The following is a revision and extension of a speech delivered to the Other Club's 10th anniversary dinner on September 13th, 2002 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on the topic, "What Kind of People Do They Think We Are?"
They think and say that we are "rebels," or at least are descended from a group of people called "rebels" who started a war in 1861 by firing on Union troops at Fort Sumter. Drawing largely on Clyde Wilson's essay "War, Reconstruction, and the End of the Old Republic" in The Costs of War (edited by John V. Denson), I propose that the hostilities of 1861–1865 did in fact constitute a revolution; however, this was a Jacobin revolution by the Union forces – a revolution against the federalist and republican ideas on which the corporate entity known as the "United States of America" was founded.
To begin, the very name by which the conflict of 1861–1865 is known, "the Civil War" in common parlance, is inaccurate. Paraphrasing historian Ralph Raico, a civil war is a conflict between warring factions for control of the central apparatus of the state. The Spanish civil war was a civil war. The English civil war was a civil war par excellence. What is commonly called "the Civil War" in this country was no such conflict; the title "War Between The States" is accurate and, as Wilson's article indicates, "War of Northern Aggression" is more accurate still.
The conventional interpretation holds that the Union forces, operating under the benevolent guidance of "Great Emancipator" Abraham Lincoln, had as their ultimate objective the emancipation of the slaves. The facts suggest that this isn't necessarily the case: many Northern states, primarily those that entered the union under the auspices of the Northwest Ordinance, had restrictions on black migration, voting rights, property ownership, and other rights of citizenship. If you were a free black in the 1850's you wouldn't be allowed to move to Iowa, Illinois, or Indiana, and as late as 1868 voters in New York turned down a measure to extend voting rights to free blacks. The hypothesis that the Union army went to war to free the slaves is damaged by the fact that many of the states from which the soldiers came had in place discriminatory regimes that rivaled those in the slave states for their oppression of blacks. For example, slavery was against the law in Indiana and Illinois; however, a complex system of indentured servitude made slavery a de facto – rather than de jure – phenomenon in the Ohio River states of the Old Northwest during the years leading up to the war.
The words of Union leaders also give us a clue as to what did and did not motivate them to go to war. Ulysses S. Grant threatened to resign his commission if he thought he was fighting to free the slaves. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so,1 and I have no inclination to do so,” and in the months leading up to his inauguration a proposed 13th amendment to the Constitution was being debated which would have protected slavery from congressional interference forever. The amendment read as follows:
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.2
In fact, Jefferson Davis felt that in light of this proposed amendment, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Dred Scott decision, slavery was never so secure as it was on the eve of secession, and he went so far as to say that secession meant the end of slavery. However, the final nail in the coffin of the emancipation hypothesis is, I believe, the fact that slave labor was being used to build the US Capitol building as late as 1865.
So we can safely conclude that it wasn't a war to free the slaves. So what was it about? If we're to believe conventional wisdom it was still a war to lose the chains of oppressed blacks throughout the South (albeit in a transcendental sense, an opinion handed down through the Battle Hymn of the Republic); if we're to believe the personal correspondence of William Tecumseh Sherman, it was a war of extermination against the Southern people. Lincoln's Gettysburg address would have us believe that it was a war about being "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" and about ensuring that government of, by, and for the people should not perish from this Earth.
On the Gettysburg address, Wilson quotes a pair of Northern sources: HL Mencken and Illinois poet Edgar Lee Masters. Mencken, pondering Lincoln's speech in 1920, writes
It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – "that government of the people, by the people, for the people," should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States.
Masters writes in 1931
Lincoln carefully avoided one half of the American story…The Gettysburg oration, therefore, remains a prose poem, but in the inferior sense that one must not inquire into its truth. One must read it apart from the facts…Lincoln dared not face the facts at Gettysburg…He was unable to deal realistically with the history of his country, even if the occasion had been one when the truth was acceptable to the audience. Thus we have in the Gettysburg Address that refusal of the truth which is written all over the American character and its expressions. The war then being waged was not glorious, it was brutal and hateful and mean minded. It had been initiated by radicals and fanatics.
This last phrase, "radicals and fanatics," brings us to the conclusion that the war was a revolution that sought the triumph of statism over individualism, in other words, a Jacobin revolution. Wilson tells us that the Gettysburg Address is the creation and embodiment of a "nationalist mythology" that attempts to substitute " the unhealthy love of one's government, accompanied by the aggressive desire to put down all others" for patriotism – the love of one's land and people. For all its faults, the South in secession embodied the spirit of independence and self-determination that motivated the founding of the American republic, and the "northern Jacobins," motivated by a desire to subsume the individual to the will of the state, hated them for it and launched a war marked by unprecedented death, destruction, and mayhem and that had as its consequences expropriation, enslavement, and chaos. Wilson concludes,
The Republican Party victory [and ensuing war] was a Jacobin Revolution. What are the signs of Jacobinism? A power grab by a minority leading to a centralized state, an egalitarian ideology masking the will to power of one-party rule, a great transfer of wealth, a ruthless disregard for tradition and law, an overturning of organic social relations, a tendency toward a totalitarian state. The revolution was not perfected because 19th-century America did not have the instruments for totalitarianism, but it was not from a lack of trying.
So I suggest that we are living with a tainted inheritance. If our desire is to restore the principle of liberty as it was originally understood by Americans, if that is possible, we need to rid ourselves, intellectually and morally, of the superstitions of unionism and emancipation which are the foundations of all other statist superstitions and all the other statist usurpations from which we have suffered and by which we have been cursed in this century. It seems a very unlikely thing to happen, I admit, although recently the French people celebrated their Revolution and a great many of them rethought the heritage of Jacobinism which they had been taught was a great tradition. There was a real revulsion of opinion about that, rejection of what had been regarded as a great accomplishment. Americans will have to do no less if they wish to recover genuine self-government.
- Quoted in Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s recent LewRockwell.com article on the 13th amendment.
- See ibid for a full discussion.
February 5, 2003
