More
than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over
statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues
taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery
proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said
to be racists. The feelings run so deep on both sides of the controversy that
one would think that the Civil War ended just yesterday.
As a
libertarian, I question why government should erect statues in the first place,
to anyone. That’s simply not a legitimate role of government. Moreover, why
should people be taxed to fund a statue of someone whose beliefs or behavior
they dislike or oppose?
Private
entities, of course, should be free to erect any statues they want, so long as
they aren’t subsidized by the state and the statues are on privately owned
property. In fact, in 2003 a group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to
establish the Confederate Memorial Park in Lookout Point, Maryland, which
features a statue and battle flags that celebrate the Confederacy. It is
privately funded and people are free to boycott it or even protest it. It is an
example of how things operate in a private-property system.
The
statue controversy exposes lies and hypocrisy that characterize the popular
depiction of the Civil War.
The
most popular lie is the one that says that Abraham Lincoln waged the war to
free the slaves. That’s just a plain lie. Ending slavery was the result at the
end of the war but it was clearly not Lincoln’s goal at the beginning of the
war.
Lincoln
had one reason and one reason alone for initiating war against the Confederacy:
to keep the nation intact by suppressing the South’s secession. That was it.
That was Lincoln’s sole aim. Prior to the war, he had made it clear that
slavery was legal under the U.S. Constitution. Thus, he believed, the only way
to end it legally would have been by constitutional amendment.
Indeed,
further proof of Lincoln’s aim is seen in his Emancipation Proclamation, which
freed slaves only in certain areas. If he were waging the war to end slavery,
wouldn’t he have proclaimed the freedom of all slaves, not just some of them?
Let’s
assume that there was no slavery in the South and that the South had seceded
for some other reason, say, tariffs, or simply because Southerners had decided
that they no longer wanted to associate with the North. Even without slavery,
there is no doubt that Lincoln would have initiated the war to prevent the
South from seceding.
What
if the Confederate States seceded today and declared their independence? Does
anyone doubt that federal forces would be sent into the South again to suppress
the secession? Obviously, their aim would not be to end slavery but to keep the
nation intact, the same aim that Lincoln had when he ordered federal forces to
invade the South.
So
why the lie? Why not teach American children the truth — that the Civil War was
waged to prevent secession and that ending slavery was simply a byproduct of
the war?
I suggest
that the reason for the lie is that proponents of the Civil War know that
suppressing secession might not be considered by many to be a noble cause for a
war that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed half
the country, not to mention that it damaged the freedom and democratic
processes of the country.
Not
so with ending slavery. That’s something noble. That’s something that many
people would say was worth the tremendous sacrifices in life, limb, freedom,
and prosperity.
Thus,
the lie comes into existence: The Civil War was waged to end slavery, it is
said, which is a noble cause, one worth sacrificing the lives of hundreds of
thousands of people and the destruction of half the country.
Treason?
Why
do some proponents of the Civil War consider the suppression of secession to be
less than a noble cause?
With
secession, people are simply saying, “We don’t want to be associated with you
anymore. We wish to separate our states from this country and establish our own
country.”
With the
suppression of secession, people are essentially responding, “Tough luck. We
don’t care whether you want to continue associating with us or not. We are
going to initiate force against you to prevent you from going your way. We will
force you to remain associated with us. We will kill and destroy you until you
change your mind.”
It is
fairly obvious that that position doesn’t have the nobility that ending slavery
does. That’s undoubtedly why the lie began.
In
fact, I believe that Lincoln himself began realizing that as the war progressed
and the death and destruction mounted exponentially. When he provoked the
incident at Fort Sumter, I think he figured that the war would be quickly
brought to a conclusion and that the seceding states would be quickly defeated.
Lincoln’s
mindset was much like the Washington, D.C., crowd of socialites and sightseers
that gathered in Virginia to watch the first Battle of Bull Run at the
inception of the war. They viewed the battle as sort of a big sports event, one
that would be over rather quickly, with the federal team winning. Once it was
clear that the Confederate forces were prevailing in the battle, the D.C.
socialites and sightseers ran for their lives back to D.C. in fear that they
would be captured or killed.
That’s
essentially what many supporters of the Civil War have done. They have fled
from the truth and convinced themselves that the Civil War was initiated
principally to end slavery and only secondarily to suppress secession.
During
the statue controversy, people have accused the secessionists of being
traitors. They say that it was treason for Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee,
Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and others to secede from the Union.
But
isn’t treason a legal concept? If the Constitution permitted secession, which
many people believed, then how could it be treasonous to secede? Indeed, at the
end of the war, federal officials took Davis into custody and threatened to
prosecute him for treason. Deciding that discretion was the better part of
valor, however, they dropped their prosecution. One reason might have been that
they didn’t want to risk a Supreme Court ruling on the matter.
There
is an important point about secession that needs to be made, one that exposes
the hypocrisy of those who condemn the South for seceding. That point is: The
United States itself was founded on secession. And most of the people who
condemn the South for seceding nonetheless celebrate America’s secession from
Great Britain in 1776.
We
call it the American Revolution, but that’s really a misnomer. It wasn’t a
revolution at all. A revolution is an attempt by rebels to oust the existing
regime and take control of the central government. That’s not what the American
colonists in 1776 were doing. They had no interest in taking control over the
British government. They simply wanted to secede from it.
Keep
in mind that the people who signed the Declaration of Independence were not
Americans. They were British subjects, just as people in the Confederacy were
American citizens. The British colonies were part of Great Britain, much as
Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands are part of the United States today.
So
the men who signed the Declaration were simply saying, “We don’t want to be
part of your country anymore. We don’t want to associate with you. We wish to
establish our own country.” They didn’t want to take over the British
government. They simply wanted to secede from Great Britain and establish their
own country, just as Southerners wanted to do nearly 90 years later.
Today,
some Americans celebrate George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
and Patrick Henry as patriots for seceding from their country while, at the
same time, condemning Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson as
traitors for seceding from theirs.
Of
course, often it’s a question of who wins and who loses that determines whether
a secessionist is a patriot or a traitor. Great Britain certainly did not
consider its rebelling British colonists to be patriots. On the contrary, it
considered them to be traitors and criminals, the same way that many Americans
today view Davis, Lee, Jackson, and other Southerners who lost their war for
secession.
Sovereign states
People
claim that Southerners were fighting to preserve slavery and, therefore, cannot
under any circumstances be considered patriots.
They
miss two important points, however. One is that the secessionists in 1776
intended to preserve slavery in their new country and, nonetheless, they are
still considered to be patriots.
The
other point is related: It’s possible to fight for two principles, one noble
and the other ignoble. Lee provides a good example. When the war broke out,
Lincoln offered him command over all Union forces. Lee turned down the offer
and returned to Virginia, where he assumed command over the Confederacy’s Army
of Northern Virginia. At the time, his wife was also a slaveowner.
Critics
today call Lee a traitor. They say that he betrayed his country by taking up
arms against it (just as some people considered George Washington, who was also
a slave-owner, to be a traitor for taking up arms against his country).
The
problem is that such critics are looking at the situation from the standpoint
of a 21st-century American, one who has been indoctrinated into viewing the
federal government and the nation in a way that is entirely different from how
18th-century and 19th-century Americans viewed them.
Today’s
Americans are taught to view the United States as one nation, consisting of
states that are inferior and subordinate to the federal government.
That
was not the mindset of our ancestors. They viewed the nation as a collection of
sovereign and independent entities (i.e., states) that had simply confederated
together to facilitate matters of common interest.
In
the process, however, the states understood that they were not surrendering
their separate, independent, and sovereign status. That was manifested in the
type of political structure that they established. The charter by which they
came together was called, appropriately, the Articles of Confederation. That’s
because they came together simply as a confederation and without losing the
independence and sovereignty of each state. Under the Articles the federal
government was given very few powers. It wasn’t even given the power to tax.
Most
people considered their home state to be their real country. That’s where their
loyalties lay. That’s where their allegiance was — not to the United States but
rather to Virginia or South Carolina. People didn’t see themselves as citizens
of the United States. They saw themselves as citizens of their respective
states.
That
mindset was reflected by the way Americans prior to the Civil War referred
grammatically to the United States. When doing so, they would use the plural form:
“The United States are moving in a different direction.” Sometime after the
Civil War and continuing through today, the country is referred to in the
singular: “The United States is moving in a different direction.”
It
was with that mindset that Lee turned down Lincoln’s request to command the
Union forces. In his mind, to do so would constitute treason because it would
entail waging war against his own country, which was Virginia. And that was the
mindset of most Southerners. In their minds, they were fighting for their
country against an illegal invader, notwithstanding the fact that their system
was based on slavery. That is, they would have had the mindset with respect to
patriotism even if there had been no slavery in the South.
Proponents
of the Civil War ignore some other important points.
If
the war was actually about slavery rather than secession, U.S. forces could
have invaded the Confederacy, freed the slaves, and returned home, leaving the
Confederacy as an independent nation. After all, doesn’t the U.S. government
justify some of its foreign interventions in that way today? After the infamous
WMDs failed to be immediately found in Iraq, U.S. officials said that they were
actually invading and occupying Iraq to free the Iraqi people from Saddam
Hussein’s tyranny. In the process, they didn’t absorb Iraq into the United
States.
They
could have done the same thing to the Confederacy — invade, free the slaves,
and return home without forcibly re-absorbing the Confederacy. The reason they
didn’t is clear: the war was about secession, not slavery.
Moreover,
there was another way to bring an end to slavery without all the massive death
and destruction that Lincoln’s war entailed. The North could have acceded to
the secession and then declared itself to be a sanctuary for runaway slaves.
What
about the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northern states to return slaves
to their owners? It would have been gone. Remember: with secession, there would
now be two separate and independent countries — the United States of America
and the Confederate States of America. There would be nothing the Confederacy
could do to force the North to return runaway slaves.
That
would have undoubtedly broken the back of the slave system in the South. After
all, slavery was a dying institution anyway, not only in a moral sense but also
in an efficiency sense. Operations based on slavery could not compete against
enterprises based on consensual, paid employees. It was just a matter of time
before the entire system collapsed. A sanctuary system in the North would have
accelerated its demise.
War crimes
Finally,
in the matter of statues and the honoring and glorification of Union leaders,
it’s important to keep in mind the grave war crimes ordered by Lincoln, and
committed by Philip Sheridan and William T. Sherman, especially in Virginia’s
Shenandoah Valley and in Sherman’s March to the Sea.
Traditional
rules of warfare precluded the waging of war against civilians, a principle
that had been taught to Sheridan and Sherman at West Point. Yet, that is
precisely what those two men and the troops under their command did. They
intentionally targeted women, children, seniors, and other noncombatants by
burning their homes, their crops, and their towns and villages, with the intent
of killing them by starvation or exposure to the elements. The idea was that it
would bring the war to an earlier conclusion, especially by demoralizing
Confederate soldiers who would be losing their wives, children, siblings, and
parents.
It’s
a rather straight line from what was done in the South to the atomic bombings
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. carpet bombing of North Korean towns and
villages, the bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam, the killing of
civilians at My Lai and countless other villages in South Vietnam, and the
several missile and drone attacks on wedding parties in Afghanistan. Every one
of those war crimes is based on the notion that it’s okay as long as it saves
American lives by ending the war sooner, especially by demoralizing the enemy.
They all stretch back to the war crimes that Sheridan and Sherman committed in
the South.
I would be remiss if I failed
to mention the extreme dictatorial actions committed by Lincoln. His arrest of
the Maryland legislature. His jailing of critical journalists. His suspension
of habeas corpus. His embrace of conscription. His
enactment of the Legal Tender Laws. They were all illegal under our form of
constitutional government. They are also characteristic of some of the most
brutal dictatorships in history.
Indeed,
let’s not forget that while Lincoln opposed slavery prior to being elected
president, he was also a white separatist, believing at best that blacks and
whites should be kept separate and that blacks should be forcibly deported to
Africa.
Lincoln
ended up winning and slavery was ended, which was the one good thing that came
out of the war. But it’s not necessary to honor war criminals and white
separatists simply because they won, especially when ending slavery wasn’t the
reason they initiated the Civil War. Indeed, does winning mean that lies and
hypocrisy have to be a major legacy of the Civil War?
Reprinted with permission
from Future
of Freedom Foundation.
Jacob
Hornberger [send
him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation.
Copyright © 2018 The Future of Freedom Foundation
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