Posted on 05/11/2002 1:57:15 PM PDT by VinnyTex
Why the South Was Right, the North Wrong
by Doug Bandow, November 2000
THE VICTORS WRITE history books, and the dominant accounts of the Civil War reflect the victorious perspective: misguided Southerners sought to destroy democratic governance and preserve slavery. Led by the heroic Abraham Lincoln, Northerners responded by saving the Union and emancipating the slaves. And for leading his moral crusade, Lincoln is America?s greatest president, martyred in his hour of triumph.
Charles Adams, best known for his books on taxation, takes aim at this history. His analysis of what more accurately would be called the War of Northern Aggression is a bit different:
With the passing of time, all wars seem pointless. The American Civil War certainly looks that way at this time in history. Heroes begin to look like fools. The glorious dead, the young soldiers who suffered and died, need to be pitied, and the leaders who led them to early graves need to be lynched. In that war, as in so many wars, the wrong people died.When in the Course of Human Events offers a sustained challenge to much of the conventional wisdom about the conflict. Indeed, the book?s title is a bit misleading. Adams doesn?t so much develop a comprehensive argument for secession as puncture the worst hypocrisies surrounding the North?s decision to initiate war.
Observes Adams: ?Lincoln?s concern that government ?of the people? would perish from the earth if the North lost may have been the biggest absurdity of all.?
Particularly valuable is Adams?s critique of Lincoln. The victors? history books tend to glide by Lincoln?s constitutional usurpations and violations. Adams does not. Even those familiar with the 16th president?s unconstitutional militia call, suspension of habeas corpus, and other lawless acts may not know that Lincoln ordered the arrest of U.S. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for ruling that Lincoln?s suspension of habeas corpus without congressional approval violated the law. Only the failure of a U.S. marshal to carry out the order ?saved the president from what would have been his worst crime against the constitutional scheme of government,? the author writes.
The tariff and the war
Adams?s most detailed argument, with interesting citations to domestic and foreign opinion of the time, is that the federal tariff was more responsible than slavery for the war. Certainly the tariff was a factor in the North?s decision to use force to prevent the South from leaving. Abolition was not particularly important: as Adams details, most Northern states shared the racism of the South, and several refused to allow free blacks to enter. Concern over the effects of lost revenue ? the tariff was the federal government?s most important tax ? and creation of a veritable free-trade zone in the South stoked Northern opposition to secession.
Still, protectionism alone might not have been enough to justify a Northern invasion. Raw nationalism and anger over the South?s decision to pick up its marbles and go home also were important. Taken together, the combination proved irresistible, especially when most war hawks thought that little fighting would be necessary to reunite the states. This fatal underestimation of the costs of war, by both sides, might have been the decisive factor in leading the Southern states to secede and the Northern states to try to stop them.
Adams?s emphasis on the tariff is less satisfactory when applied to the departing states. Although the protective tariffs passed at the behest of Northern manufacturing interests rankled Southerners, Lincoln?s election did not dramatically impact that issue. The rush out of the Union by the seven Deep South states reflected anger over the triumph of someone viewed as hostile to the South and fundamental fears about the security of the ?peculiar institution.?
Adams argues that the institution of slavery had never been more secure ? but sometimes even otherwise rational people act irrationally. Indeed, the slave states could fear the continuing effectiveness of paper guarantees, especially if Lincoln used federal institutions to campaign against slavery.
Not one to shy from controversy, Adams charges Northern generals with barbarism and war crimes. He contends that the actions of the Ku Klux Klan after the war ? before its later lawless campaign against helpless blacks ? could be understood in the context of defending Southern society from ?the Yankee invaders? during Reconstruction.
Finally, Adams offers a wonderfully vicious parsing of Lincoln?s celebrated Gettysburg Address. It might be ?good poetry,? Adams writes, but that didn?t make it ?good thinking,? based as it was on ?a number of errors and falsehoods.?
Standard histories of the War between the States make an inviting target for debunking. Adams joyously shoots away. Most of his criticisms hit home, but you don?t have to agree with all of them to recognize that he is right in calling the Civil War ?a great national tragedy in every conceivable way,? including ?a botched emancipation; the extermination of a whole generation of young men, including hundreds of thousands of teenage boys; the destruction of the constitutional scheme of limited federal power.? It is a war that should never have been fought.
Mr. Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author and editor of several books. This article originally appeared in the May 27, 2000, Washington Times. Copyright © News World Communications, Inc., 2000. Reprinted with permission of The Washington Times.
When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, by Charles Adams (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); 255 pages; $24.95.
IN HER 1924 BOOK Free Trade and Peace in the Nineteenth Century, Helen Bosanquet pointed out,
The conflict between Free Trade and Protection was one of the chief causes of the great [American] Civil War.... Interests and passions and prejudices were all largely engaged in the war between North and South, and among the interests those of Free Traders and Protectionists were perhaps the most influential next to that of slavery itself.... The Southerners saw the sources of their prosperity attacked by the policy of Protection even before the North had advanced its anti-slavery policy to the point of abolition.She also pointed out that ?on the question of Free Trade the sympathies of Europe, and more especially of England, were with the South, so much so as to neutralize to a large extent the national abhorrence of slavery. ?
That the primary factor in bringing about the American Civil War was the long-running debate and dispute over free trade and protectionism between the South and the North is the essential theme that Charles Adams develops in his new book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.
Central to his argument is the idea that the Southern states had the right to secede, if sufficient provocation warranted dissolution of the Union. Adams insists that the very rationale for the American War of Independence against British rule in the 18th century had been the right of people to separate themselves from one political authority and form a new government and political entity. If this was true in 1776, how could it be any less true in 1861? Indeed, many of the flash points of international affairs today ? Russia's insistence on retaining political control over Chechnya or communist China's demand that Taiwan accept political control by Beijing, or the Israelis resisting full political independence for a Palestinian state ? are all examples of a political authority trying to prevent or suppress secessionist movements by people who do not want to accept or remain under a government's political authority.
Why secession?
The right of secession has long had the moral sympathy of the American people and sometimes the support of the U.S. government. In the 19th century, Greeks and Poles visiting the United States for the purpose of gaining financial and political support for their independence movements received a warm welcome from most Americans, who saw these people merely desiring the same right of secession from a larger nation that Americans had claimed for themselves against Great Britain. And one of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points at the end of the First World War was the right of various national and ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe to self-determination from German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian rule.
Why then did Abraham Lincoln and the Northern states so vehemently oppose the right of the Southern states to leave the Union? The answer, Adams insists, can be found in the long-standing debate in the United States over free trade versus protectionism.
In a nutshell, the Northern states were developing industrial centers heavily dependent upon high tariffs to protect themselves from lower-cost European manufactured goods, especially goods sold by England. A high tariff on imported goods provided two benefits: first, for the Northern manufacturers it provided captive Southern consumers who were unable to purchase more-cheaply priced foreign goods; and, second, for the federal government it supplied a generous source of tax revenue to meet the financial demands of government spending.
The Southern states, on the other hand, wanted free trade so that they could purchase less-expensive European goods with the income they earned from selling raw materials, especially cotton and tobacco, to the European market.
An independent Confederate States of America, therefore, meant a threat to the economic viability of the Northern higher-cost producers, who would now have to price-compete for Southern consumers against their European rivals. And the costs of the federal government would now fall entirely on the shoulders of the taxpayers of the Northern states. These consequences, Adams argues, were considered intolerable in the North. Hence, the decision was made by President Lincoln to not relinquish Fort Sumter at the mouth of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina.
Furthermore, the initiation of hostilities against the Southern states, Adams explains, was undertaken by Lincoln in clear violation of the procedures outlined in the Constitution. And once war was under way, Lincoln continued to violate the Constitution and to infringe on freedoms of the American people.
Lincoln's usurpation of congressional authority
For example, Lincoln only called Congress into session three months after hostilities broke out in April of 1861, in the meantime implementing various executive decisions that clearly involved a usurpation of congressional authority. He ordered up the militias of the states in the Union to suppress the Southern states; instituted a naval blockade of the Southern ports (which threatened incidents or conflicts with foreign powers whose ships might attempt entry into Southern waters); initiated government spending without congressional approval; suspended habeas corpus; and began closing newspapers in Union states that directly criticized his policies. Lincoln, Adams declares, ?pushed the Constitution aside, ignored its checks and balances, and assumed the role and power of a Roman consul, a dictator in fact, for the duration of his life. ?
The most dramatic constitutional confrontation, Adams reminds the reader, occurred in 1861 when John Merryman was arrested and imprisoned by federal troops in Maryland. Merryman petitioned the chief justice of the United States, Roger Taney, for a writ of habeas corpus, who ordered that the commanding officer responsible for the arrest and Merryman appear in court. When neither did, Taney wrote a famous opinion accusing Lincoln of a grievous violation of the Constitution for unlawfully suspending the writ of habeas corpus and sent a copy of the opinion to the White House. Lincoln's response was to order Taney's arrest, which fortunately was never effected.
Wars are cruel and wild practices by human beings which always lead to death and destruction. But as the most lethal and destructive conflict among any of the ?civilized nations ? in the 19th century, the Civil War was unique. Anti-Southern fanaticism reached such a peak in the North that calls were made for the mass murder of every white man, woman, and child in any of the Confederate states as well as the wholesale destruction of all means of livelihood for Southern whites.
And in fact the degree of violence against the civilian population of the Confederacy by the Union Army leads Adams to conclude that the orders of the Northern generals ?made their behavior criminal by the laws of nations.... In fact, it will be hard to not call what he [Lincoln] did a crime against the laws of war and nations, making Lincoln, as painful as it may be, a war criminal. ?
It would create a completely wrong impression of Adams's argument throughout the book if it were not strongly and forcefully pointed out that he has no sympathy with slavery in the South and no desire to make an apology for it. If anything, his political views are clearly just the opposite; he is a thorough defender of individual liberty. What he does is demonstrate that the issue of slavery was not the ?cause ? of the American Civil War, and that in fact, Lincoln and the citizens of the Northern states were quite willing to accept and support this ?peculiar institution ? in the South.
What drove America into this terrible tragedy, which continues to leave its mark in the country, were the issues of free trade versus protectionism and the right of secession and self-determination. These are issues that continue to plague the modern world and continue to bring war and violence in their wake.
Professor Ebeling is the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, and serves as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation.
New York - $35,155,452.75
Boston - $5,133,414.55
Philadelphia - $2,262,349.57
New Orleans - $2,120,058.76
Charleston - $299,339.43
Mobile - $118,027.99
Galveston - $92,417.72
Savannah - $89,157.18
Norfolk - $70,897.73
Richmond - $47,763.63
Wilmington, N.C. - $33,104.67
Pensacola - $3,577.60
How can you continue to make the claim that the south paid the majority of the tariff when some 95% of all revenues were collected up North? And the reason the collections were so small had nothing to do with an inability of ports to handle imports. In his same book Wise points out that New Orleans exported almost 1.8 million bales of cotton to overseas destinations in the year prior to the war. Mobile exported almost half a million bales, Charleston over a quarter of a million bales. The capacity to handle imports was there, the reason why comparatively few goods were imported through these ports was that demand for the imported goods was not. Had the south been the largest consumer of imported goods then the financial incentive to ship those goods directly to the market would have guaranteed that New Orleans would have been collection the lions share of revenue and New York would have been deserted. The fact that it was the other way around shows that the demand for the imports was in the North and the overwhelming majority of the tariff was paid by Northerners.
PANIC of 1857
In the 1840s and 1850s, the North greatly expanded, using money that had originated from tariffs charged to the South. In 1846, these tariffs were reduced, but the North spending money like a drunken sailor on leave, continued to operate, as if the same quanity of money was being generated by these tariffs. In 1857, the well ran dry. There was no longer sufficent funds to support Northern extravagance and expansionism.
"During August 1857, the economic boom started turning to bust. The New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which had $5 million to $7 million in debts, could not meet its obligations because its cashier had embezzled its assets. A panic struck the financial community, stock and commodity prices collapsed, and bankruptcies triggered a succession of additional bankruptcies. A brief recovery seemed to shape up early in September, then panic began anew as depositors made runs on banks. By mid-month, every bank in the city was forced to close its doors. Banks in Boston and Philadelphia soon followed, and then those in Baltimore and the Midwest collapsed. In short order, the notes of fourteen hundred state banks became worthless, five thousand businesses failed, and western railroads went broke. And, in a reversal of the usual pattern, wherein financial dislocations in Europe set off panics in America, the panic of 1857 spread to Europe.
The economic depression that followed was long and harsh. In New England, cotton and woolen textile mills were idle, and workers, laid off by the thousands, were plunged into poverty throughout the country, railroad construction, which had carried a great deal of the boom, stopped. Values of land collapsed, breaking tens of thousands of farmers who had borrowed to invest in acreage that they could no longer pay for. Female factory workers in Chicago and Chicopee, Massachusetts, kept their jobs but were paid a meager $1.40 a week. In Cincinnati, half of the twenty-five thousand workers in the clothing industry were unemployed. A majority of the country's furnaces and iron mills were shut. Lumbermen in Michigan and Wisconsin, fired with almost no warning, verged on starvation. Two hundred fifty ships were tied up in Boston; a little relief to shippers came from a demand by arriving immigrants to be taken back home. Private charitable instrumentalities were inadequate to relieve the suf-fering, and municipalities did not have the wherewithal. The major of New York proposed public works projects to employ the jobless unskilled laborers, but the city council's response was minimal."
Anger permeated the ranks of midwestern farmers, who sought and readily found scapegoats in the form of eastern "jobbers and speculators." From Ohio to Kansas, they blamed their troubles on manipulators in the eastern cities. Farmers in central Illinois held a convention and adopted bitter resolutions condemning "trading combinations," railroads, and banks. Other conventions alleged that stockyards and grain markets robbed the farmers, and they demanded government action. No action was forthcoming, and nothing would have helped anyway, for the farmers' plight was due to forces over which governments had no control."
Northern Manufacturers were also angry, attributing their woes to excessive importation made possible by the low import duties of the 1846 tariff and by a tariff adjustment enacted the day before Buchanan took office.
Ironmasters were especially bitter, for the United States obviously had the natural resources necessary for a great iron industry, yet Britain was consistently able to undersell American produc-ers in American markets. Textile manufacturers joined in clamoring for protective tariffs. Since 1846, imports of British printed and dyed cottons had increased eightfold to tenfold. To make matters worse, the 1857 tariff revisions had actually reduced the duties on cottons and woolens. Northern Manufacturers across the board organized and contributed money to elect Republicans to Congress and thereby to reinstitute the protective tariff system, in order to restore Northern Prosperity, at the expense of the South."
SOUTH UNTOUCHED BY NORTHERN MISMANAGEMENT
The cotton kingdom was almost untouched by the panic and depression. The price of cotton did drop from sixteen cents a pound in September (seasonally the peak) to nine cents by the end of 1857, but growers could wait for the rise-which came soon. Moreover, the 1857 crop was nearly a record and production during the last three years of the decade soared ever higher, while prices ranged up-ward from twelve cents a pound. Southerners, meanwhile, had not imported as lavishly as northerners, and thus they were essentially debt free. The prosperity of the South convinced southerners that cotton was king, that "our wealth;' as De Bow's Review crowed, "is permanent and real, while that of the North is fictitious.""
And at just this time, southerners were being powerfully reminded of how much better off they would be if they were not shackled in a union with the North. Thomas Prentice Long. former editor of the Democratic Review, published a book called Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, which proved something southerners suspected: that the South produced vast wealth, but the North took most of it. Using copious tables, Long reached the conclusion that the North took annually from the South, $253 million in profits by means of protective tariffs, fishing bounties, commissions of brokers, interest paid to bankers, and freightage paid to shippers. Others echoed the sentiment and announced that an independent South would be a more prosperous South. "We must separate," wrote the Virginia agricultural reformer Edmund Ruffin, "and the sooner it is done, the greater will be the relative strength of the Southern party and the more sure will be the success of the movement ""'
Forrest McDonald - Research Professor of History - University of Alabama
Forrest McDonald
Distinguished University Professor
(Ph.D., Texas)
U.S. constitutional; economic and business; South
BORN Orange, Texas, January 7, 1927. Graduated Orange High School, 1943. Served U.S. Navy, 1945-46. Married. Five children.
Education: B.A., 1949; M.A., 1949; Ph.D., 1955--University of Texas, Austin.
Professional Employment:
University ot Texas, Teaching Fellow, 1950-51
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1953-58
Brown University, Associate Professor, 1959-64;
Professor, 1964-67
Wayne State University, Professor, 1967-76
University of Alabama, Professor, 1976-87; Distinguished University Research Professor, 1987--
Visiting Professorships:
Columbia (1962); Duke (1963); N.Y.U. (1966); University of West Florida (1975); James Pinckney Harrison Professor, College of William and Mary (1986-87)
Honors and Fellowships:
Social Science Research Council, Research Training Fellow, 1951-53
Master of Arts, Honorary Degree, Brown University, 1962
Guggenheim Fellow, 1962-63
Volker Fund Fellowship, 1962-63
Relm Foundation Fellowship, 1965
Earhart Fellowships, 1969, 1976, 1984
American Council of Learned Societies, Research Grant, 1975
Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award, Wayne State University, 1975
George Washington Medal (Freedom's Foundation), 1980
Fraunces Tavern Book Award, for Alexander Hamilton, 1980
Outstanding Scholar Award, University of Alabama, 1980
First Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award, University of Alabama, 1980
Mortar Board, Honorary Membership, 1982
Board of Foreign Scholarships (Presidential Appointment), 1985-87
Finalist, Pulitzer Prize, for Novus Ordo Seclorum, 1986
American Revolution Round Table Book Award, 1986
Benchmark Book Award, 1986
National Endowment for the Humanities, 16th Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, 1987
Doctor of Humane Letters, Honorary Degree, SUNY-Geneseo, 1989
Ingersoll Prize, Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters, 1990
Heritage Foundation, Salvatori Award for Academic Excellence, 1992
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Henry J. Salvatori Award for The American Presidency, 1994
Frederick Moody Blackmon--Sarah McCorkle Moody Outstanding Professor Award, University of Alabama, 1995
Alabama Library Association 1996 Nonfiction Book Award
The Templeton Honor Tolls for Education in a Free Society, 1997-1998:
Professors; Scholarly Books, We The People
Mount Vernon Society in conjunction with the Organization of American Historians selected The Presidency of George Washington one of the Ten Great Books on George Washington, 1998
Advisory and professional services:
Rovensky Fellowship Selection Committee, 1965-88
National Review, Contributor, 1978--
Continuity, Board of Editors, 1980-
Richard M. Weaver Fellowship Selection Committee, 1980--
Encyclopedia Britannica Editorial Review Board, 1981-82, 1998
The Southern Historian, Faculty Advisor, 1983-89
Bicentennial of the Constitution, Claremont Advisory Board, 1983-89
Intercollegiate Review, Board of Editors, 1984--
Department of Education, Reader, Graduate Fellow Program, 1985, 1986
National Humanities Institute, Academic Board, 1985--
Constitution magazine, Advisory Board, 1988-94
National Legal Center for the Public Interest, Academic Council, 1988-94
Campus: America's Student Newspaper, Advisory Board, 1990--
Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, Editorial Board, 1990-92
Rockford Institute, Board of Directors, 1990-94
Birmingham Federalist Society, Board of Directors, 1990-St. George Tucker Society, Secretary of the Publications Committee, 1991-92
Heritage Foundation, Salvatori Center Advisory Council, 1992--
Center for the Study of Interactive Learning, Advisory Council, 1992-96
Philadelphia Society, President, 1988-90, Trustee, 1983-86, 1988-91, 1994-97
Earhart Foundation, Academic Sponsor Fellowship Program, 1993-94, 1998-99
Adair Prize Committee, Selection Committee, 1995-96
Grady Mcwhiney Research Foundation, Senior Fellow, 1997--
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Lady Thatcher Essay Competition, 1997
Presidential Studies Quarterly, Board of Editors, 1998--
Biographical and historiographic articles about Forrest McDonald:
"Forrest McDonald," by Justus Doenecke, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 17, Detroit, 1983
"If Jefferson et al Could See Us Now," by Leslie Maitland Werner, New York Times, February 12, 1987
"Forrest McDonald, the 1987 Jefferson Lecturer," by Linda Blanken, Humanities, March-April, 1987
"Historian Calls for Sustained Adherence to the Framers' Precepts," by Angus Paul, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 1987
Who's Who in America, starting in the 45th edition, 1988
Also listed in "The World Who's Who of Authors," 1975--; "Dictionary of International Biography," 1976--; "Directory of American Scholars," 6th edition--, "The Jnternational Authors and Writers Who's Who," 8th edition--; "Men of Achievement," 5th edition; "Community Leaders and Noteworthy Americans," 9th and 11th editions; "International Who's Who in Education," 1980; "International Who's Who in Community Service," 3rd edition; "Who's Who in the South and Southwest," 17th edition--.
FORREST MCDONALD PUBLICATIONS:
1. Books:
Let There Be Light: The Electric Utility Industry in Wisconsin (Madison: American History Research Center, 1957)
We The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958; new ed. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1992)
Insull (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)
E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1965; new ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979)
The Presidency of George Washington (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974, paperback ed., 1985)
The Phaeton Ride: The Crisis of American Success (New York: Doubleday, 1974)
The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1976; paperback ed., 1987)
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