Posted on 11/11/2002 1:23:27 PM PST by l8pilot
Evidence Builds for DiLorenzo’s Lincoln by Paul Craig Roberts
In an excellent piece of historical research and economic exposition, two economics professors, Robert A. McGuire of the University of Akron and T. Norman Van Cott of Ball State University, have provided independent evidence for Thomas J. Dilorenzo’s thesis that tariffs played a bigger role in causing the Civil War than slavery.
In The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo argues that President Lincoln invaded the secessionist South in order to hold on to the tariff revenues with which to subsidize Northern industry and build an American Empire. In "The Confederate Constitution, Tariffs, and the Laffer Relationship" (Economic Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, July 2002), McGuire and Van Cott show that the Confederate Constitution explicitly prohibits tariff revenues from being used "to promote or foster any branch of industry." By prohibiting subsidies to industries and tariffs high enough to be protective, the Confederates located their tax on the lower end of the "Laffer curve."
The Confederate Constitution reflected the argument of John C. Calhoun against the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. Calhoun argued that the U.S. Constitution granted the tariff "as a tax power for the sole purpose of revenue – a power in its nature essentially different from that of imposing protective or prohibitory duties."
McGuire and Van Cott conclude that the tariff issue was a major factor in North-South tensions. Higher tariffs were "a key plank in the August 1860 Republican party platform. . . . northern politicians overall wanted dramatically higher tariff rates; Southern politicians did not."
"The handwriting was on the wall for the South," which clearly understood that remaining in the union meant certain tax exploitation for the benefit of the north.
October 16, 2002
Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions Evidence Builds for DiLorenzo’s Lincoln by Paul Craig Roberts
In an excellent piece of historical research and economic exposition, two economics professors, Robert A. McGuire of the University of Akron and T. Norman Van Cott of Ball State University, have provided independent evidence for Thomas J. Dilorenzo’s thesis that tariffs played a bigger role in causing the Civil War than slavery.
In The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo argues that President Lincoln invaded the secessionist South in order to hold on to the tariff revenues with which to subsidize Northern industry and build an American Empire. In "The Confederate Constitution, Tariffs, and the Laffer Relationship" (Economic Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, July 2002), McGuire and Van Cott show that the Confederate Constitution explicitly prohibits tariff revenues from being used "to promote or foster any branch of industry." By prohibiting subsidies to industries and tariffs high enough to be protective, the Confederates located their tax on the lower end of the "Laffer curve."
The Confederate Constitution reflected the argument of John C. Calhoun against the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. Calhoun argued that the U.S. Constitution granted the tariff "as a tax power for the sole purpose of revenue – a power in its nature essentially different from that of imposing protective or prohibitory duties."
McGuire and Van Cott conclude that the tariff issue was a major factor in North-South tensions. Higher tariffs were "a key plank in the August 1860 Republican party platform. . . . northern politicians overall wanted dramatically higher tariff rates; Southern politicians did not."
"The handwriting was on the wall for the South," which clearly understood that remaining in the union meant certain tax exploitation for the benefit of the north.
October 16, 2002
Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions
I found some stuff also.
"The New York Times described Taney's decision the next day as one that "can only be regarded as at once officious and improper."
-- from a website
"The majority of Congress approved of the President's course of action, partly due to the fact that the Southerners had either left Congress or been expelled. They were divided over the constitutional justification of his actions, but attached a validating clause to an act that called for an increase in privates' pay.
The President's acts were pronounced "in all respects legalized and made valid, to the same intent and with the same effect as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of the Congress." The Supreme Court also, for the most part, approved the constitutionality of Lincoln's assumption of broad war powers. They justified this by saying that since the war was begun by insurrection, Lincoln was "bound to accept the challenge without waiting for any special legislative authority." Both the legislative and judicial branches of government came to a consensus of approval for the extra powers assumed by the executive branch. Lincoln left an enduring legacy for future generations of Americans. He gave slavery the death blow, and enacted federal intervention in banking and currency, transportation, the tariff, land grants to homesteaders and aid to higher education. He effected an enormous expansion of the economy during the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The presidential office has been completely shaped by its incumbents, and Lincoln has been an important one of these. Although his actions did lack precedent, it does not necessarily make them wrong.
Ironically, the greatest presidents did the most beneficial things for our nation without authorization from the Constitution. A perfect example of this is Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase. Departures from the Constitution do not create constitutional precedents for future departures, so it must not be said that Lincoln's broad use of war powers made them constitutional, but it did demonstrate that extraordinary measures are sometimes needed to deal with extraordinary situations."
--From a website
"Not every historian today would credit it with saving Maryland for the Union, but that conclusion became almost a truism in Lincoln's day. Nathaniel Banks, who commanded the Department of Annapolis in 1861, was a poor general but an astute politician, and he thought the system worked. Indeed, Maryland provided Banks with a model for reconstruction in Louisiana later:
The secession leaders—the enemies of the people—were replaced and loyal men assigned to... their duties. This made Maryland a loyal State.... What happened there will occur in North Carolina, In South Carolina, in Georgia, in Alabama and Mississippi. If... those States shall be controlled by men that are loyal... we shall then have loyal populations and loyal governments.
The success of the Maryland policy became a political byword and was celebrated, beyond the borders of Maryland, throughout the war, Thus in 1863, a Loyal Publication Society pamphlet on the War Power of the President explained the necessity of military arrests rather than reliance on the courts by pointing to that familiar example:
When the traitors of the loyal state of Maryland were concocting their grand scheme to hurl the organized power of that state against the government, probably not a handful of them was known to be guilty of any act for which he could ever have been arrested by civil process. And whatever their offenses against the laws might have been, and whatever the fidelity of the courts in that lurisdictlon, the process of civil law would have been far too slow to prevent the consummation of the gigantic treason which would have added another state to the rebellion.... Courts could not have suppressed this unholy work, but the summary imprisonment of those few men saved the state of Maryland to the Union cause.Republicans would later enjoy substantial bipartisan agreement on the necessity of the early arrests in Maryland.
From a review of Dr. Neely's later book:
At its heart, Southern Rights is about what Neely perceives as an overweening Confederate streak of hypocrisy; the very title of his book is a statement of irony. Neely is impatient with what he characterizes as the "strident" and "noisy" posturing of Confederates on matters of civil liberties and individual rights. He is also deeply distressed by a tendency among Confederate historians to take Southerners' declarations of libertarianism at face value. "Antebellum politicians exaggerated sensitivity about southern rights as a means of combating northern power," Neely wrote, "but historians should not exaggerate as well" (p. 79). There is merit in this argument, and in the book as a whole. Professor Neely should be commended for pursuing this subject matter in the first place. Many scholars of Confederate history, and certainly the lay public, would much prefer to discuss battlefields and generals. Even the admirable recent trend in the field towards studies of social and cultural topics tends to neglect matters of law and constitutionalism. There is also a real paucity of primary source materials available, and these are of a generally fragmentary nature.
Arrest records for Confederate political prisoners, for example, are scattered throughout various archive collections, often with no index or other finding aids. Confederate legal and constitutional history is a neglected topic for a very good reason, and Neely should be commended for exhibiting the patience and resourcefulness necessary to pursue this evidence.
In doing so, Neely shed light on some very dark and musty corners of Confederate history. He wrote a brilliant little chapter on the relationship between the prohibition of alcohol and martial law in the Confederacy. He introduced the reader to the almost completely unknown office of "habeas corpus commissioners," quasi-legal government officials who acted as "the War Department's shadow courts" (p. 80).
Neely also examined the careers of some obscure but fascinating individuals like Thomas C. Hindman, the irascible military governor of Arkansas who unabashedly proclaimed the need to take harsh measures against Southern dissenters, and North Carolina judge Richmond M. Pearson, who employed some very interesting legal arguments to block conscription in his state. It is also to Neely's credit that he does not shirk from pointing out what should have been obvious to any historian of the Confederacy, but which has been strangely overlooked: that the issue of civil liberties in the Confederacy should be seen as one involving black as well as white Americans. Neely points out that the vaunted Confederate concern for individual rights was a concern for white rights only. African- Americans didn't much enter the Confederate field of vision on this point. It is high time that Confederate history reconceptualize itself as a field involving black and white subjects alike, and Neely's work should help. These are all valuable contributions to the literature on the Confederacy. Nevertheless, Southern Rights does possess shortcomings. I suspect they are shortcomings produced by the book's close proximity to the methods and questions prevalent in The Fate of Liberty. Neely applied almost exactly the same questions to the Confederacy that he asked of Lincoln and the North, questions about martial law, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, enforcement of conscription statutes, and arrest of civilian political prisoners. In doing so, however, he failed to examine some aspects of the Confederate experience that actually were quite different -- not better -- from those in the North. The widespread Confederate military practice of property impressment, for example, was a burning issue of personal rights vs. government power, yet Neely didn't address this subject. Neely also rarely mentions sequestration -- the confiscation of Yankee-owned property in the South -- a practice that took up the lion's share of the Confederate federal court system's time and resources throughout the war.
These issues were important because much of what constituted a Confederate conversation concerning personal rights and government interference involved matters like sequestration and impressment, matters which have no direct counterpart in the legal history of the North. This might also have caused Neely to moderate his conclusion that the South had no real conversation about civil liberties. In fact, impressment cases raised serious concerns about individual rights in the South. And the Confederacy may well have had its version of Ex parte Merryman in a sequestration case called James Louis Petigru vs. The Confederate States of America, in which a South Carolina Unionist challenged the Confederate national government's right to conduct sequestration investigations which impinged upon Confederates' personal rights.
Both impressment and sequestration involved property rights, and it is plausible to suggest that this question of property constituted a conversation about civil liberties which, while differing from the North's debate over habeas corpus and martial law, was in its way quite robust.
I also wondered if Professor Neely was quite fair in his analysis of Jefferson Davis. He is annoyed with invidious comparisons between Lincoln and Davis where civil liberties are concerned, taking special umbrage with the suggestion by many historians that Davis was more reluctant to suspend the writ and declare martial law because of "habitual and consistent constitutional principles" that Lincoln lacked. On the contrary, Neely argued, Davis was willing to repress political dissent when he thought circumstances warranted such action. "Lincoln was no 'dictator,'" Neely wrote, "and Jefferson Davis was no 'constitutionalist'" (p. 172). Perhaps unwittingly, Neely is actually rehabilitating Davis's reputation here, for the Confederate president has often been criticized for being so stiff and formal in his constitutional scruples that he lacked the necessary flexibility to meet Confederate war needs. Neely suggests that the opposite is true. But I think Neely presses this point a bit too far. He cuts Lincoln a great deal of slack, suggesting that, when Lincoln quickly moved to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in Kentucky and Maryland in 1861, he "recognized the realities of power." On the other hand, he suggests that Davis rather cynically "opted for a pose of dedication to civil liberty as a way of attracting these states to his side" (p. 154). Perhaps this made sense as good political strategy for Davis; but why should we assume it was a "pose"? Perhaps Davis pursued a policy here that was, at least to his mind, both pragmatic and principled. Maybe he really believed himself to be both a defender of constitutional liberty and a flexible political leader. Lincoln scholars -- Neely among them -- have long suggested (and rightly so) that it is wrong to draw too cynical a distinction between principle and practical politics where Lincoln is concerned. Should it be less so for Davis?
Neely is impatient with the hypocrisy, in Confederates themselves and in much of Confederate history, which suggests an unusual anxiety for civil liberties in a Confederate nation which he believes was in fact all too comfortable with wartime violations of those liberties. On the whole this is laudable; it encourages scholars of Confederate history to press beyond the well-worn shibboleths of Lost Cause mythology. If such an approach can also strike a blow at the abominable history perpetrated (often all too successfully) by modern neo-Confederates, so much the better. Yet I wonder if those of us who write Civil War history might be better served by a more balanced, charitable point of view, suggesting that each side was afflicted not with hypocrisy, but with unresolved internal contradictions and tensions on a whole host of issues, including the proper balance between liberty and order. To this end, Professor Neely's Southern Rights is a useful beginning, a starting point for a conversation we should be having about the intellectual underpinnings of the Confederacy, and the Union as well."
Lincoln's actions were widely approved at the time. It is much like the modern relativism that changed Chrstopher Columbus from "Admiral of the Ocean Deep" to a syphilitic oppressor of minorities. But Mr. Lincoln's reputation can stand the assault.
Walt
Nonsense, I am a military brat, and have brothers that served as well - my biggest regret in life is NOT enlisting - there wasn't an active war going on, and I wanted combat experience.
That is without a doubt the lamest thing I've ever read.
But only a psychotic wants combat experience.
I guess everyone in the military has stories from people who said, "oh, I was going to join up, but my knee was bad, or I just got a new job", or whatever. I certainly heard it often enough. I did join up. You couldn't or wouldn't take the plunge to give yourself over to something larger than yourself.
Walt
You don't join to play tiddlywinks.
What horse manure. Here you try character assassination on a freeper on whether or not he served in the military and YOU voted for Clinton who is on "record" as loathing of the military and lied to get out of it. You are totally disgusting.
You don't join to play tiddlywinks.
Read "Men Against Fire" by General S. L.A. Marshall.
I can't believe what ignorant comments you've made on this subject.
Walt
The reason there wasn't a war on for your enjoyment was due to the hard work and dedication of those professional military men and women, like Walt and my humble self, who joined and served to help prevent wars from happening. I had 22 years commissioned service, active and reserve, in the Navy and never once heard a shot fired in anger. And I don't feel slighted or the slightest bit of regret, either.
Walt, as I stated I was a military brat - I know full well what military service entails. I didn't want to join to receive benefits and play dress up, I wanted to "be" a soldier. Only those that have "seen the elephant" can fully understand the horrors of war. And that is not a denigration of those that have never seen combat - the military is comprised of numerous people that would never see actual combat - but they still earned my respect.
But I certainly reserve the right to disagree on issues, particularly the targeting of civilian targets, and failing to abide by their oath to defend the Constitution.
See my previous comment above. I never stated that I wanted combat experience for my enjoyment. I stated that I chose to get my degree 1st, and then would join as an officer, which for other reasons, never occurred.
No, war was just a prerequisite for military service, a chance to punch God only knows what kind of ticket. I can't imagine what that makes the rest of us who joined for minor reasons like sense of duty, or a desire to give something back to our country and help protect her.
I never denigrated anyone that chose to serve, or stated that their reasons for doing so were "minor". People enlist for various reasons - duty, honor, following in their father's footsteps, etc. Some join to avoid minor jail-terms, obtain a free college education or enlistment bonuses, because they have nothing better to do, or they simply just to see the world.
As I stated way back in #1437, "my biggest regret in life is NOT enlisting."
Now that I am all choked up about all the sacrifices you and Walt made, the question must come up, did you vote for Clinton too? I'd like to hear your reasoning, yes or no.
And you voted for Clinton. Sort of a misnomer statement of yours if I ever heard of one.
I didn't say anyting about people who spent time in the military. I spent time there myself. I just don't parade it around like liberals do. You know, the ones who voted for Clinton.
But I'll answer you anyway. No
Well, you answered half of the question. Care to say why you didn't vote for Clinton? I'm sure we will get an honest answer.
Avoid the question if you want. I am thinking along the lines of quilt by association. You can clear that up, right here and now by answering the original question of mine. Which is why you did not vote for Willian Jefferson Clinton. It that so tough?
Because I cast a write in vote for Zoltor, Grand High Emperor of Venus.
Because I'm a Jefferson Davis supporter and I found the idea of having more than one candidate to vote for for president to be insulting to the great man's name.
Ok, ok, ok, how about this one? Walt and I always cancel each other out at election time.
Why didn't I vote for Clinton? He didn't run in 2000. Duh.
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