fired, its
genesis is still fiercely debated and its
symbols heralded and protested. And
no wonder: the event transformed the
American regime from a federalist
system based on freedom to a
centralized state that circumscribed
liberty in the name of public order. The
cataclysmic event massacred a
generation of young men, burned and
looted the Southern states, set a
precedent for executive dictatorship,
and transformed the American military
from a citizen-based defense corps into
a global military power that can't resist
intervention.
And yet, if you listen to the media on
the subject, you might think that the
entire issue of the Civil War comes
down to race and slavery. If you favor
Confederate symbols, it means you are
a white person unsympathetic to the
plight of blacks in America. If you favor
abolishing Confederate History Month
and taking down the flag, you are an
enlightened thinker willing to bury the
past so we can look forward to a bright
future under progressive leadership.
The debate rarely goes beyond these
simplistic slogans.
And yet this take on the event is wildly
ahistorical. It takes Northern war
propaganda at face value without
considering that the South had solid
legal, moral, and economic reasons for
secession which had nothing to do with
slavery. Even the name "Civil War" is
misleading, since the war wasn't about
two sides fighting to run the central
government as in the English or Roman
civil wars. The South attempted a
peaceful secession from federal control,
an ambition no different from the
original American plea for
independence from Britain.
But why would the South want to
secede? If the original American ideal
of federalism and constitutionalism had
survived to 1860, the South would not
have needed to. But one issue loomed
larger than any other in that year as in
the previous three decades: the
Northern tariff. It was imposed to
benefit Northern industrial interests by
subsidizing their production through
high prices and public works. But it had
the effect of forcing the South to pay
more for manufactured goods and
disproportionately taxing it to support
the central government. It also injured
the South's trading relations with other
parts of the world.
In effect, the South was being looted to
pay for the North's early version of
industrial policy. The battle over the
tariff began in 1828, with the "tariff of
abomination." Thirty year later, with
the South paying 87 percent of federal
tariff revenue while having their
livelihoods threatened by protectionist
legislation, it become impossible for the
two regions to be governed under the
same regime. The South as a region was
being reduced to a slave status, with the
federal government as its master.
But why 1860? Lincoln promised not to
interfere with slavery, but he did
pledge to "collect the duties and
imposts": he was the leading advocate
of the tariff and public works policy,
which is why his election prompted the
South to secede. In pro-Lincoln
newspapers, the phrase "free trade" was
invoked as the equivalent of industrial
suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It was
a customs house, and when the North
attempted to strengthen it, the South
knew that its purpose was to collect
taxes, as newspapers and politicians
said at the time.
To gain an understanding of the
Southern mission, look no further than
the Confederate Constitution. It is a
duplicate of the original Constitution,
with several improvements. It
guarantees free trade, restricts
legislative power in crucial ways,
abolishes public works, and attempts to
rein in the executive. No, it didn't
abolish slavery but neither did the
original Constitution (in fact, the
original protected property rights in
slaves).
Before the war, Lincoln himself had
pledged to leave slavery intact, to
enforce the fugitive slave laws, and to
support an amendment that would
forever guarantee slavery where it then
existed. Neither did he lift a finger to
repeal the anti-Negro laws that
besotted all Northern states, Illinois in
particular. Recall that the underground
railroad ended, not in New York or
Boston -- since dropping off blacks in
those states would have been restricted
-- but in Canada! The Confederate
Constitution did, however, make
possible the gradual elimination of
slavery, a process that would have been
made easier had the North not so
severely restricted the movements of
former slaves.
Now, you won't read this version of
events in any conventional history text,
particularly not those approved for use
in public high schools. You are not
likely to hear about it in the college
classroom either, where the single issue
of slavery overwhelms any critical
thinking. Again and again we are told
what Polybius called "an idle,
unprofitable tale" instead of the truth,
and we are expected to swallow it
uncritically. So where can you go to
discover that the conventional story is
sheer nonsense?
The last ten years have brought us a
flurry of great books that look beneath
the surface. There is John Denson's "The
Costs of War" (1998), Jeffrey Rodgers
Hummel's "Emancipating Slaves,
Enslaving Free Men" (1996), David
Gordon's "Secession, State, and Liberty"
(1998), Marshall de Rosa's "The
Confederate Constitution" (1991), or,
from a more popular standpoint, James
and Walter Kennedy's "Was Jefferson
Davis Right?" (1998).
But if we were to recommend one work
-- based on originality, brevity, depth,
and sheer rhetorical power -- it would
be Charles Adams' time bomb of a
book, "When in the Course of Human
Events: Arguing the Case for Southern
Secession" (Rowman & Littlefield,
2000). In a mere 242 pages, he shows
that almost everything we thought we
knew about the war between the states
is wrong.
Adams believes that both Northern and
Southern leaders were lying when they
invoked slavery as a reason for
secession and for the war. Northerners
were seeking a moral pretext for an
aggressive war, while Southern leaders
were seeking a threat more concrete
than the Northern tariff to justify a
drive to political independence. This
was rhetoric designed for mass
consumption . Adams amasses an
amazing amount of evidence --
including remarkable editorial cartoons
and political speeches -- to support his
thesis that the war was really about
government revenue.
Consider this little tidbit from the
pro-Lincoln New York Evening Post,
March 2, 1861 edition:
"That either the revenue from duties
must be collected in the ports of the
rebel states, or the port must be closed
to importations from abroad, is
generally admitted. If neither of these
things be done, our revenue laws are
substantially repealed; the sources
which supply our treasury will be dried
up; we shall have no money to carry on
the government; the nation will become
bankrupt before the next crop of corn is
ripe. There will be nothing to furnish
means of subsistence to the army;
nothing to keep our navy afloat;
nothing to pay the salaries of public
officers; the present order of things
must come to a dead stop.
"What, then, is left for our government?
Shall we let the seceding states repeal
the revenue laws for the whole Union
in this manner? Or will the government
choose to consider all foreign commerce
destined for those ports where we have
no custom-houses and no collectors as
contraband, and stop it, when offering
to enter the collection districts from
which our authorities have been
expelled?"
This is not an isolated case. British
newspapers, whether favoring the
North or South, said the same thing: the
feds invaded the South to collect
revenue. Indeed, when Karl Marx said
the following, he was merely stating
what everyone who followed events
closely knew: "The war between the
North and the South is a tariff war. The
war is further, not for any principle,
does not touch the question of slavery,
and in fact turns on the Northern lust
for sovereignty."
Marx was only wrong on one point: the
war was about principle at one level. It
was about the principle of
self-determination and the right not to
be taxed to support an alien regime.
Another way of putting this is that the
war was about freedom, and the South
was on the same side as the original
American revolutionaries.
Interesting, isn't it, that today, those
who favor banning Confederate
symbols and continue to demonize an
entire people's history also tend to be
partisans of the federal government in
all its present political struggles? Not
much has changed in 139 years.
Adams's book goes a long way toward
telling the truth about this event, for
anyone who cares to look at the facts.
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