Evidence Builds for DeLorenzo's Lincoln

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.

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

"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.

Hardly. According to accounts of the time the Harriet Lane was doing exactly what she was supposed to do, protect the coast of the United States.

Incorrect. Charleston was a southern city in a state that had seceded from the northern union. The Harriet Lane was a northern ship. It had no right to impede access to a port that was not its to guard. It was essentially in the same situation as the fort - blocking free access to a confederate port. The Harriet Lane's firing on a confederate steamer was also one of the events that pushed Beauregard to attack the fort - he knew that the yankees were there to do exactly what you have long denied they were there to do, that being to impede access to the port.

You mean they couldn't decide for themselves what to do?

But what happens if government uses its power to infringe upon or even destroy people's rights, as our Founders feared it might do? As the Declaration points out, in that case it is the right of the people to alter or abolish their government and to institute new government that would be more likely to protect their rights. What Jefferson was referring to was peaceful change through political action as well as, in extreme cases, violent change through armed revolution.

The 10th Amendment states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

"Most southerners fought because the army was the only seemingly honorable activity they could undertake, as manual labor was beneath a poor white as it was the lot of the slaves. For most of them, getting drafted by the Confederacy was the only way they would see their first musket and their first pair of boots. For such exotic and otherwise unobtainable items, why wouldn't they go along?"

Man, that is irrational! White Southerners worked and worked hard, it's the only way they had of living. No one took care of them cradle to grave.

. For a professional historian (yes I know he's not the only one) he bends over backwards in his anti-South bias. He brags about it.

Yes, he certainly does that...sometimes as a commentator for NPR and Pacifica radio, which are not the most confederate-friendly media outlets themselves. If a person wants to quote McPherson, debate McPherson, read McPherson, or discuss McPherson on a factual basis it is his right to do so. But to pretend that McPherson is some above the fray non-biased scholar, as Walt has done directly in the face of evidence of McPherson's biases, is dishonest at best.

Perhaps he's reacting to criticism from Neo-Confeds. Even so, he's gotten more liberal since Battle Cry came out a few years back.

I think he's gotten more openly liberal in the days since that publication. He's been more willing to appear publicly in leftist forums and among radical leftists. This has included activism in defense of Bill Clinton during impeachment, an advisory role among leftist scholars to Bill Bradley, and publication on the website of the Trotskyite Marxist party. He's also become more openly anti-southern, weighing in on political issues involving the confederate flag and the sort. He also recently hosted one of those campus academic "dialogue" (read: left wing whine session) things on slavery reparations, though I don't know if he took a side openly.

I do think McPherson's academic leftism has been strong for some time though. As far back as I can tell he's held the righteous/moralist view of the war you talk of and drawn a comparison between the 1860's and 1960's. In addition his writings have drawn toward the far left in indirect academic senses. I remember reading a journal article he published in the early 1970's that argued 100 years of activism by white liberals was to thank for the civil rights movement and more or less tried to argue that the "black power" movement of the time should not forget white liberals. He also recited a list of what he called successful black leaders in his article, many of them being mainstream like MLK. But he was careful to include radicals like WEB DuBois and, perhaps the most bizarre, Stokely Carmichael. All in all it was a very strange topic for any historian to choose and write about, save of course those on the far left.

The policies in effect exactly parallel those in any other socialist country.

Very much so. During the war Hitler instituted programs of duty-bound labor terms to the reich among the German people. They were used for periods of work in industry, not unlike the Soviet industrial expansion plans. In fact, Goebbels once said that the Stalinist Soviet Union was a model of National-Socialism in action. This was obviously before Hitler turned on his former ally Stalin and decided to challenge the soviets in order to expand his power and resources.

(read carefully "Disquisitions" in which he waxes eloquent about the LABOR THEORY OF VALUE, which is the essential Marxist/socialist principle)

Actually, Calhoun's economic beliefs largely surrounded the tariff issue, which he took on from an increasingly free-trade view as his career progressed. If any American political player of the time espoused the Labor Theory of Value, it was Abraham Lincoln, not Calhoun.

Lincoln did this across decades of his career and asserted the theory repeatedly. It's most specific consideration is found in the notes from a speech he gave on tariffs in the late 1840's, but the idea emerges and is referenced by Lincoln again and again in the 1850's and as president.

and George Fitzhugh, which neo-Confederates have scrupulously avoided

Fitzhugh is avoided today much for the same reason that he was avoided in his own day. He was a crackpot fringer. His ideas are certainly disturbing, bizarre, and socialist-minded but, as any good historian will tell you, on the fringe in his own day, not to mention today.

An additional note on socialism and the yankees: It is a little known historical fact that Karl Marx himself was one of the north's biggest advocates during the war. Marx wrote a frenzy of editorials promoting the north, attacking the south, and praising Lincoln during the war. Many of them were published widely abroad and picked up by the northern newspapers in the US, among them Horace Greeley's NY Tribune. The articles themselves were largely propagandist in nature. They tended to be loaded with distorted facts, alarmist appeals, and socialist "liberation" theory. Marx also very clearly saw Abraham Lincoln as the deliverer of the working man into a new stage of class evolution. He expressed this sentiment in some of his articles and in a letter to Lincoln following the 1864 election. Marx's communist political organization in London also issued proclamations praising Lincoln and the North.

I mention all of this because it seems odd that the world's leading communist and the communist-socialist political movement at the time would tilt so heavily in favor of the North if the South were what you say it to be.

Here is perhaps the most famous of many quotes in which Abraham Lincoln asserted a labor theory of value:

"[S]ince then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour. And, inasmuch [as] most good things are produced by labour, it follows that [all] such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government." - Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1847, Collected Works vol. 1, pp. 411-412

All that I've seen of it suggests a strong yankee bias combined with shoddy consideration of the facts.

Show that, then.

You can start with this:

"Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Pure Jeffersonians could not accept this. The most outspoken of them, Joseph Brown of Georgia, denounced the draft as a "dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the states...at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution."

In reply Jefferson Davis donned the mantle of Hamilton. The Confederate Constitution, he pointed out to Brown, gave Congress the power "to raise and support armies" and to "provide for the common defense." It also contained another clause (likewise copied from the U.S. Constitution) empowering Congress to make all laws "necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Brown had denied the constitutionality of conscription because the Constitution did not specifically authorize it. This was good Jeffersonian doctrine, sanctified by generations of southern strict constructionists. But in Hamiltonian language, Davis insisted that the "necessary and proper" clause legitimized conscription. No one could doubt the necessity "when our very existance is threatened by armies vastly superior in numbers." Therefore "the true and only test is to enquire whether the law is intended and calculated to carry out the object...if the answer be in the affirmative, the law is constitutional."

--Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson P.433

Just because Davis sounds as if he might be reading directly from the 1819 Supreme Court decision McCullough v. Maryland doesn't mean it is Dr. McPherson's fault that it makes Davis sound like a lying cretin when he posited an entirely different interpretation in his memoirs.

Walt

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Some of the powers delegated to the Congress include providing for the general welfare and common defense. If those are threatened, Congress in empowered to act by the necesary and proper clause.

The sesesh thought they could get their way with little or no fighting. They didn't listen to Sam Houston:

"Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win Southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche."

There is no way out of the Constitution except through amendent or revolution. That was the intent of the Framers. They had seen the Articles of Confederation fail. They didn't want that again.

Walt

Incorrect. Charleston was a southern city in a state that had seceded from the northern union.

Incorrect. Charleston was a city of the United States. As a unit of the Revenue Service the Harriet Lane was within it's authority to determine the identity of ships entering or leaving the harbor, especially in the face of the budding southern rebellion. Your claim that it was one of the actions which pushed Beauregard into firing is ridiculous. By that time the orders to fire on Sumter had arrived from the Davis regime and less than 12 hours after the Lane stopped the Nashville the southern batteries opened fire.

By that time the orders to fire on Sumter had arrived from the Davis regime and less than 12 hours after the Lane stopped the Nashville the southern batteries opened fire.

Thanks for calling GOPcap on this.

The neo-rebs will put forward Robert E. Lee and the other traitors as the greatest of Christian gentlemen and then tell the biggest lies themselves.

Walt

Ah, but you fail to read on. Later, Lincoln said that the PURPOSE of labor was that every man should start his own farm/small business. Labor was a starting point. Moreover, Lincoln soon modified these views (note the date) and while he always "stood up" for labor, he also, as an attorney, represented banks and railroads in numerous cases which he won. You might look at some of his court cases to see somewhat contradictory arguments.

With Calhoun, however, his purpose was not emancipation but eventually the quasi-enslavement of free whites. Read carefully his "Disquisitions" (since I went through this on another thread, I'm not going to start up again with new quotations) and you'll see he in fact was, as Richard Hofstadter called him, the "Marx of the Master Class."

I don't care how "odd" it seems. You have to remember WHY Marx "supported" Lincoln was that he wanted a communist revolution and his theory (WRONG) was that such revolutions would occur in CAPITALIST countries. This alone tells you that even the father of communism knew the South was not "capitalist," but feudal.

But the Marxist supporters of slavery, most notably Calhoun and Fitzhugh, were very clear that in their system, not only blacks, but all men would become slaves.

Fitzhugh was not a "crackpot fringer," but in fact the ESSENCE of slavery. And you need to look at Calhoun's Disquisitoins more carefully. This was NOT just related to the tariff, but involved land policy and above all, race. Eventually Calhoun knew that slavery would enslave not only blacks, but poor whites---exactly as he thought it should be. THIS is why Fitzhugh and some of Calhoun's statements are avoided by the neo-Confeds.: it clearly puts them on the side of slavery and oppression, which, of course, the South was. I'm amused by the hoops that neo-Confeds have to go through to ignore, downplay, sidestep, and otherwise dismiss slavery as the cause of the war.

It was not only the cause of the war, it was THE ONLY reason for the formation of the modern Democratic Party, and that is what is even more amusing about neo-Confeds. To attack Lincoln, they have to link arms with the Democratic Socialists. HAHAHAHAH.

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