Midge Decter writes of Abraham Lincoln in the November issue of Commentary, "Union came first, and he was prepared to preside over what would become the bloodiest war in the country’s history to preserve that union…Lincoln’s war was a horror, but it kept us together, and in the long run made possible a full national life in common." By these lights, the Confederacy's conquest was a sanguinary necessity.
In fact, there was nothing necessary about smashing the consensual cornerstone of American government and sacrificing over 620,000 American on the altar of unitary dogma. Lincoln's course of action was a colossal atrocity.
An all-purpose source of exculpation for Lincoln's apologists is slavery in the Confederacy. Given the denial of self-ownership to four million blacks, goes this claim, Lincoln's denial of secession's legitimacy was just. (Don't be insolent and mention to them the perpetration of slavery and disenfranchisement in Union states or the irrelevance of slavery to Lincoln's conquistador motivation. Definitely do not mention the sentiments of abolitionists such as George Bassett in May 1861: "It is not a war for Negro Liberty, but for national despotism. It is a tariff war, an aristocratic war, a pro-slavery war.")
To most starkly illustrate the odious premise of the anti-secessionists, I will present a counterfactual scenario where secession was asserted not by the South but against it.
During the 1850s – a period that would be more aptly described as the Civil War than 1861-1865 – the Fugitive Slave Act incensed many Northerners. It was one thing for Southern states to perpetrate slavery in their territory; it was another to have the federal government send marshals into non-slave states, arrest runaways, and return them to bondage. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1855:
…when the poor people who are the victims of this crime [slavery], disliking the stripping and peeling process, run away into states where this practice is not permitted – a law has been passed requiring us who sit here to seize these poor people, tell them they have not been plundered enough, and must go back to be stripped and peeled again, and as long as they live.
(The federal welfare for slaveholders evident in the Fugitive Slave Act mirrored slaveholding states' welfare. Professor William Marina notes in A History of Florida: "Slave patrols, required by law, were in a very real sense a tax on the non-slaveholder in favor of the slaveholder. Absent such governmentally mandated subsidies, the labor costs in a market-oriented society would tend toward manumission. The best evidence that such economic tendencies were operative is that laws were increasingly passed over the years to make manumission of slaves more difficult. Why would such laws have been necessary unless manumission was an option that undercut the slave system imposed by government? In any event, such massive governmental political-economic interventionism on behalf of the slave owning interest group is hardly descriptive of a laissez faire, small government, market-oriented society." Professor Mark Thornton similarly observes in the Summer 2001 Austrian Economics Newsletter: "The political institutions of the American South were set up to socialize the costs of the system while privatizing its fruits. This was a huge public subsidy and a way of keeping the system going. Everyone was drafted into the slave patrols, and you couldn't free your slaves; it was against the law. All of this reduces the private costs of owning slaves but increases the overall social costs.")
Abraham Lincoln consistently pledged to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, i.e., to make northern states complicit in the perpetuation of the peculiar institution. He moreover opposed efforts in the Republican Party to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law. (See his letters to Salmon P. Chase and Samuel Galloway on June 20, 1859 and July 28, 1859, respectively.)
Now begins the counterfactual scenario.
On December 20, 1860, a Massachusetts convention passes the following ordinance:
Whereas, Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States, and
Whereas, President-elect Lincoln has affirmed support of the Fugitive Slave Act, and
Whereas, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and all non-slaveholding states shall be bound to aid in the rendition of fugitive slaves under this administration, and
Whereas, Such complicity with the iniquitous institution of slavery is repugnant to the consciences of this commonwealth's citizens, and
Whereas, Seeking to throw off this wretched yoke and be a beacon of freedom for the enchained masses of this country,
Therefore Be It Resolved, That the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hereby dissolves its political bands with the United States of America and shall hereafter exist as a free and independent state.
Other states enact similar ordinances soon after Massachusetts.
According to Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address, secession is "the essence of anarchy"; he made no exemption for secession by non-slaveholding states. Thus, these withdrawals would be illegitimate.
To restore the union, troops would have to invade Massachusetts and the other seceded states. The abolitionists' attempt to be a safe haven for runaways would be subdued, and free states would then have to tolerate by threat of occupation the periodic presence of slave-hunters. (Efforts to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act – never mind slavery – in this coercive union would be fruitless due to the congressional and judicial power of the master class.)
It requires a despotic temperament to endorse this. Only someone who believed in Union über Alles instead of federal republicanism and self-determination could say, "The invasion of Massachusetts was righteous." (It was all too appropriate when Chinese premier Zhu Rongii told President Clinton in 1999 regarding Taiwan, "Abraham Lincoln, in order to maintain the unity of the United States…resorted to the use of force…so, I think Abraham Lincoln, president, is a model, is an example." No doubt the mainland regime considers secession the essence of anarchy as well.)
Ms. Decter's romanticism of Abraham Lincoln's monstrous error is common among her peers. To restate a conclusion on one of these peers that applies equally to Ms. Decter: Examined from the perspective of Southern secession, this orientation can claim a fig leaf of justice. Examined from the perspective of abolitionist disunion, we see its unvarnished tyranny.
December 3, 2001
