It doesn’t surprise me that Jim Henley’s defense of Ron Paul’s assertion (“Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery” — ) is more interesting than Paul’s own — partly, of course, because the latter was abridged by the format of a Sunday news soundbite show, but mainly because I think Henley is a more capable essayist and thinker than Paul.
Henley’s title — “A Fiery Gospel Writ in Burnished Rows of Steel” — is a quote, of course, from Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I think Henley has a point if he wishes that our republic didn’t have “battle hymns,” and that our political culture didn’t confuse wars and hegemony with national purpose — rather than simply seeing that purpose as protecting the liberties of all its citizens. There’s not enough “constitutional patriotism” in the United States these days, and too much “military history patriotism” that seems to make blood sacrifice the point of our history.
Nevertheless, I think Henley’s argument in this post is as wrong as Ron Paul’s, and I’ll try to explain why. Others — see particularly Ari Kelman (”The Edge of the West”) — have rehearsed the events preceding the outbreak of the Civil War at some length, so that need not be recapitulated here, other than the fairly important points that (1) Lincoln was duly elected, (2) his platform merely sought to limit the spread of slavery, and (3) that the Confederacy fired the first shot at Fort Sumter.
For his part, Henley begins his argument as a rejoinder to this comment by Matthew Yglesias on the matter:
The South … decided that rather than abide by the results of the election, they would secede from the country and establish a new herrenvolk democracy committed to slavery uber alles. They, not Lincoln, put resolution of the slavery issue through the political process out of reach.
Henley replies this is only partly correct:
Rather, they put the resolution of slavery through a peaceful political process of “The United States of America” out of reach, because they decided not to be in it any more. There are all kinds of bad things that might have attended the North letting the South go - one possibility is decades worth of border wars in the western territories as the USA and CSA tried to expand at each other’s expense. Imagine a “bleeding Kansas” stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean. That might have happened. And Saddam Hussein might have decided to underwrite a biological terror strike on Chicago. Or, maybe not! But the bad possible alternatives are distinct from “American slavery lasts forever.”
And with this, the gambit is more or less complete, with both Henley (and Paul) adding the final move of positing the inevitable end of slavery within a few decades, based on Russia’s and Brazil’s emancipations and various stratagems for undermining the CSA (buying slaves in border states, assisting fugitive slaves, homesteading the freedmen in the USA Western territories, etc.) Like Ron Paul, Henley frames his Civil War analysis as one about the wisdom or morality of the Civil War as a method of ending slavery.
But that wasn’t what it began as: a war for preserving a particular democracy in a particular time and place. That is, there was actually an even more fundamental issue than the particular one of slavery at stake: whether deeply divisive issues such as slavery could be settled by unilateral secession. A United States that allowed itself to be dissolved and fired upon — especially if the dissolution and violence were because of the outcome of an election — is one that would have had no convincing legal answer to further secessions later on, as diminishing centripetal forces of scale and allegiance were outweighed by the centrifugal ones of local advantages via location and alliances.
Henley’s arguments about the war also ignore that peaceful, constitutional mechanisms for achieving disunion were readily available — and were proposed by Lincoln himself in his First Inaugural address:
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right* to dismember or overthrow it. I cannot be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the national Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it.
I will venture to add that to me the Convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions, originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse.
Henley and Paul are right to be horrified at the cost of the Civil War; they may even be right to suggest that if ending slavery — or washing one’s hands of it — was all it was about, the Civil War was not the only or necessarily the best option. (Though I shall argue that’s a somewhat surprising position for them to take.) But any nation “so conceived and so dedicated” as the United States would have had to make the same decision to resist secession, or accept crumbling into its constituent parts. Lincoln, as usual, said it best, both in his First Inaugural address…
If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government, is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority, in such case, will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.
…and in the famed heartbreaking words of his Second Inaugural address:
Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
Henley also makes a somewhat unexpected argument when he posits the “the near certitude that American chattel slavery as such would end within the generation that saw 1865″ — and then writes: “Would the lives of American blacks by 1890 have been better than the lives of American blacks in the 1890 we actually had? I think it’s very likely.”
Even accepting arguendo that blacks would indeed have been emancipated everywhere in North America by 1890,** that’s still a remarkable bargain to make: the basic freedom of millions for “very likely” a generation (but possibly longer) to prevent the battlefield deaths of hundreds of thousands (but “likely” fewer, to recall the beliefs on both sides at the outset of the conflict). Say what you will about the Civil War, but even as waged it was a far quicker and surer route to emancipation than anything Henley imagines — even if that wasn’t the original intent.
And that’s a benefit I’d have thought worth its weight in gold to libertarians like Ron Paul or Henley. Henley, at least, often and rightly rejects the infringement of a single person’s human rights for the sake of unspecified, unproven national security benefits, as reckoned in American lives purportedly saved or guarded. It seems inconsistent to reverse that calculus for our forebears — even if the argument somehow nibbles at the origins of the modern American nation state.
I think the relationship of ending slavery to the Civil War is much as Lincoln described it in his Second Inaugural:
One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.
That is, ending slavery was not the first object of Lincoln and the United States in The War of the Rebellion, as it is referred to in United States records. Rather, that object was simply but forcefully to insist that we had a deal: our Constitution foresaw some ways of resolving political conflict, but not others. Nevertheless, slavery was the root cause of that political conflict and that war, and slavery’s demise quickly (and foreseeably) became a corollary of ending the war on terms favorable to the Constitution and its Union.
Thus Henley (and Ron Paul) mislead themselves and others by arguing ending slavery was insufficient grounds for resisting secession. No: slavery’s preemptive defense was insufficient grounds — nay, evil and repugnant grounds — for proceeding with secession from this Constitution and this republic. I think constitutional patriots and defenders of liberty — ones like Henley, and perhaps like Ron Paul — do themselves no favor implying otherwise.
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NOTES: Kelman via Josh Marshall, where video of Ron Paul’s “Meet the Press” statements can be seen. “War of the Rebellion”: Cornell University “Making of America” digital archives.
* This would seem to open a loophole, but Lincoln closes it elsewhere: “If by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution — certainly would, if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case” (because ending slavery was not Lincoln’s aim at that time). While I don’t know Ron Paul’s mind on the subject, I can’t imagine Henley would categorize a potential future threat to a class of property he finds an “abomination” as sufficient grounds for revolution.
** However, I do not actually accept it. A successful Confederacy need not have cared a whit for events in Russia and Brazil, would have been a new alliance partner for European countries, and might have maintained and perpetuated slavery in old forms or new (mining, assembly lines) all but indefinitely even if agricultural slavery waned — also not a given. It’s hard to believe a country that went to war for the right to expand its substantial interest in slavery to new areas would not in fact have done so, and did not rightly anticipate material rewards from that.
